Between 1970 and 2000, more than 161,000 dwellings were demolished in Detroit, amounting to almost one-third of the city's occupied housing stock — that's more than the total number of occupied dwellings today in the entire city of Cincinnati.
Between 1978 and 1998 only 9,000 building permits were issued for new homes in Detroit, while the city doled out over 108,000 demolition permits.
At that time (1989) Detroit had razed an average of 2,000 buildings a year since 1982 — at nine million dollars per year, or $4,500 per home, a figure that had shot up more than 50 percent in five years. That was serious wreckage, the paper reported, but it wasn't even holding the line. Every year in Detroit an estimated 2,400 structures became newly vacant and in dire need of destruction...
There was smashing to be done, and Detroit rolled out the wreckers. In April 1989 Department of Public Works Director Conley Abrams was appointed the city's demolition czar, and he drew up separate demolition contracts for the city's four quadrants. The deal was this: each of the four contractors had to wreck at least ten houses every week; within each quadrant, smaller wrecking firms were contracted to raze three buildings per week.
As part of the new blitz, crews were free to crunch up multiple houses in the same area simultaneously, which was a boon to wrecking productivity: one crew ripped down five "dangerously abandoned" houses on one block in just four hours...
...No one remembered this spontaneous outpouring of commonweal and chainsaw oil better than the city's next great wrecking impresario, Mayor Dennis Archer — he who gleefully cheered on the imploding Hudson's building. It was 1997, and Archer had been on a rampage, vowing to bulldoze every abandoned building in the city deemed too far gone for rehabilitation — as many as 8,922 of them — preferably in a single summer (the one before the mayor's November reelection vote, that is).
In a stroke of brilliance, Archer asked the federal Housing and Urban Development office to pony up the cash. Amid grumbling about ballot-count boosting, days before Archer's reelection HUD officials swept into town with some timely good news. "Secretary Andrew Cuomo granted Archer a campaign wish: a 60 million dollar loan guarantee, slated to finance the demolition of nearly every abandoned residential building in Detroit..."
...Even though Detroit at the time razed five buildings per day — costs by then had gone up to $7,100 each — the number of vacant structures had stayed steady for years at about 12,000, and the fitful bouts of wrecking had "done little to shrink the city's swollen inventory...
http://www.lostmag.com/issue2/detroit.php"planned shrinkage"
In 1976, for instance, New York City began "thinking the unthinkable" when its top housing official, Roger Starr, urged all sensible Americans to get hip to the thought of "planned shrinkage." The city already had pockets of dwindling population — namely the South Bronx and Brooklyn's Brownsville neighborhood — and if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Public policy would accelerate that shrinkage, so that blighted areas could be scratched off the list of neighborhoods needing expensive city services. 42 No doubt about it, Starr said. "The stretches of empty blocks may then be knocked down, services can be stopped, subway stations closed, and the land left to lie fallow until a change in economic and demographic assumptions makes the land useful once again."
I remember reading about home demolitions in detroit 30 years ago.
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