Rebuilding Detroit
The Basic Pitch: The City of Detroit has such an absurdly bad depression on home prices that you can currently buy an apartment building for less than $1000. To begin with, hop on Realtor.com and take a look around Detroit.
Rather than abandoning Detroit, should we be embracing this opportunity to start over? Is there a proven track record of using sustainable development and ecosystem design to raise property values? Are there factories that could be transformed into carbon sinks, community supported farms, bioremediation projects and public parks? Are there blocks that could benefit from permaculture installations?
Is there any precedent for building and maintaining Earthships in an urban environment? Would city permitting even allow for a sane use of blighted land, or is development for profit legally mandatory? Can we just demolish a home to avoid having to pass a housing inspection? Is it generally a bad idea to try and build in the Atrazine-saturated "Poison Belt"?
As the map demonstrates, Detroit has a huge surface area -- and 30% of it, "about 40 square miles," is just vacant land. 67,000 homes have been foreclosed on and 44,000 of those are empty.
According to the improbably named Doug Diggs, who works for Detroit as the Director of their Planning and Development Department, the average home demolition totals out at just over $10,000 in expenses.
Jon Storvik from Autonomy Without Tears provided the best closing note I could imagine:
"I think one of the most popular critiques of this project (and the one that is most likely to hold it back) is that people are saying "why Detroit? Why can't we do this in our own areas?" Well, you can, if you can get enough people in your area to come along for the ride. The thing is, if this sort of idea is going to take hold and become an inspiration to communities across the country, someone needs to go ahead and do it somewhere. Detroit might as well be the starting point.
Land and housing is cheap. Detroit is already one of the most extreme examples of failed/feral cities in the country, if this kind of thing can be done there, it can be done anywhere. Why not drop a couple grand on a property or two and see what can be done? It's not even like you'd have to live there, we could set up eco-rental units, even provide housing for WWOOF workers who might want to come work on an experimental urban farm. Lots of room for ideas here, folks."
Tags: detroit, earthships, farming, permaculture, renewal, urban
Views: 109
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Justin Boland on -
MORE ON EARTHSHIPS:
These are NOT theoretical, there's thousands of them around the world, they work and they're beautiful.
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Permalink Reply by Cat on -
YES! we should be buying all of this up. If all goes well, we will be purchasing a property like this for the FWT detroit group. If anybody wants to help with this huge fundraising project, let me know. As a matter of fact, if all goes well, we will be buying a lot of these properties and doing exactly this. We need help, mostly more hands to work on these properties.
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Permalink Reply by lowkey on -
Fascinating idea. On a smaller scale, I'm sure there are blighted areas close to most urban centers.
The only questions I can come up with off the top of my head are:
A. Zoning laws. How hard is it to change classifications to allow this activity?
B. Toxic exposure. What may or may not be in the soil of some of these areas?
Still this could be a great way to build sustainable communities near urban centers.
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Permalink Reply by Justin Boland on
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Thanks for the interest, folks.
Since I'm a Vermonter living in Illinois, my interest in Detroit was just based on the severity of the situation. Plus, a number of artists on my label live there so we're always talking shop about urban mountaineering and exploration. (They're both graf artists who actually got featured in a recent TIME article on "decaying detroit")
However, the overall discipline here, of assessing your local environment, organizing like-minded people, and making positive changes is something that's relevant -- and f'ing desperately needed -- to anyone, anywhere. Studying Detroit, collaboratively, has taught me a lot about the tools and resources people need to access and organize.
So the overall goal here is a template, and a list of resources, so that anyone can apply this where they live, ASAP.
Cat, I will definitely be in touch.
lowkey, zoning laws are a huge problem in most cities for everyone except the contractors and inspectors. (And even the contractors bitch about them.) Part of the appeal of Detroit, then, is simply that they're broke and their infrastructure is collapsing. When you can't even provide adequate law enforcement and social services...housing inspections won't be much of a priority.
As for the toxins, I'm working up a piece about Bioremediation. When I bring that up, most people seem to think it's a process that takes years -- it's way faster than that, and much more effective, too. Especially useful is "myco-remediation," something a visionary named Paul Stamets has been talking about for years...I'll post up one of his video talks:
As a side note, in his book Mycellium Running, which is an amazing and detailed hands-on manual, he demonstrates a project they did in Oregon where they innoculated a 1 mile stretch of paved road, then covered it with tarp and loaded it with fungus food. Within the space of a year, almost the entire...the entire...stretch of road had been literally eaten by the fungus. If that's possible...
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Permalink Reply by lowkey on
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lowkey, zoning laws are a huge problem in most cities for everyone except the contractors and inspectors. (And even the contractors bitch about them.) Part of the appeal of Detroit, then, is simply that they're broke and their infrastructure is collapsing. When you can't even provide adequate law enforcement and social services...housing inspections won't be much of a priority.
Well, that is true that there wouldn't be much of a problem initially but I'm a planner and I tend to project everything forward which is where zoning issues really scare me. Imagine 10 years from now, when you've setup a successful community and some developer who wants the land is able to shut down large parts of the community because of so called "zoning violations" to try to force you to sell the land cheap.
Better to address it now rather than pay for it later.
As for the toxins, I guess it all boils down to which toxins are present. Very interesting video.
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Permalink Reply by Justin Boland on
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I suppose that does reveal a semi-conscious prediction on my part that the government infrastructure won't be there in 10 years to enforce this, huh? I'm glad I have saner minds to bounce this off...thanks for that point, man.
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Permalink Reply by lowkey on
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Hey I'm hoping for a very different world too but we're still going to have to live together so some amount of regulation is inevitable.
I just watched the video again and it is compelling. I really liked the cardboard box example and the implications of that alone are amazing. Imagine a box impregnated with fungi optimized for land file contents. A day when throwing away a box is a good deed.
And the little capitalist in my head is screaming his head off about the potential markets and opportunities. Chances to do good and make money at the same time. Maybe I need to get backing into microbiology because this is definitely cool.
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Permalink Reply by Jonny 5 on -
To me, this sort of scenario would be a good time for direct action/squatting, in the vein of the recuperated factories in Argentina.
If proper channels are available, that's better obviously. But in the midst of economic collapse, as in detroit, reclaiming public spaces has it's place even if not in accordance with zoning laws. An organization that's thinking a lot on this front and rooted in the detroit community is the boggs center.
Grace Lee Boggs is pretty danged amazing. Check out all a number of great writings on this and other topics...
http://www.boggscenter.org/
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Permalink Reply by lowkey on
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Now I won't deny that squatting can work. What's the law? You have to occupy/use the property for 10 years and you can take over ownership? Or is it longer?
Maybe this is another case where its not black and white. Try to purchase the land and if you can't then start squatting to pressure a sale to you while being as low profile as possible about the community "lifestyle". If you're careful, you won't attract any attention until it's too late to take it from you.
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Permalink Reply by Fabio on -
(before I begin, I´m going to warn in advance that my keyboard is not functioning well)
Man, that´s a great vision, but I´m afraid I´ll have to bring this jus a little closer back to Earth.
First, right now, unless Detroit becomes part of Obama´s alernative energy plan, I doubt congress, even with a Democratic majority and a convincing arguement from the White House [and of course, We The People, for whatever that´s worth] will wan´t to fund something that requires money and might actually have results. As you can see, our beloved politicians enjoy throwing money into giant holes, hoping to fill i up, rather than just avoid the hole altogether.
Keeping my first point in mind, it´s safe to say that you´ll need something along the lines of venture capitalism on a grand, philanthropic scale. That is very hard to find, so maybe we´ll even have to settle for having some profit being made; we´d just have to make sure that it doesn´t run away and become derimental to the original vision.
So, after finding funding for this project, you´d need some sense of structure. As much as I love the idea of just opening the doors and allowing research anarchy (this is a positive connotation, btw), to do something on a grand scale like this would at least need to be able to direct funding to implement succesful projects and to allocate resources to promising projects.
Finally, if you want to see things like this go global, you´d have to come up with a template for this kind of project that would work regardless of the initial conditions [i.e. implementing this in Tampa, or D.C., or Chicago].
Unfortunately, I had a lot more to blather about but I have to go...I migh elaborate on this train of though later.
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Permalink Reply by Justin Boland on
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Cuba is a solid example of how this works when all the social safety nets collapse:
http://www.cityfarmer.info/category/cuba/
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Permalink Reply by lowkey on
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The urban farms in Cuba are inspiring but lets remember to keep it all in perspective. I think you're dead on by describing it as "all the social safety nets collapse" but lets add a little more detail about the problems facing Cuba today so others can understand too.
This was released on Reuters yesterday:
HAVANA (Reuters) - Cuban President Raul Castro called on Saturday for austerity measures including fewer subsidies for workers and stricter management to pull the country out of an economic morass aggravated this year by three hurricanes and the global financial crisis.
He told a year-end meeting of the National Assembly the government would cut official trips abroad by 50 percent and eliminate programs that reward good workers with free vacation trips but cost the government $60 million a year.
"The accounts don't square up," he said. "You have to act with realism and adjust the dreams to the true possibilities," said Castro, who officially replaced his ailing older brother Fidel Castro as president in February.
"Two plus two always equals four, never five," he said
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Castro said Cuban managers need to demand more from their workers, who receive free education and health care and subsidized food rations but on average earn only $20 a month.
"I have arrived at the conclusion that one of our big problems is a lack of systemic demand," said Castro.
He expressed dissatisfaction with the system of subsidies for those who can work, but do not, saying government handouts discourage Cubans from being more productive.
Sounds like Raul might be an objectivist in communist clothing.
Also, lets not confuse what the Cuban people are doing with the urban gardens with any environmental movement. They're doing it to eat not to save the planet. The effectiveness is inspiring but the motivations are different than ours.
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