The new Nexus 7 tablet

DETROIT, MI – For the past two mornings, dozens of hired workers and volunteers have met by numbered signs in the halls of Tech Town. There, they are given Google Nexus 7 tablets and, in groups of three, set out to Detroit’s neighborhoods to document every blighted structure and lot.

It is the $1.5 million surveying round of the Detroit Blight Removal Task Force’s ultimate goal of having a strategy in place to rid one of the country’s most-blighted cities of its glut of crumbling structures. By some estimates, there are more than 70,000 vacant and abandoned properties in Detroit, though the blight task force’s co-chair, Glenda Price, told MLive Tuesday that number is likely inflated.

“That’s an estimate, and it’s a number that’s been thrown around a while,” she said, adding that some of the properties included in the estimate could be vacant lots. “Once the mapping is complete we’ll have that answer, we’ll have hard data.”

The blight task force was formed in September as part of a public-private partnership between the federal government, the state, the city and several foundations, as well as Rock Ventures, the umbrella company of Quicken Loans founder and Chairman Dan Gilbert.

Gilbert is co-chair of the task force, along with Price and Linda Smith, Executive Director of neighborhood development non-profit U-Snap-Bac.

Price, who is president of the Detroit Public Schools Foundation, said blight remediation is key to having a successful education system in Detroit. “It’s a safety issue,” she said.

While the surveying round is being funded by a variety of foundations, the blight task force itself has no budget or funding. Federal dollars set aside in September would later be used for the physical removal of blight once property surveying is complete and the blight task force has laid out a plan of action. “We are developing a strategy for the highest and best use of those dollars,” Price said.

Before that happens, some 75 teams of three people each will be mapping out the city in detail with mobile application data developed by Detroit-based Loveland Technologies. Data Driven Detroit is helping to process data and train the surveyors.

The two surveyors in the three-person teams are being paid $10 an hour. Sean Jackson, a Venture for America fellows who is helping lead the project as an executive associate with Rock Ventures, said that the group tried to hire as many people from the neighborhoods in which they’d be surveying in order for greater upfront knowledge. Others have been enlisted through Detroit Employment Solutions Corp. The drivers of the Rock Ventures vans are working on a volunteer basis.

The entire surveying project is expected to be wrapped up by mid-January or early February at the latest.

Jackson showed MLive a map of Detroit in which the entire city is broken up into “microhoods,” or numbered, ¼-square-mile plots that the surveying teams will document one at a time. “It’s kind of like Battleship,” he said.

David Muller is the business reporter for MLive Media Group in Detroit. Email him at dmuller@mlive.com or follow him on Twitter or Facebook.