John Gallagher

Detroit Free Press

John Hantz is frustrated.

In a little over three years since the city sold him about 140 acres of surplus land on Detroit's east side for his Hantz Woodlands project, he and his team have done everything they promised. Cleaned up almost 2,000 vacant lots. Hauled away mountains of trash. Planted more than 20,000 trees. Kept their lots mowed and tidy.

But Hantz and his team feel unable to finish the jobs of beautifying their east-side project area because the City of Detroit has held back a few hundred surplus parcels within the Hantz Woodlands district. These are parcels that were originally included in the deal but so far have not yet been transferred to Hantz. Today they remain overgrown and blighted amid the well-tended parcels that Hantz owns.

The reasons the city has withheld these final few hundred parcels remain somewhat obscure.

I asked Mayor Mike Duggan’s office about it. Jed Howbert, executive director of the mayor’s Jobs & Economy team, gave a statement: "Now that we have a world-class urban planner on our staff in Maurice Cox, we just want to take a step back and re-evaluate our land-use strategy before deciding whether we want to sell large amounts of land."

So I asked Cox, the city’s planning director, about it. He told me the Hantz issue hasn’t gotten to the top of the priority list yet among city staffers.

That's odd, and it contradicts the common assumption that wealthy white businessmen like Dan Gilbert, Mike Ilitch and Roger Penske get whatever they want from the city. Generally, of course, they do. The recent Grand Prix on Belle Isle, an event championed by Penske, shows just how willing the city remains to assist one of them.

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But for some reason Hantz, a resident of Detroit's Indian Village district who owns a number of financial services firms, doesn't even seem to merit an answer as to why the city hasn't yet sold him the remaining parcels.

It's tempting to say the city is being cautious for fear of reigniting the long, contentious fight that preceded the creation of Hantz Woodlands.

The City Council, in a 5-4 vote in late 2012, agreed to sell Hantz those nearly 2,000 parcels of tax-foreclosed land after years of debate. Opponents cited several reasons for their “no” votes – questions over process and whether Hantz was getting a deal ordinary Detroiters couldn’t get. And there were fears of the unknown, of what a massive tree-planting operation would be like.

For whatever reason, the city has not given Hantz and his team a price for the remaining parcels or a date when the city may set such a price.

But there's a cost to that, a cost measured in blighted landscape.

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Near the corner of Goethe and Lemay on Detroit’s east side, a burned-out ruin of a house sits smack in the middle of the Hantz Woodlands tree-planting project.

The City of Detroit owns that blighted ruin. It's one of the parcels Hantz has been trying to buy it from the city for more than a year so he can clean it up. So far, the city hasn’t agreed to sell it to him.

Nearby, on Beniteau Street, neatly tended and mowed lots cared for by the Hantz Woodlands project alternate in checkerboard fashion with overgrown lots still owned by the city. Again, Hantz and his team have tried to buy those blighted lots from the city for over a year, to no avail.

The city is working hard on blight removal, tearing down thousands of crumbling burned-out structures. But so far those efforts have not touched the parcels Hantz and Mike Score, president of the Hantz Woodlands operation, hope to buy. As a result, those remaining parcels within the Hantz project footprint remain an unsightly reminder of a city that can’t do all it needs to do by way of basic services.

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Certainly there are more pressing issues for Detroit than the disposition of a few hundred vacant parcels on the city’s east side. Schools, crime, jobs, transit – all cry out for solutions.

But there’s probably no quicker win for Detroit right now than to sell Hantz the remaining few hundred lots in his project footprint. The blight will be removed in short order at no cost to the city. Indeed, based on the sale price the city sets, it can bring in some needed cash.

What’s even more curious is that there’s no issue of contention between the city and Hantz. Indeed, Score told me on a recent tour of the project that everyone at the city remains cordial to him, and working relationships are good. It’s just that nobody at the city seems ready to make a decision.

“In some ways we’re working together,” Score said. “The Ombudsman’s Office has been great. The Department of Public Works has been great. Building Safety and Engineering’s been great. The assessor’s office is great. We have a good working relationship with individual departments. But then the system as a whole is the part that’s been less responsive.”

The usual answer is “we’re working on it,” he said.

Holding back those parcels would make sense if these final few hundred lots were being claimed by next-door neighbors or other potential buyers. Instead, most are like the burned-out ruin at Goethe and Lemay – surrounded by the neatly planted rows of trees in the middle of the Hantz Woodlands project.

The Hantz Woodlands project has proved an exemplary way to clean up abandoned urban land. Neighbors like Ray Andersen, who live in the project area and were initially skeptical of the Hantz project, have become its biggest fans.

“I’m very pleased with a lot of things that they’re doing,” Anderson, a retired city worker who has lived on Holcomb between Mack and Charlevoix for 59 years, said last week.

Some of his neighbors still harbor doubts, Anderson said, and he doesn’t want to take a position on the sale of the final parcels. But he agrees the Hantz team has fulfilled all their promises.

“They’ve done a great job, and they’re continuing to do that,” he said.

That ought to be good enough for the city. The best course now is to sell the final lots to Hantz and let him clean them up at no cost to the city.

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