There is still a lot of work to be done to improve the quality of housing in Detroit, while other cities, such as Cleveland, are getting toward that point. Seeing how there is still an estimated $1 billion of "fixing up" costs to restore houses in Detroit should be a major red flag. For some reason, it's not.
Instead of the city spearheading a ton of spending to fix up, there must be an easier way so that those funds can go toward schools and infrastructure, just to name two areas. Seems to me for less than half of that amount a group of bulldozers could create vacant land, infrastructure could be updated, and parcels could be ready made for aggressive developers. There could be affordable housing requirements in place at the start, allowing developers and investors to prepare accordingly.
It's one thing to fix a few houses in need to come up to neighborhood standards, but when the amount gets into hundreds of millions of dollars, it's not worth doing it half-assed.
The new saying might be "It takes a village to create a village" instead of to merely restructure one. Let's create opportunities for being "first in" on significant progress!
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