How 85,000 worms are helping vacant Detroit lots

In its effort to revitalize, Detroit is putting even worms to work.

On an east side lot last week, forestry workers with the non-profit Greening of Detroit scattered 85,000 worms onto a newly tilled vacant lot. The worms, if they do their job right, will burrow several feet into the ground, loosening up the soil and thus allowing rainwater and snowmelt to perculate down into the dirt instead of running off into nearby sewers.

The idea is to keep precipitation out of the city's overburdened combined sewer overflow system and, in a tiny way, contribute to savings millions of dollars in big-pipe sewer infrastructure that won't need to be built.

This single vacant lot in the 8800 block of East Forest is one of numerous pilot sites where forward-thinking Detroiters are experimenting with new uses for some of the city's tens of thousands of vacant lots. Finding ways to keep rainwater out of sewers is just one of many new ideas for reusing vacant lots.

Other ideas include various kinds of urban agriculture, beautification projects involving wildflowers, or commercializing lots by growing shrubs and trees for sale.

The Detroit Future City Implementation Office, the non-profit charged with advancing the concepts in the Detroit Future City framework for the city's reinvention, this week will publish its new Field Guild to working with vacant lots. The 72-page booklet offers not only dozens of ideas for reusing vacant lots but a host of exercises for neighborhood volunteers to use to get started.

The Detroit Future City office has printed 2,000 copies of its Field Guide but the same material is also available on a new website: dfc-lots.com.

Erin Kelly, the head of the Detroit Future City land use team, said the guide is more than a simple pattern book with examples of vacant-lot ideas, such as urban gardens or parking lots. Rather, it's meant to help residents assess the condition of vacant lots in their district and help residents understand how much time, money, and expertise will be needed for each of the suggested treatments.

For example, planting hedges and trees on vacant lots and then selling themcould be accomplished with volunteers with just a beginner's knowledge. But creating a "basement raingarden" to transform the basement area of a recently demolished house into a series of stepped raingarden tiers could cost more than $5,500 and require some professional help to achieve.

Wade Rose, head of Greening of Detroit's vacant land effort, said inserting worms into the lot on East Forest is part of the Great Lakes Restoration project that the regional planning agency SEMCOG and other players are advancing.

"We’re looking at ways to, one, reduce the amount of stormwater the city’s dealing with, and also, two, thinking about innovative ways to use existing infrastructure as well as beautifying the neighborhoods," he said.

With an estimated 24 square miles of vacant land in the city -- even more by some estimates -- the city has plenty of room to experiment, he added.

"Let's think innovatively," Rose said. "This gives us the opportunity to be very innovative and very forward thinking and kind of set the precedent for other cities, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, places like that, to take the models that we’re setting here in Detroit and expand those on a much larger scale."

Contact John Gallagher: 313-222-5173 or gallagher@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @jgallagherfreep.