Poison on Tap (A Bridge Magazine Analysis): How Government Failed Flint, and the Heroes Who Fought Back by Bridge Magazine

Author:Bridge Magazine [Magazine, Bridge]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mission Point Press
Published: 2016-06-26T07:00:00+00:00

Gina McCarthy, U.S. EPA administrator. (Screen capture courtesy of CSPAN)

Michael Simmons arrives to pick up donated water from Pastor Bobby Jackson after Detroit-area volunteers dropped off more than 500 cases on Jan. 16. (Photo courtesy of Jake May/Mlive.com)

Chapter 16

Nov. 19, 2015

Demolition: A Flint success story

‘It gives people room to breathe’

Editor’s summary: With all the attention on Flint’s water crisis, Chastity Pratt Dawsey of the Bridge team found this good news story about the success Flint is having in demolishing blighted homes. The Genesee County Land Bank Authority spearheads a program that is a model of efficiency in removing abandoned, often dilapidated homes that are a scourge – like lead pipes proved to be – of old inner-city neighborhoods.

By Chastity Pratt Dawsey

Bridge Magazine

With so much focus on the city’s water crisis, a Flint success story has had little notice.

The Genesee County Land Bank Authority has demolished more than 1,766 blighted houses in Flint since 2014 with federal grants. That exceeds its stated goal of 1,600 home demolitions when the city received more than $20 million for blight removal in 2013. The Flint program boasts significantly lower average demolitions cost than those in Detroit.

The most visible sign of the city’s progress: Hundreds of lots with neglected or abandoned homes have been transformed into fields of clover.

Of five Michigan cities that shared $100 million in Hardest Hit federal grants, Flint is the only one to meet ‒ and exceed ‒ its demolition goals, records show.

Flint has eradicated nearly 30 percent of the city’s blighted homes.

To be fair, the blight fight in Detroit is on a huge scale ‒ at least 3,683 houses were demolished in the Motor City with Hardest Hit grant funds, records show. Detroit estimates it needs to knock down 80,000 structures.

Flint’s program is its largest blight battle ever, said Lucille James, brownfields and demolition program manager for the land bank.

“We’ve never worked at this scale,” she said.

The federal blight money is intended to stabilize neighborhoods around the city’s anchor institutions ‒ “schools, hospitals, churches, main thoroughfares,” James said. “So it doesn’t address all our needs.”

A ride through Flint’s neighborhoods offers glimpses of the same sort of poverty Detroit has become known for: streets pocked with wood frame bungalows that now lean in on themselves, empty; brick houses, crumbling.

But absent in Flint are large numbers of gentrifying hipsters to stoke hopes, and no world-renown decay like Detroit to attract attention to its plight. When Antonio Dunn drives through Flint, he hardly recognizes the city of his childhood.

But he sees vestiges of progress ‒ soft carpets of clover grow where rotting houses stood only months ago.

Dunn, an inspector for the Genesee County Land Bank Authority, stood on Mackin Road, on the city’s north side, and explained how the north side of the block – save one vacant house – was demolished. An elementary school stands on one end of the block.

“Before, it wasn’t safe. It was a hot mess,” Dunn said. “Abandoned houses are used for trap houses, stash houses,” referring to structures where drugs and money are hidden.

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