A $250 million bond sale will not end blight in Detroit.

Full stop.

Over the last five years, Detroit has used federal funds to demolish around 19,000 blighted structures.

And over the last five years,the number of vacant homes in Detroit has shrunk — but not as quickly as the rate of demolition and rehab would suggest. Vacancy data tracked by the USPS and others show that, data analysts say.

City officials say another 20,000 structures need to be demolished, and because the federal well is running dry, Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan wants Detroit voters to approve the sale of $250 million in bonds to fund some rehabs and more demolitions.

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Duggan hopes the Detroit City Council will place his proposal on the ballot in March, when turnout has historically been minuscule. He says the bond proceeds will fund sufficient demolitions to "get every vacant house out of every neighborhood" by 2025.

Getting rid of blight is really important. Blighted, vacant homes are dangerous. They're more likely to burn, to harbor criminal activity, to house threats to neighbors and passers-by. Blight also exacts an enormous psychological toll on the Detroiters surrounded by it every day.

But tearing down blighted houses attacks the symptoms of blight, not its causes, and Detroit cannot end blight without changing the broad, systemic conditions that cause blight.

Some Detroiters lack the resources to maintain or repair their homes. Some Detroiters leave the city, walking away from homes they can't sell. And some homes become blighted because of tax foreclosures that drive residents away.

This year, the county auction is set to displace an estimated, record-low 3,000 Detroiters from about a thousand occupied structures.

Sarida Scott Montgomery, executive director of Community Development Advocates of Detroit, says she understands the focus on blight removal: "Blight is an issue. It does have all of the dangerous physical and psychological aspects. But if we as a city are not looking at causes of blight ... those are problematic as well."

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The connection between blight and depopulation is well-documented. So is the nexus between foreclosure and blight. A 2014 Motor City Mapping survey of every property in Detroit found that 93% of the foreclosed homes in government inventories were blighted.

The city and county have worked hard to reduce the number of occupied structures that are foreclosed and auctioned each year for back taxes, and the number of such homes has declined since 2015, when more than 9,000 occupied structures were foreclosed. That's the product of an improving economy, payment plans for back taxes, more accurate tax assessments — and more acknowledgement, across government, of the harm foreclosure causes to Detroit neighborhoods.

At a press conference this week announcing the bond proposal, Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan scoffed when a reporter asked a question linking depopulation, blight and tax foreclosure.

But some Detroiters leave their homes because they have been foreclosed.

And of all the broad, systemic causes of vacancy and blight, foreclosure is the easiest to fix.

Treading water

Blight is often subjective. Some homes in visible disrepair are inhabited, and some vacant homes are not blighted.

Vacancy is easier to track. But both blight and vacancy data suggest that when it comes to removing blight, Detroit is treading water.

That Motor City Mapping survey, conducted by Loveland Technologies and Data Driven Detroit, found around 40,000 blighted structures that required immediate demolition. The surveyors determined that an additional 38,000 were at high risk of becoming blighted. That's almost 80,000 structures.

Some critics contend that the city's demolition plans don't account for newly blighted or vacant structures: The city plans to demolish a total of 40,000, the number identified in 2014 by Motor City Mapping.

City officials say that's not so.

In addition to the 19,000 homes it has demolished, the city says it rehabbed and sold 9,000 homes over the past five years. If the bond passes, it proposes to knock down another 20,000, and fund the rehabilitation or sale of 7,000 more.

Arthur Jemison, Duggan's infrastructure and services chief, says those numbers account for properties that have become blighted since the baseline work was completed, and properties that will become blighted over the next five years.

But all told, the city plans to demolish or rehab 55,000 structures over a 10-year span.

Quicken Community Ventures' Neighbor to Neighbor survey visited 60,000 of the homes logged by the Motor City Mapping project. More than 2,400 homes that were vacant in 2013 were occupied in 2018, canvassers found. But 8,193 homes occupied in 2013 were vacant last year. That's a net increase of more than 5,000 vacant homes.

Right now, USPS data say there are 46,000 vacant structures in Detroit.

In early 2014, says Noah Urban, director of projects for Data Driven Detroit, the USPS reported 63,183 vacant addresses, 54,375 with structures. In early 2019, the USPS reported 61,108 vacant, 46,353 with structures.

"While demolition has decreased the number of vacant structures estimated to be in Detroit, the data also indicates that this number is declining more slowly than the pace of demolition and rehab would suggest, and the overall number of vacant parcels (as identified by USPS) is decreasing even more slowly still," Urban says.

Adding up

Absent the kind of comprehensive, physical effort Motor City Mapping undertook, it's difficult to measure blight.

Jemison says the city's estimates include homes that have been foreclosed on, have been transferred to the Detroit Land Bank Authority, demolished by the land bank, or privately owned homes demolished by emergency order.

In other words, the city's current blight inventory only counts structures that have come into contact with the system. But that seems to leave out a lot of homes in serious disrepair.

Deadline Detroit's Violet Ikonomova, writing in Metro Times last year, found numerous discrepancies in the actual conditions of homes marked vacant but not blighted by the Detroit Land Bank Authority. In some cases, homes the land bank considered vacant but not blighted had been abandoned for years, per residents' accounts.

The big picture

Detroit and Wayne County have worked hard to keep more Detroiters in their homes — the overwhelming majority of foreclosures in Wayne County happen in Detroit — but there is more to be done.

There are rarely silver bullets in policy, but when it comes to foreclosure, there's something that comes close: a retroactive poverty property tax exemption.

Michigan state law requires cities to offer impoverished residents some exemption from property tax. In Detroit, it's 100%. The Quicken Community Fund's researchers spoke to the owners of 24,089 of about 45,000 tax-delinquent occupied Detroit homes; about 75% of their owners are eligible for the city's poverty property tax exemption.

But the city has tacitly admitted it has done a bad job of communicating this to homeowners who may be eligible for relief.

Obtaining a poverty exemption can ensure that qualifying homeowners won't have to pay future property taxes, . but they can still lose their homes to foreclosure if they owe taxes from previous years. A retroactive poverty exemption would wipe out back taxes.

"When we have something right in front our faces where we could help keep families in their homes, immediately, and I’m referring to foreclosure ..." Montgomery said.

Making the poverty exemption retroactive would require state legislation. So far, that hasn't happened, and it's unlikely to without Duggan's support.

Duggan says extending the poverty exemption retroactively won't be fair to homeowners who did pay. He's not wrong to worry about fairness.

But it's also not fair to residents who've paid their taxes to see homes in their neighborhoods fall into vacancy and blight, a process hastened by tax foreclosure.

We talk a lot about affordable housing in Detroit, but the reality is that for most Detroiters, the most affordable homes available are the ones they're living in right now.

Keeping more Detroiters in their homes, slowing the spread of blight, keeping neighborhoods whole — that would be fair.

Nancy Kaffer is a Free Press columnist. Contact: nkaffer@freepress.com.