RAMPING UP THE FIGHT AGAINST COMMERCIAL BLIGHT

A year ago, city of cials prioritized about 100 properties, big and small, for remediation. This year, they have added more and are aiming to make a big jump in progress.

An international exhibition of photos of Detroit’s abandoned and decaying commercial buildings made him “extremely angry,” Mayor Mike Duggan said last year. He believed it continued the “ruin porn” reputation in the popular imagination, the idea that dilapidated sites were drawing tourists.

It also prompted the city to step up e orts to demolish and rehabilitate buildings that in some cases had been empty for generations. And after an initial dozen were identi ed, Duggan said in his 2022 State of the City address last March, he wanted to expand the scope to encompass even more blight.

“I want to make sure there’s no chance somebody comes around with a new camera and takes new pictures,” he said. “So we made a list of the next hundred.” at list became known as the M100, and has since ballooned to 150 blighted commercial properties the city is tracking. Most are slated for demolition, but others may still be saved.

“I think it’s actually a sign of optimism,” Richard Hosey, the owner of Hosey Development and the redeveloper of the Fisher Body No. 21 plant, said of the M100. “ ere was a time when the list would have been so big, people would say, ‘Why are you putting together a list? It’s just the city.’” e creation of the M100 rep- resents a focused, coordinated effort to be proactive about blight elimination, members of the administration said. And while progress can sometimes be slow, information from the city’s demolition department shows a dozen properties have come down since the list was started in 2021, while two are actively moving toward demolition and another dozen are out for bid.

LaJuan Counts, director of the department, said she expects all the properties slated for demolition to be contracted out this year, with the majority being torn down this year.

Duggan said in January that another 40 or so were going through environmental remediation and he expected every property to be torn

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BY ARIELLE KASS

down or rehabilitated by the end of 2025.

Rattling o a list of projects and progress, Duggan said he doesn’t need to explain to Detroiters the effect demolishing eyesores like the Packard Plant would have on residents’ psyche.

“People visited from around the world to say they walked in the ruins of Detroit,” he said. “As you can tell, I’m very much focused ’cause each one of these is a symbol of Detroit’s decline. And we’re going to eliminate once and for all the ruin porn tours in the city of Detroit.”

‘Much better strategy’

Abandoned manufacturing cen- ters, empty strip malls, vacant apartment buildings: “ ere’s a lot of commercial blight in the city of Detroit,” said John Mogk, a distinguished service professor at Wayne State University’s law school.

Detroit or a city entity now owns half of the worst o enders, according to the M100 list, and Mogk said local government could use help from the state for additional tools that could give the city options to mitigate the blight. One thing is clear, though, he said: blight places a heavy burden on an area, and if the city is to have a future, it must not let commercial blight stay, or spread.

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