Erick Trickey is a writer in Boston.

DETROIT—For the past year, Clement Wright has driven into the Marygrove neighborhood before and after his night shifts at Chrysler to reclaim a small piece of the city where he has spent his whole life. While his friends texted him sunny vacation pictures from the Florida Keys, Wright, 62, spent much of his non-working life tearing down walls, laying bricks, installing electrical outlets, sanding, tiling, nailing, molding and painting.

“When I got it, it was devastated,” says Wright, standing near a shop vacuum and a roll of pink insulation in his three-bedroom, brick colonial built in 1950. Dozens of houses like it had gone vacant in this tightly-packed middle-class neighborhood near Detroit’s Marygrove College. “The house had been sitting seven years. It had holes in the walls. The electrical was missing. The water tank was missing.”

For $17,900, Wright, a tool-and-die analyst and a landlord of eight other Detroit properties, bought the house in May 2016 from the Detroit Land Bank Authority. He has put $40,000 of work into it: new walls, a new second-floor ceiling, a new kitchen. Out front, the house’s façade was bulging. So Wright took down the bricks, then mortared them back into place. The land bank, which is holding the deed in escrow until Wright finishes the house, checks on his progress every 30 days. All he’s got left to do is lay some hardwood flooring downstairs and paint some rooms. Then he’ll move in with his dogs, Macabee, a shepherd-pit bull mix, and Beauty, his pregnant Rottweiler.

“They’ve given people like me, the ordinary Joe, the opportunity to buy a house on the low side,” says Wright, “and fix it up the way they want it, as long as you bring it up to 21st century code.” He’d do it again, but Marygrove is a target of the city government’s revival efforts. “There are vacant homes around me,” he says. “I try to investigate them, but they’re all taken.”

Wright is one of 2,000 people who have bought houses from Detroit’s land bank since 2014. The land bank is one of the boldest—and also most controversial—aspects of Mayor Mike Duggan’s administration, which is drawing intense national attention as Duggan struggles to bring his city back after its emergence from bankruptcy. Repairing Detroit’s fiscal collapse depends in large part on reversing the city’s physical decline.

In 2014, the Detroit Blight Removal Task Force counted 40,000 blighted homes in the city and 38,000 more approaching blighted. | Mark Peterson/Redux Pictures for Politico Magazine

The sheer scale of abandonment in Detroit is unmatched in America. A city of 1.8 million people in 1950, Detroit’s population has plummeted by almost two-thirds. A once-teeming city that defined America’s middle class aspirations has become a surreal patchwork of still-dense neighborhoods separated by nearly empty expanses of land. In 2014, the Detroit Blight Removal Task Force, appointed by President Obama, counted 40,000 blighted houses in the city and 38,000 more homes heading in that direction. They’ve wounded property values, leading to a loss of tax dollars for a city struggling to pay its bills and social deterioration that discouraged all but the bravest from moving in. The national surge of interest in urban living has reached only a few Detroit neighborhoods. Mortgages are rare in the city. Dilapidated houses in tougher neighborhoods sell—for cash—for as little as $500 or $1,000.

Duggan was elected mayor in November 2013 on a 10-point platform for rebuilding the city’s neighborhoods after the largest municipal bankruptcy ever filed in the U.S. “If we act now,” his platform read, “we still have time to save the large stretches of this city that are still filled with residents who want to stay in their homes.” He wanted to bring people back into the city, increase the tax rolls and save Detroit, which has the highest concentration of poverty of any large city in America. One of the keys to his plan was to radically enlarge the city’s tiny land bank program.


Land banks are the Swiss Army knives of urban reclamation efforts, wielding an array of powers to make abandoned, tax-foreclosed properties useful again. They demolish unwanted houses, sell houses to new owners who’ll fix them up, sell vacant lots, and assemble land for future development. They’re an alternative to unloading tax-foreclosed land in highest-bidder auctions, which often attract irresponsible speculation.

By most measures, Duggan’s plan for the land bank has worked. Almost four years later, Detroit’s land bank has grown into the largest in the country, about seven times bigger than the next largest. It now has 135 employees and owns 98,000 parcels, covering some 10 percent of the city. It has demolished more than 8,800 houses and sold 1,500 of the newly vacant lots to neighbors. It’s also sold a couple of thousand more houses to people like Clement Wright and 130 vacant lots for economic development projects. It has launched an innovative effort to sue owners who have left houses vacant and neglected.

Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan fields questions from the media before the 10,000th vacant home in Detroit is demolished in July 2016. | AP Photo

“There’s not another city in the country that has a challenge as large as what the Detroit land bank faces,” says U.S. Representative Dan Kildee (D-Michigan), who launched the land bank movement 15 years ago by founding a land bank in nearby Flint.

And yet, Detroiters have grown increasingly anxious about whether their land bank is up to the tasks still ahead. The agency’s demolition program—fueled by $130 million in federal funding—is the subject of an ongoing federal investigation of its contracts. The program lost its funding for two months last year amid questions about possibly improper billing to cover up high demolition costs. Turnover has also hurt the land bank, which is now hunting for its third executive director in three years. Land-bank experts elsewhere are watching Detroit’s agency with a mix of cautious concern and respect for the size of its task; if Detroit can make a land bank work on this scale, it would provide a replicable model for other large cities.

Land bank leaders hope to demolish or sell its entire backlog of 30,000 houses in five years. The bigger goal is to help boost Detroit’s neighborhoods after years of decline. “We’re designed to raise the property values,” says land bank spokesman Craig Fahle, “and make this an investment-grade type city.”



***

Four years ago, Duggan, then a candidate for mayor, came to Dossin Elementary School in Northwest Detroit to speak to a weary, skeptical neighborhood group. “He said he was going to knock down houses,” recalls Bryan Ferguson, president of the Schoolcraft Improvement Association. “We thought that was going to be impossible to do.”

Image Bryan Ferguson, president of the Schoolcraft Improvement Association, had tried for years to get the city to demolish blighted homes. Duggan was the first mayor to make good on his promise to do that, tearing down a long-abandoned apartment building near Ferguson in February 2016. | Mark Peterson/Redux Pictures for Politico Magazine

Ferguson and his neighbors wanted the most derelict houses gone from their neigborhood. They kill property values, and they can provide cover for the city’s worst crimes. “We didn’t want any kids to get dragged into them,” he says. A block from where they were meeting stood an abandoned 30-unit apartment building. It was an open invitation for trespassers, who for years left trash and dead dogs there. In August 2013, four months after Duggan’s visit, the body of an unidentified young woman, a murder victim, was found inside.

But the neighbors doubted Duggan could deliver, because no one had before. “I fought hard to get that building down,” says Ferguson. The city government, he says, had done almost nothing. “They came up and tried to board up the bottom half. People come out, snatch the boards back out. We would call the city. ‘Nothing we can do—we don’t own it.’ We’d call the owner up, send him pictures.” Nothing changed.

Duggan ran for mayor as a turnaround expert. In nine years as CEO of Detroit Medical Center, he’d taken the city’s largest employer from near-bankruptcy back into the black. Duggan vowed to streamline the city’s process for demolition. And he pledged to sue to have abandoned houses and drug houses declared public nuisances, then seize them in court, a strategy he’d used as Wayne County prosecutor in the early 2000s.

He made good on his promise to the Schoolcraft association in May 2015 when the land bank filed a nuisance abatement suit against the ruined apartment building. After winning a default judgment and taking ownership, it demolished the building in early 2016. “That was huge. Once it went over to the land bank, it was like that,” Ferguson says with a snap of his fingers. “They got it down.”

Duggan’s idea—to give a land bank powers to revive the city’s worst property—wasn’t new. The first land banks were started in the 1970s, in St. Louis, Cleveland, and other Rust Belt cities. But they were generally passive entities that held properties that fell into city ownership. The first modern, activist land bank was born in 2002, just up I-75 from Detroit, in Flint, another town that had endured the financial blow of losing tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs.

Detroit’s population has declined to a third of its peak population of 1.8 million in 1950. | Mark Peterson/Redux Pictures for Politico Magazine

Dan Kildee, then the Genesee County treasurer, got tired of seizing abandoned properties and selling them at auction, only to foreclose on them again years later. Each time, they were in worse shape: Family-owned houses became rental properties, then sporadic rentals, then empty shells. “The goal of the land bank concept is to gain control of that property at that first stage,” says Kildee, “and then only sell it when [it’ll] improve …the surrounding market.”

In 2003, Kildee helped convince the Michigan legislature to pass a law that allowed counties to create land banks. The law gives land banks the power to acquire foreclosed properties from the county, resolve questions about a property’s title, and demolish or rehabilitate buildings. Crucially, land banks also have the flexibility to hold or sell property with the community’s interest in mind—for instance, selling to a responsible owner for less than market value.

Flint’s land bank revived the city’s downtown main drag, Saginaw Street, rescuing buildings that had been empty since the 1970s. It has sold more than 3,000 houses and returned properties worth more than $40 million in taxable value to the tax rolls. Property sales fund much of the agency’s operations. With federal and state money, it has demolished 5,000 more houses. It’s taking down almost 1,000 a year now, and planting clover on the newly vacant lots instead of grass, because it needs to be mowed less.

Land banks of varying sizes are used by about 160 communities around the United States. But the concept arrived relatively late in a city that needed it the most. Detroit had set up a small land bank in 2008, but didn’t give it much power, political support or property. It owned only 700 properties and had only five employees in January 2014, when Duggan was sworn in as mayor. That would change fast.

***

“We had to build the plane while we flew it,” Detroit land bank officials like to say. The land bank grew exponentially in 2014, as Duggan and the newly elected city council pumped millions of dollars in general fund money into it. They dashed to launch a demolition program to take advantage of sun-setting federal funds. And they took in land, tens of thousands of parcels at a time.

One reason Detroit’s land bank became the nation’s largest so quickly is that much of the abandoned land in Detroit was already in public hands. A hodgepodge of city, county and state government departments owned at least 60,000 abandoned parcels. Many lots still had homes on them, forfeited in tax foreclosures across decades. Each government had a different system for selling its parcels.

From left to right: Rebecca Camargo, Carrie-Lewand Monroe and Irene Tucker. Carrie Lewand-Monroe was the former executive director for the Land Bank, and officially left her post in the second week of May. Irene Tucker, who until now has served as the chief financial officer, has taken over as the interim executive director, and will be joined by Rebecca Camargo, the demolitions director. | Mark Peterson/Redux Pictures for Politico Magazine

“There is virtually no coordination between them,” Duggan’s 2013 position paper complained. “There is no plan to maintain or reuse this property. It just sits.”

So Detroit’s land bank took in the orphans. The state’s own land bank handed it 10,000 parcels. The city council deeded it 60,000 parcels in three batches. The land bank also started accepting the dregs of Wayne County’s annual tax foreclosures—about 6,000 to 10,000 properties that don’t sell in the county treasurer’s two annual auctions. The nuisance abatement program has brought in another 2,000 properties.

Armed with the Detroit Blight Removal Task Force report, an unprecedented collection of data on urban decay, the land bank launched its demolition program, its nuisance abatement effort and its house auctions. “Our idea was to go into the most densely populated neighborhoods first,” says Carrie Lewand-Monroe, who joined the agency in February 2014 and became executive director in the fall of 2015, “because those are the areas that are going to have the greatest impact on the greatest number of residents.”

The overarching goal of the beefed up land bank is to get properties ready for productive use again—and back on the tax rolls—as quickly as possible. This requires a process of real estate triage, not unlike nurses and doctors in an emergency room.

Vacant lots are easier to deal with: the land bank either sells them or holds them. Since 2014, the land bank has sold 6,900 lots to the homeowners next door so they can expand their yards. Detroit’s program is especially innovative and efficient: Homeowners can buy the lot next to them or behind them for $100 on the land bank’s website. The agency also holds popular side lot fairs in neighborhoods on Saturdays, for residents who’d rather get the deed on paper right away—a common concern in a city where about 20 percent of people don’t use banks.

Rehabbing a Detroit home before resale. | Mark Peterson/Redux Pictures for Politico Magazine

What about the lots with no homeowner next door? That’s where the banking in land-banking comes in. The agency holds the empty land for future development. Any interested buyer has to prove they have a plan for development and the capital to do it. The city council also has to approve any sale of nine or more parcels.

For vacant houses, the triage gets a lot tougher. The land bank inspects each house’s condition and studies its location. Is it a neighborhood with a healthy real estate market, or one of the many distressed parts of Detroit where houses sell, or don’t, for $500 or $1,000 at foreclosure auctions?

The vast majority of properties are marked for demolition through a massive program co-run by the land bank and the Detroit Building Authority. It’s supported by the Hardest Hit Fund, part of the U.S. Treasury’s Troubled Assets Relief Program, created in 2008 at the height of the financial crisis.

The houses with the most potential go into an auction program, which sells three homes a day online—not unlike eBay. The land bank is choosy about who can bid. Non-residents of Michigan can only buy a home if they intend to live in it. That’s meant to block absentee speculators. People who are delinquent on property taxes or who have blight violations can’t participate. Most important, buyers have six months to bring the house up to code, or nine months if it’s in a historic district. The land bank only releases the deed from escrow once the work is finished. It’s sold 1,050 homes through the auctions.

A select few houses—30 so far—have been sold through the agency’s “Rehabbed and Ready” program. They go on the market after work subsidized by Quicken Loans, the Detroit mortgage company owned by Dan Gilbert, the billionaire developer who owns or controls about 90 buildings in downtown. An episode of This Old House featured a rehabbed land bank house in April. Some houses in the small program remain on the market for months, while others sell within 30 days. Fahle says the program was designed to “kick-start the real estate market” in the neighborhoods it’s in by providing appraisers with high comparable sale prices.

The land bank’s auction capacity is limited. It can only sell 8 percent of its salvageable homes that way, according to its most recent report to the city council. So its Own It Now program handles houses the land bank isn’t sure will sell, based on their condition and location. The land bank has sold 845 houses this way, and the buyers face the same rules about fixing them up as the auction houses. But if the house is offered for sale three times and no one bites, it goes on the demolition list.

***

Damon and Ashley Dickerson, married architects working in Detroit, were tired of commuting almost an hour from Pittsfield Township, a suburb of Ann Arbor, to their jobs in Detroit. Both graduates of the master’s program in architecture at the University of Michigan, they looked at various Detroit suburbs, but decided they wanted a home in the city. “We didn’t think we’d get into renovating, or any sort of fixer-uppers,” says Damon, “but as we shopped, we realized what we wanted was a bit above the price range we could afford.”

Image Top left: Detroit resident Clement Wright bought his house from the Detroit Land Bank Authority after it had been sitting vacant for seven years; all he’s got left to do before he moves in is paint the walls and lay hardwood floorings. Top right: Frank Polk and his wife Timiko in their Detroit home. Bottom left: Damon and Ashley Dickerson in their 1910 colonial home near the Detroit River, purchased through the land bank. Bottom right: Detroit resident Melvin Sanford in the home he fixed up. | Mark Peterson/Redux Pictures for Politico Magazine

Friends told the Dickersons about the land bank’s auctions. They shopped on the website until they saw a place they liked: a two-family, 2,800-square-foot, 1910 brick house near the Detroit River, just outside the Indian Village historic district. They liked having one flat for themselves and one to set aside for aging family members someday. They walked through an open house with a contractor friend, then set up a bidder’s account on the website.

At 9 a.m. on auction day, a Sunday in July 2016, they started watching the site. “Nobody started bidding until about 4 o’clock or so,” says Ashley. They started with the minimum bid, $1,000. It stayed there until 4:45 p.m., 15 minutes before the deadline. “We got into a bidding war from about 4:45 to 7 p.m,” says Ashley. They competed with two other bidders, going up in $200 increments, each bid extending the deadline five minutes.

Finally, the Dickersons won. The house was theirs, for $45,400. They went out for frozen yogurt at TCBY to celebrate. Within days, they put 10 percent down and signed a purchase agreement. Then they got to work planning the rehab.

The house needed a complete gutting. It took 10 site visits with contractors to finish their scope of work and get a mortgage. Their rehab was ambitious: new walls, a new floor plan. It would cost $180,000—which would still put them ahead of the prices for modernized homes in the neighborhood. The Dickersons chose a new financial package offered by five local banks: the Detroit Home Mortgage, a conventional loan plus a second mortgage to cover renovation costs. A collaboration between the banks, the land bank, foundations and the state, it’s meant to cover Detroit’s “appraisal gap”—the difference between the city’s low home values and the high cost of rehab projects.

In March, after their financing was finally approved, the Dickersons closed the deal. Now they’re living in a loft near their new house while contractors renovate and the land bank’s compliance team checks their progress.

“We feel good about it,” says Ashley. “It’s a very unconventional way to do it, but I think our outcomes are going to be unconventional and really rewarding. We have a lot more ownership of our home, because we actually designed it.” The Dickersons like the auction program. “I think it’s great they’re trying to fill in these gaps in neighborhoods that are still thriving, that just have a few holes,” says Ashley.

The Dickersons only have two critiques. They wish it’d been easier to schedule site visits before they closed the deal. And at the time they bid, the land bank didn’t give bidders any guide to the cost of fixing up the house. They went through the house with a contractor, a friend of theirs. Without a contractor willing to give an estimate, “You don’t really know the gravity of that project,” says Damon.

It’s one example of how the land bank has rushed into major programs at some risk to itself and to Detroiters. Only in 2017 has the land bank begun to post an inspection report and an estimated minimum cost of repairs for houses on its auction site. “People now know what they’re getting themselves into,” said inventory director Darnell Adams at the land bank’s April board meeting. “We’d like to do it for all our properties, but of course, our resources are limited.” Own It Now houses still come without reports.

Some homebuyers weren’t prepared for the risk. So far, 145 of the 720 buyers who have gone through the land bank’s compliance program have failed, putting them at risk of losing their deed. (Another 1,025 are still being monitored, according to the land bank’s April report.)

Speed and volume are the goals of the program. But they’re also the greatest risk to the land bank’s reputation.

***

Dressed in a white robe, the journalist reads a newspaper in bed. The camera pulls back to show he’s lying on a mattress inside a ruined house. He stretches his arm. “Imagine my happiness when I open the morning papers and read just how fast, and cheap, the mayor is tearing down all those nasty houses!” says the journalist, Charlie LeDuff, in a voice-over. “I mean, it’s like a world record if you believe City Hall!”

In October 2015, LeDuff— the muckraking, power-bashing, hard-drinking, street-fighting author of Detroit: An American Autopsy—flogged the land bank in a nine-minute segment on Detroit’s Fox affiliate, “Is Detroit’s demolition math fuzzy?” LeDuff reported that the price of demolitions had soared, that contracts weren’t going to the lowest bidders and that federal authorities were investigating.

The day after LeDuff’s report, city council president Brenda Jones asked for a city audit. The mayor appeared before the council a week later to contest LeDuff’s report. He blamed the higher demolition costs on environmental rules and local construction costs. But the next day, state auditors showed up at the land bank’s offices to review its bidding processes. They quickly found that the land bank had opted not to hire the lowest-bidding demolition contractor about 40 percent of the time. Two months later, the Detroit Free Press reported that “city officials and handpicked companies agreed to a contract price for a massive [demolition] project before others could submit bids.” (Fahle says the land bank demolished 1,400 homes under a “unit price” program that was meant to attract new contractors to the demolition program. It’s been discontinued.)

The land bank has demolished more than 8,800 houses and sold 1,500 of the newly vacant lots to neighbors. | Mark Peterson/Redux Pictures for Politico Magazine

The land bank is now subject to a federal criminal investigation by the FBI and the U.S. Treasury inspector general that oversees the Troubled Assets Relief Program. In May 2016, the inspector general sent an administrative subpoena asking for the voice mails and notes of 14 land bank officials regarding several demolition contracts. In November, FBI agents visited the land bank and left with computers and documents. No charges have been filed.

In August, the Treasury Department suspended the land bank’s demolition funding. It resumed in October, but with new controls in place. That month, the land bank also released an internal audit that showed the land bank improperly billed nearly $1 million in demolition costs to the state. Land bank contractors had bid more than the state’s cap of $25,000 per home to demolish some properties, the audit found. But in the final contracts, the costs were redistributed to other parcels so that, on paper, all the demolitions came in under the price cap.

Advocates for land banks and blight demolition are nervous about the Detroit investigation, says Jim Rokakis, director of the Thriving Communities Institute, which supports Ohio’s 43 land banks. “Those of us who have been so interested and involved in obtaining this money, our biggest concern is that somebody screws it up,” Rokakis says, “and then the [Treasury inspector general] and members of Congress who are critical will jump on this as an example of why money shouldn’t be made available to distressed urban areas.”

Detroit land bank officials say they’ve worked closely with their state and federal funders to make changes in the demolition program. They note that the agency has received $130 million in new funding since October.

“In the past, we would look at a contract as a whole,” says Lewand-Monroe, who was executive director from late 2015 until May 15. “Now we do a property by property cost analysis, to make sure the prices being bid are in line with the market.” The land bank used to include up to 150 properties in a single demolition contract. Now 50 is the maximum, to make the contracts more manageable.

Officials say they’ve lowered the cost of demolition—from an average of $18,118 per house in early 2016 to $13,516 at year’s end, according to the Treasury inspector general—by knocking down houses at a more moderate pace. In July 2014, the land bank was demolishing 300 houses a week. “What we’ve found since then was, there’s a sweet spot of hitting about 125 to 150 houses per week,” Lewand-Monroe says. “If you do more, the resources are not there, so the price of demolition can increase.” Detroit’s 2014 demolition frenzy led to a spike in the price of backfill dirt.

The tough scrutiny isn’t over. The Detroit land bank’s board chair, Erica Ward Gerson, is feuding with the city’s auditor general over a preliminary report he issued in March, which claimed the land bank shows “escalating administrative costs amid weak internal financial controls, along with inadequate program management and oversight.” Ward Gerson disputes the findings.

“Detroit’s land bank must right ship,” the Detroit Free Press editorialized April 5 after the auditor’s report. “It’s hard not to think that a demand for speed has eclipsed sound management. … Fast is good. Right is better. The mayor must achieve both.”



***

Some critics of the Detroit land bank focus on the demolition troubles, others on more existential questions about the land bank’s purpose.

Activists argue: How much property should the land bank return to the real estate market, and how much should go to community groups trying to shelter people from foreclosure? Why sell that land to that community group, and not this group? Why demolish that home and not this one? And why doesn’t the land bank do more to clean up and maintain its 98,000 properties?

Scott Benson is a Detroit city councilman and a supporter of the land bank. | Mark Peterson/Redux Pictures for Politico Magazine

City councilman Scott Benson has mediated disputes between the land bank and owners targeted by its nuisance abatement program. “They’ve been very aggressive,” he says, adding that he understands the challenges for landlords. “You’ve got to give people opportunity to fix their homes.” But he says the land bank will negotiate. “The land bank has been very clear: as long as you’re in conversations with them, they’re very, very, very lenient.”

The land bank’s most sensitive challenge is how to approach the thousands of Detroiters who still live in its houses. Tax foreclosures have swept an estimated 4,000 occupied properties into land bank ownership. The occupants, living rent-free for now, include former owners who defaulted on their property taxes, tenants whose landlord didn’t pay the tax, and squatters.

“It’s difficult for us to be landlords,” says Fahle. “It’s not what we’re in business to do.” The land bank is supposed to fight vacancy, not create it. So it’s not evicting anyone, says Fahle, unless the person broke into the house.

The land bank’s answer is its buy-back pilot program, open to anyone who can prove a past connection with the property—former owners, former tenants or even squatters who’ve made substantial improvements to a house or paid the utilities for a year. Participants have to pay $1,000 for the house, put $100 a month into a savings account to cover future property taxes, pay the water bill, keep up the house’s exterior and participate in home-ownership workshops.

Only about 200 people, or 5 percent of the occupants of land bank houses, are in the pilot program. That prompted Michele Oberholtzer, who runs the tax foreclosure prevention project at Detroit’s United Community Housing Coalition, to write that the land bank should simply sell houses to their occupants for $1. “We need to allow people to remain in the homes that they’re in,” Oberholtzer says, “because there’s not enough alternative housing for them to go somewhere else.” Fahle replies that the program needs to include “an incentive for people to pay their taxes.”

By about 2022, Detroit’s land bank hopes to be “structure-free”—to sell or demolish all of its 30,000 homes.

To do that, the nation’s largest land bank will have to grow larger before it gets smaller. National land-bank advocates say Detroit’s land bank needs a steadier funding stream than its $11 million appropriation from Detroit’s general fund. As it moves more property, says Fahle, it’ll need to add people to its sales-closing team and the compliance team that monitors rehab efforts.

It’ll also need new sources of demolition money. The land bank has $120 million in federal demolition funds to spend, enough to take down 8,000 to 9,000 houses in the next two years. After that, if the federal government doesn’t renew or replace the Hardest Hit Fund, Detroit could be left with only its own demolition budget to knock down the thousands of houses it can’t save.

Once the backlog is gone, the land bank will still acquire houses that don’t sell at county tax foreclosure auctions, but it’ll aim to demolish or sell them all within a year. (This year it took in 1,500 houses and 4,500 vacant lots.) “We can still be stewards of the vacant land, and preserve it for development projects that may be coming along,” says Fahle.

In April, the city announced a major new housing development on about 300 land bank parcels in the Fitzgerald neighborhood, a mile east of Marygrove College and Clement Wright’s new home. A developer will renovate 115 vacant houses and landscape the vacant parcels around it.

Meanwhile, the land bank says, it’s doing its part to stabilize Detroit. An October 2015 study showed that each home demolition in Detroit increased the value of nearby homes by more than 4 percent, creating a total of $209 million in home equity. Add in other Duggan Administration efforts, such as re-lighting Detroit’s streetlights, and new demand for city living as Detroit’s downtown core recovers, and many neighborhoods are inching back. A land bank study shows that from 2014 to 2016 property values increased in most Detroit neighborhoods.

