Detroit's Bing proposes relocating residents of blighted neighborhoods.

Dave Bing, who became mayor of Detroit in the spring of 2009, wants to relocate residents of neighborhoods that have lost the vast majority of their inhabitants. The relocations would take place as part of Bing’s plan to demolish approximately 10,000 houses and other empty buildings over three years. By one estimate, the 139-square-mile city contains 33,500 empty houses and 91,000 vacant residential lots.

The thinking is that if residents of scattered houses were moved to more populated neighborhoods, the drain on city services such as fire protection could be reduced, and the empty land could more easily be used for farming, parks, and other purposes. Nearly 900 urban gardens (averaging 0.25 acre each) are already being tended within the city, and their numbers have been rising rapidly.

Businessman John Hantz this spring asked the city to help him with his proposal to establish farms on 5,000 acres in Detroit. Altogether, there are estimated to be roughly 40 square miles of vacant property in the city, which has seen its population decline to about 900,000 from 1,850,000 in 1950.

“It’s not definitive exactly how some of these initiatives are going to be carried forward,” Mark Nickita, president of the Detroit urban design firm Archive Design Studio, says of the city’s plans. Detroit faces a budget deficit possibly as high as $400 million. The salary of Detroit’s recently appointed director of community development — Toni Griffin, who won recognition for her work in Newark, New Jersey, and Washington, DC — is being paid by the $3.1-billion Kresge Foundation, based in nearby Troy. Despite the population outflow, “We’re still two to three times more dense than Dallas,” Nickita emphasizes. Some neighborhoods have experienced a population increase. “In the last 10 years,” Nickita says, “thousands of housing units have been built.”