William Pulte said the only way to truly save Detroit and get the housing market functioning properly again is to destroy large swaths of the city as quickly as possible.

Pulte, a scion of the family that created PulteGroup Inc., the largest U.S. homebuilder by revenue, has already knocked down 10 blocks of southeast Detroit as part of the proposed nonprofit Detroit Blight Authority program. It's a preview of the effort he said is needed to get ahead of the metal strippers and arsonists devastating the city's property values.

"We're trying to do total blight elimination," Pulte said, standing in the middle of the blocks his group cleared earlier this year. "You can go tear down one home here and then tear down one in another area, but if you go into one area and take down everything, that's what really makes a difference."

Housing markets in Detroit and other rustbelt cities such as Cleveland and Buffalo are hampered by decaying, vacant homes even as sales of existing homes hover around a three-year high nationally. Pilfering of vacant units in urban areas cut the number of U.S. homes with complete plumbing by about 10.4 percent from 2008 to 2011, according to U.S. Census data compiled by Bloomberg, including 66,722 such homes alone in Detroit.