DETROIT — Vacant homes were once one of the largest obstacles that stood between Detroit and a safer city. Tens of thousands of empty houses invited danger around nearly every corner.
Deputy Mayor Todd Bettison carries around a folded-up piece of paper in his pocket as a reminder of all the blight.
"Let me show you something real quick," Bettison said, unfolding the document covered in red ink.
"If you look at this map right here, you can zoom in," he told our cameraman. "This just shows you in a glance the number of abandoned houses or abandoned structures that were a real eyesore and creating blight in the city of Detroit."
In an hour-long interview, Bettison rattled off a long list of issues plaguing Detroit. Many of those problems are the same troubles we see in St. Louis.
"Abandoned houses," he said. "We had roughly 80,000-some abandoned houses in the city of Detroit at the time. They complained about garbage pickup. It was just so much."
You can still find boarded-up windows, crumbling rooftops, and graffiti-covered brick walls in portions of the city. But these days, you're more likely to see construction workers and excavators knocking down the old buildings as the city has rapidly accelerated the process of tearing them down.
“This is the nation’s largest demolition program," contractor Brian McKinney told us outside of an active worksite last month.
All that demolition creates jobs, and the city has steered most of that work to local companies.
"The city of Detroit was able to create economic opportunity for its residents, which then created more upward social mobility for the people who actually work at these companies, and that's been a very transformative thing that I think will pay dividends long after the blight is gone," McKinney said.
His company is one of several to experience exponential year-over-year growth in business. He moved back home to Detroit for the opportunity to invest in his hometown.
“Whenever you have these structures, you can have dangerous crime," he explained. "The city has really done a great job of making sure removing blight is also a way to make the community safer.”
The abundance of vacant lots has also allowed the city to sell real estate at incredibly low prices, giving priority to local residents over out-of-town developers and creating prime opportunities to reinvest in their neighborhoods.
“We’re really helping people in a tangible way," Alyssa Strickland with the Detroit Land Bank Authority told us.
The city recently started offering Detroit homeowners exclusive rights to purchase vacant lots next door to their property for $100.
“We’ve sold over 21,000 side lots for $100 exclusively to Detroit homeowners," she said.
"Our side lot program has been a major asset of transferring a tremendous amount of city-owned property back to the residents of Detroit," Bettison said.
"What's beautiful about it is that the city doesn't have to maintain it," he added. "The residents will do creative things with the lots."
In the city's east side, a local block club director started buying up vacant lots on her block and turning them into community gardens and safe spaces for kids to play.
"It is a lot of work, but it's so worth it," Kaytea Moreno Elst said. "The houses in our neighborhoods have very small backyards."
"Green space is hard to get in a city," she said. "I mean, it's hard to come by. And to own property? Land? That's something that every person wants to do."
During the colder months, she turned one of the vacant lots into a makeshift ice rink and organized donation drives to give neighborhood kids their first pair of skates and something fun to do in the winter.
In the spring, the kids will see the fruits of their labor as the first flowers start to blossom. Moreno Elst plans to help the kids organize a flower sale.
Before the city started handing the real estate over to local residents at nearly no cost, the vacant lots would sit and morph into unofficial dumping grounds.
Now, the parcels of land have someone tending to them, and one by one, the city's overall look is starting to feel more like home.
That policy sparked a sense of hope, a sense of ownership, that living in a shrinking city comes with perks for people who stay and call it home.
Journalist John Gallagher covered urban development for the Detroit Free Press for decades. In one of his recent books, he challenged city leaders in Detroit to see their shrinking city as a rare chance to spread out.
The message caught on at City Hall. Now, the Land Bank, often called the 'owner of last resort,' has become a design hub where planners strategize the next chapter of economic development with a keen eye for vacant lots or empty homes in close proximity to others.
"We offer small bundles of property," Strickland said. "If we've got a lot of inventory in one neighborhood, we might package four, five, six properties together."
A construction manager for the city stopped in the middle of applying foam insulation inside one home to discuss the bigger picture.
"We're very strategic about where we do these renovations," Robert Saxon Jr. said. "It's not by accident that we're doing this particular house."
In more than 20,000 cases, the Detroit Land Bank decided vacant homes were a total loss and knocked them down. But in other instances, especially when there was historical significance to the property, the city brought in renovation teams and prepared the homes to hit the market at affordable rates.
When the city first started to see its comeback, Saxon said, "The progress was in the downtown."
Now he sees signs of progress as renovations start to pay off.
"We're trying to do properties near stronger neighborhoods so all that development over there bleeds into some of the weaker neighborhoods. We're trying to get all of that good stuff to start happening over here."
The land bank strategy to coax investors or home buyers to move in just next door to hot areas built up and gave people a sense of momentum.
"The beauty of it now is that it's bleeding into [weaker neighborhoods], and what the land bank's been able to do with other city agencies is bleed it out so everybody feels like they're getting a taste of that comeback," he said.
Since we've returned from Detroit, the city of St. Louis rolled out plans to start adopting the side-lot program, which means homeowners will soon have the option to apply online and purchase a vacant lot next door to their home for just $100 plus application fees.