DETROIT (WXYZ) — Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan delivered his final report on the city's residential blight removal program, marking the near completion of one of his signature campaign promises. The program has dramatically reduced abandoned homes owned by the Detroit Land Bank from 47,000 to fewer than 1,000.
Watch Christiana Ford's video report:
A recent University of Michigan study shows total home values have increased from $4.2 billion in 2014 to $8.8 billion in 2023.
"It was unbelievable, the conditions the neighborhoods. One out of every five houses in the city of Detroit was vacant. The city had been demolishing houses at the rate of 25 a week," Duggan said.
PREVIOUS STORY: Detroit homeowners are gaining $1.4 billion in wealth in 2024, with a focus on neighborhoods growing.
When Duggan took office, Detroit faced a massive blight crisis with more than 47,000 abandoned Land Bank-owned homes scattered across the city.
"I ran on a platform that every neighborhood had a future and that we could erase blight," Duggan said.
12 years later, that number has dropped to just 942 homes. The city demolished more than 18,000 homes and sold more than 9,000 during Duggan's tenure.
"Since 2020, we've actually sold more vacant houses in this city than we have knocked down. That was a tipping point for the city," Duggan said.
Of the remaining homes, 240 are scheduled for demolition within the next six months, and more than 700 are expected to be sold by the end of next year.
The mayor recapped the two phases of the successful demolition effort: Phase 1, with $265 million in federal funding under the “Hardest Hit Fund” program, and Phase 2, with the $250 million Proposal N bond approval.
Hardest Hit Fund Phase (2014-2020)
Funding Demolitions Home Sales/Renovations
$265 Million 18,701 9,043
Proposal N Phase (2021-2025)
Funding Demolitions Home Sales/Renovations
$250 Million 8,277 (8,000 promised) 10,037 (8,000 promised)
Duggan highlighted the Marygrove-Fitzgerald community as one area where transformation has been particularly dramatic.
"That was where we started. Those were beautiful homes. That neighborhood was probably 35-40% vacant when I started. Those houses are now going for $150,000 to $250,000, and if you go talk, go find any neighbor in Marygrove that lived there in 2014 and talk about the transformation of that neighborhood. It is a beautiful neighborhood again, as it was when I was a kid. I remember it when I was a kid," Duggan said.
Cailyb Jordan, who has lived in the Marygrove neighborhood his whole life and now owns a home there, can attest to the changes.
"As a kid, it wasn't your best neighborhood to - I only had corner to corner to ride your bike from, essentially, from like the gardens, the community parks that we have built up, just giving the opportunity more to our neighborhood than we had before, and the upkeep of it has just been top tier," Jordan said.
As Duggan prepares to leave office, he says funding is secured for the work to continue, even as the city investigates and tests potentially contaminated backfill.
To successfully close out Proposal N environmentally, Duggan says the city must remove contaminated soil from every site at which contractors used unacceptable and possibly contaminated backfill.
The City has retained the environmental consulting firm Mannik & Smith Group and says it is testing every single site with a suspicion of contaminated backfill. Mayor Duggan outlined the two investigations underway:
- Iron Horse of Michigan, Inc. supplied several City contractors with soil from its sand and gravel pit in Milford Township that it represented was undisturbed, native soil. Soil from Iron Horse’s Milford facility has been used to backfill 424 demolition sites in Detroit. City testing has shown elevated levels of contaminants in soil at multiple sites supplied by Iron Horse, suggesting the strong probability that Iron Horse supplied contaminated and recycled soil. The City issued an order on November 3 suspending Iron Horse as an approved backfill source and has turned the matter over for investigation to EGLE, the State environmental agency responsible for environmental regulation and enforcement of sand and gravel pits. While the State investigation is ongoing, the City continues to test each one of the Iron Horse sites and is promptly removing any soil found to have contaminants at unacceptable levels. While earlier media reports characterized this issue as attributable to one demolition company – Gayanga – the investigation has shown that all City contractors using Iron Horse backfill have experienced the same level of elevated contaminants.
- The Detroit Office of Inspector General (OIG) reported this summer that demolition contractor Gayanga Co. LLC may have intentionally used backfill from unapproved sources. In September, Mayor Duggan asked the Detroit Police Department to open a criminal investigation into whether such activity occurred, who was responsible, and whether there was a basis for pursuing potential fraud charges against any individual. So far, 24 Gayanga sites have been found to have unacceptably high contaminant levels (not including sites where Gayanga used soil supplied by Iron Horse). The soil from all of these sites has already been removed by the City. Including sites where Gayanga used soil from Iron Horse, the City has removed soil from 58 sites to date, and the work is ongoing. In addition, in the 3-month investigation to date, DPD has identified 49 other suspect Gayanga sites, all of which are now being tested.
The Mayor indicated that the City has retained $15 million in the Proposal N Closeout fund.
——————————————————
This story was reported on-air by a journalist and has been converted to this platform with the assistance of AI. Our editorial team verifies all reporting on all platforms for fairness and accuracy.
