The Divided City by Alan Mallach

Author:Alan Mallach
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Island Press
Published: 2018-03-26T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

Empty Houses and Distressed Neighborhoods: Confronting the Challenge of Place

Indian Village is one of Detroit’s few areas that can be considered an elite neighborhood. Magnificent 1920s mansions selling for $500K and upward flank tree-lined streets named, for some obscure reason, after Native American tribes. In 2014, the first house ever listed in Detroit for over $1 million—although it ended up selling for slightly less—was in Indian Village.1 Yet if you walk two blocks east from Iroquois Street along St. Paul to Fischer Street, you find yourself in a very different world, one where vacant lots and vacant houses are the norm, and a habitable, let alone desirable, house is the exception.

The crumbling houses on Fischer Street are just a few of the 50,000 vacant, abandoned structures that surveyors armed with handheld computers found when they went out in 2013 to count vacant properties in the city. That number is on top of the 100,000 or more vacant lots in between and around them. It’s not that Detroit isn’t knocking down empty buildings as fast as they can. Of the 550,000 homes and apartments that existed in Detroit in 1960, over 250,000 are gone, in most cases replaced with the vacant lots that today dominate the landscape of most of Detroit’s neighborhoods.

Unoccupied houses and vacant lots are the most powerful symbol and symptom of neighborhood distress. Not surprisingly, as they began to proliferate along the streets of the nation’s legacy cities, people have tried to figure out how to deal with them, along with the underlying problems of the struggling neighborhoods where they proliferate.

The American industrial city of 1950 was a teeming, crowded place. With city populations at or near all-time highs, and with the homebuilding industry only beginning to recover from the war and the Great Depression, homes and apartments were at a premium. Cities had slums, but few vacant properties. That year, the Census found that in the city of Buffalo there were only 853 houses or apartments available to buy or rent in a city of nearly 600,000. Gradually, though, the cities began to empty out. Between 1950 and 1960, 93,000 new homes and apartments were built in the Buffalo metro area, 90 percent of them outside the city, and the number of empty homes and apartments available in the city had risen to over 5,000.

The fifties were the first decade in history in which Buffalo lost population. For many legacy cities, that was the beginning of a long decline that lasted for some of them until the end of the millennium, and that for others, including Buffalo, is still going on. Over the decades, cities steadily lost population and families as more people moved out and fewer and fewer moved in to take their place. As this went on, more and more of the houses and apartments they lived in, the stores they shopped in, and the factories and office buildings they worked in became empty.

The story of why neighborhoods declined so precipitously and houses, apartment

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