DETROIT – Local 4 News is getting out of the studio and hitting the road to be In Your Neighborhood! We’re showcasing what makes our communities great!
The City of Detroit is focused on tackling blight in more than a dozen commercial corridors, including some on Detroit’s northwest side.
“Each corridor has a life of its own and a different strategy,” Detroit Blight Remediation Assistant Director Katrina Crawley said.
Local 4′s Will Jones went on a ride along with Crawley to see the work that’s been done and still left to do.
“So on Fenkell you will see as we are driving down to Wyoming, you will see some yellow placards. Most people think those yellow placards are tickets but they’re not. They are blight violation notices,” she said.
Crawley focuses solely on commercial properties.
“We first start off with vacant property owners who are out of state because those owners have the worst properties, and they don’t have skin in the game,” she said.
Crawley wants property owners to pick up the phone and work to get into compliance.
“You can see this is a vacant property. The owner obviously came out. You see the yellow placard, they tried to scrape it off,” she said.
Since 2021, the city said it has remediated about 140 properties in the 48238 zip code, about a one-third of the properties belong to the city.
---> In Your Neighborhood: Getting to know Detroit’s 48238
If owners don’t clean up their properties, the city will do it for them and send them the bill.
David Garrison owns Garrison Auto Glass on Dexter.
“I genuinely am looking forward to the transformation of what’s going on,” he said.
Crawley knows ridding a neighborhood of blight is just one part of its transformation. She hopes it spurs economic development.
“I would say success is almost in the eye of the beholder, subjectively when the community sees that there has been a change and it’s a change that will be long-lasting,” Crawley said.
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