opinion

By any measure, there are too many fires in Detroit

No matter how bad you think Detroit's fire problem is, it's worse.

That's the only conclusion you can possibly reach after reading a new report by Loveland Technologies, a downtown data and information firm that spent six months chronicling Detroit fires.

And it's the only conclusion you can reach after Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan's rebuttal, insisting simultaneously that Loveland undercounted fires, and that things aren't as bad as they seem.

Loveland found that 1,653 structures were damaged by 1,486 fires fire between Jan. 1 and July 31 of this year. Some 765 were occupied. Duggan says it's more, 2,256 fires, but that the tally is down from last year. Loveland CEO Jerry Paffendorf explains the discrepancy by saying Loveland only counted structure-damaging fires.

By any measure, it's a lot.

Detroit's fire problem — extraordinarily high rates of arson and insurance fraud, underpaid and overworked fire fighters, thousands of vacant homes that are targets for accidental or intentional fires, a rate of demolition that can't keep pace with the number of homes that need to come down, a profoundly malfunctioning fire hydrant system, a historically low number of arson investigations — is a harsh reminder of just how far the city has to go, post-bankruptcy.

There's also this: Fires that damage structures and displace residents strain the already tenuous fabric of some Detroit neighborhoods. Hundreds of the structures that burn each year are occupied — or were, until they burned. When structures are damaged past the point of habitation, residents leave, and their once-occupied homes swell the ranks of the estimated 50,000 vacant structures in this city.

And that means while Duggan's team is tearing down about 150 blighted structures each week, about 5,000 in the last year and a half, the list keeps growing.

To tear down just the structures with irreparable damage cataloged by Loveland could cost the city $2.9 million. Worse, because of the city's demolition backlog, it's likely many burned houses will remain far longer than neighbors or passersby would like, stubborn reminders that despite its progress, Detroit is not yet like other cities.

Alexis Wiley, Duggan's chief of staff, says the number of fires has dropped 18% in the last year, thanks to the administration's blight removal efforts, and it's working on the arson problem: For years, only 13% to 18% of suspected arson fires were investigated. Now, Wiley said, police investigators work with the fire department on arson cases, and the investigation rate is closer to 78%. That change was made about a month ago. She's hopeful these gains will be repeated next year, and the year after.

But it's all connected, blight and fire and tax foreclosure, which is why Loveland set out to compile this data. Paffendorf says he's eager to compare the official data to his team's results.

About 18,000 of the vacant structures in Detroit need to be demolished, according to the firm, hired last year by the Detroit Blight Task Force to inventory derelict structures in the city. The results of that survey have informed Duggan's demolition efforts.

To keep the survey information current, it's important to track structures that fall into disrepair. So the firm approached the Detroit Fire Department in search of the data; it wasn't available. (It's still not posted on the city's open data portal, although Wiley said it should be up within the month.) In the absence of fire department records, Loveland surveyors started gathering the data themselves, monitoring fire radio scanners, logging locations and making visits to the site of every reported fire. That work is meticulously documented at www.makeloveland.com/fire.

"(Detroit is) in the middle of a huge blight removal effort, there's a lot of money from the federal government and banks coming into Detroit," Paffendorf said. "No one's doing anything wrong. Everybody’s working really hard and doing a good job in an absurd situation. But one thing I think it’s really important to note, there’s not a finite, static supply of things being torn down or fixed up in the city, it’s growing all the time. When you piece together buildings damaged by fire and tax foreclosure, the 4,000 properties torn down last year in Detroit are replaced by 4,000. That's missing in peoples’ perceptions — policy-makers' perceptions and funders' perception. When I travel ... people feel like what has happened in downtown and Midtown is happening everywhere, and they are surprised at the chaos and decay that is happening over the majority of the city."

Reversing that decay, quelling the chaos — putting out the fires, knocking down the blighted buildings — is a daunting task. Detroit is inching forward. But let's not fool ourselves about how far we've got to go.