“SPERAMUS meliora; resurget cineribus”: the Latin incantation, offered by a French Catholic priest after a fire nearly destroyed the city in 1805, is Detroit’s motto—“We hope for better things; it will rise from the ashes.” The once-great city, the “arsenal of democracy” during the second world war and home of the world’s most innovative manufacturers, has almost been ruined a second time. National interest in Detroit has waned since its bankruptcy proceedings, brought on by decades of mismanagement, ended in December 2014. Most tales of the city now take one of two tacks. Either Detroit remains mired in poverty and unemployment, its doom merely forestalled by a few years. Or the hipsters flooding in are, with each overwrought coffee contraption and jam-jar cocktail, returning the city to something like its former glory.

What both accounts miss is that Detroit seems on the point of doing something remarkable: re-electing a mayor whose singular achievement has been to knock bits of the city down faster than his predecessors, and swapping racially tinged politics for a more managerial sort. Mike Duggan took office in 2014 after an unlikely write-in campaign. In August this year he won 68% of the vote in the primary, and is likely to win the election proper in November. This despite the illustrious lineage of his opponent, Coleman Young II. Mr Young’s father was the city’s first black mayor, ran Detroit for two decades and has his name inscribed on city hall. Mr Duggan was the city’s first white mayor in 40 years. In the past four decades the city has undergone a racial transformation: from 70% white in the 1960s to just 10% now.

Mr Duggan, whose office overlooks the Detroit river (Caesars Casino in Windsor, Ontario, is visible in the distance), calls himself a “metrics nut”. The mayor’s cabinet meeting room is blanketed in graphs charting the city’s employment, ambulance delivery and crime rates, among other statistics. “The police are going to show up in under 14 minutes; the ambulance is going to show up in under 8 minutes; the grass is going to be cut in the parks every 10 to 12 days—it just is.” City employees who do not meet these targets do not last long. “It’s a pretty unpleasant experience to come in the meeting and not have your numbers straightened out,” he says. Cabinet members grimace in agreement.

Plenty of these numbers have improved. Police response times are down from an average of 40 minutes to 13. But the most important numbers for Detroit’s future concern derelict properties. There were 40,000 such structures in 2014—ruins left over from an extreme population crunch. The sprawling metropolis, covering 139 square miles, once housed 1.8m people—three times as many as today. The city “is just too big”, says David Schleicher of Yale Law School, pointing out that “all that expanse increases the expense of providing services”. Urbanists suggest that the solution for such cities is “right-sizing”—shrinking them down to a size where the city can afford to provide pavements, streetlights, sewerage and so on.

Wholesale restructuring of Detroit inspires scepticism, because past city efforts hurt black residents in the name of development. Because of blatantly racist mortgage policies and racial “covenants” that prohibited blacks from living in certain neighbourhoods, African-Americans were kept in segregated areas, like Black Bottom and Paradise Valley, and had much lower rates of home ownership. Albert Cobo, mayor for much of the 1950s, pursued the building of motorways by razing black neighbourhoods, sowing the seeds for the race riots in 1967 which marked, for many, the beginning of Detroit’s decline. Because of those scars, using eminent domain (compulsory purchase) to restructure the city is off limits.

Appetite for destruction

That means the same task has to be accomplished by persuasion instead. Mr Duggan has an ambitious project, fuelled by federal dollars, to demolish abandoned houses at record speed. The centrepiece of those efforts is the mayor’s expansion of the Detroit Land Bank, a quasi-governmental authority which now owns 96,000 properties across the city—most of them acquired through foreclosure because of unpaid taxes. The land bank centralised city control over abandoned and vacant properties, replacing an antiquated registry scattered across 83 data sets, some of them still on paper. Wiping away liens and back taxes means the properties are more easily cleared for demolition or restoration into something habitable.

Since Mr Duggan took office, the city has demolished 11,900 residential properties. City officials have worked from the highest-density districts, with 80% occupancy rates, downwards, reasoning that demolitions there stabilise prices for more people. The demolition of a blighted property increases the value of a home 500 feet away by 4.2%, according to one study. The pace has been unprecedented. “I’ve been living in Michigan for 29 years. Every mayor has said, ‘I am going to demolish 10,000 structures’. No one ever came close,” says Margaret Dewar of the University of Michigan.

With this speed have come problems. Allegations that the city’s demolition programme awarded contracts improperly have dogged the administration and attracted a federal investigation. Michigan’s state housing agency suspended funds for two months, after a state audit found improper controls in place. Land bank officials, including the director of demolitions, have resigned. Mr Duggan, who is not a subject of the investigation, blames the mistakes on a desire to increase the pace of demolitions, but acknowledges that regulators were right to rap his knuckles.

One hole in his plan is the high pace of tax foreclosures—the main pipeline for properties that end up in the land bank’s possession. Owners who do not pay taxes after three years lose their property, according to state law. But those property taxes were last comprehensively reassessed decades before market values plummeted, meaning many are set too high. Median sale prices for city houses fell from $70,000 in 2006 to $16,200 in 2012. The owner of a house worth $15,000 could owe $3,000 in property taxes. The state-mandated interest rate on property-tax debt is 18% per year. A much-needed update, finished in January, should see lower bills but will not be retroactive. Up to 53,000 properties will receive foreclosure notices this autumn.

Not every foreclosed property will necessarily end up derelict. But it is easy to see how tax foreclosures, which are driven by government policy rather than market forces, could dislodge longtime residents and exacerbate the problem that the demolition drive, which has already cost $162m, is trying to solve. The average back taxes for houses that go up for auction are $7,700—much less than the cost of demolition. “It’s like an auto-immune disorder. We penalise people for not paying, and then we end up paying more for the punishment,” says Michele Oberholtzer, director of the Tax Foreclosure Prevention Project. Provided he can solve this puzzle, Mr Duggan thinks that at the current pace of demolitions he can clear the city’s long-standing blight within five years. Detroit would emerge smaller, but no longer a byword for decline.