Duggan in 100 Days

In an exclusive interview, Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan sat down in his office with Michigan Chronicle editor Bankole Thompson to review his first 100 days in office and what to expect in post-bankruptcy. Following are excerpts.

MICHIGAN CHRONICLE: What is the strategy behind the blight initiative in light of the area you selected near Marygrove College?

MIKE DUGGAN: We have a lot of strategy. The Marygrove area was picked with others that are similar because the houses are beautiful, brick buildings. Before the recent foreclosure crisis this was a great neighborhood. So we were looking to find a neighborhood where the housing stock was still fundamentally sound and that we could save it. And so we picked out an area where we are going to have to knock down some of the houses. We think the vast majority can be saved by us suing and selling them on the Internet, whether they are saved by people signing consent agreements and fixing them up.

MC: What has the response been so far?

MD: We posted 79 houses. I know the owners of 25 houses have contacted us. Many of those 25 will sign consent agreements and avoid a lawsuit. I know we filed the first 25 lawsuits on Thursday (last week) and we will be filing the balance (this week) and then we are going to work through this process.

MC: What role do you see anchor institutions like Marygrove College and University of Detroit-Mercy playing in this blight initiative?

MD: The president of Marygrove, David Fike, came out to the announcement. We are talking to him about potentially providing some incentives to their employees. But even if they don’t, he’s actively promoting it on the campus for their faculty, their employees and potentially some of their students. UD-Mercy I understand has a program similar to Live Midtown to encourage their employees to live in the area. We are going to see who the buyers are. Of course, the key is we are talking to the neighbors and churches in the area. We’ve also taken houses we already owned and we’ve auctioned those starting May 5 in the East English Village area. So we are going to determine whether there is in fact a market for vacant buildings and solid neighborhoods in the city. Obviously we think there is.

The fact that 2,500 people have registered and given us their credit cards, we think it is an important thing. We lined up six buses to take people to come see the open houses we are running (April 27) in the East English Village neighborhood that day because the demand for those houses is going to be so high. Assuming the East English Village houses do go quickly as the area where we file suit on the private owners. What we are doing now in East English Village is selling the city owned properties.

Once we are through with those we are going to start the lawsuits, and then we will start to sell the privately owned properties. Again I prefer not to take property. I prefer they sign a consent agreement and fix it up themselves. So my hope is that once we sell the first twelve in East English Village the rest of the neighborhoods, most people will sign consent agreements and fix them up and get them occupied.

MC: What about demolition?

MD: We are dramatically speeding up demolition on houses that can be sold. You saw the vote from city council last week to move 16,000 vacant buildings over to the Land Bank, and you are going to see a speed which you haven’t seen before. You are going to see us attack it with multiple strategies. You have a lot of burned down houses. We are just going to knock them down. We are also going to start to let some bid from deconstruction firms. We want to see if we can pay people to deconstruct houses and recycle materials in a way that is time and cost competitive. So sometime in May you are going to see the first bid.

Bidders are going to be measured not just on price but also the percentage of materials they end up presenting to Detroiters. So we are hoping we can build a deconstruction industry in this town where you take a lot of the old abandoned stores, windows and end up in a central warehouse where we deconstruct and supply the warehouse. When we sell these buildings to people they have a central place they can go to potentially buy materials in a cost effective way to rehab houses. And if we could get that to happen you could see us fundamentally change the direction of the neighborhood.

MC: Under former mayor Dave Bing there was a plan to get police officers to live in the city. Is that something you would consider?

MD: I’m working really hard on an incentive for city employees. I think I’m close to a deal with a bank on a significant incentive. That’s the kind of thing that we are doing now. Now that we’ve gotten away from nine different agencies dealing with blight to a single Land Bank, now we could lay all those strategies into this. At what point do we start selling properties around churches to a church? At what point do we provide incentives for Detroit employees to buy them? Those are all things you are going to see in the coming months when we figure out what the strategy is going to be. First I’ve got to prove that there is a market for these houses.

MC: In your State of the City address you rolled out district managers. What specifically is their role?

MD: District managers have one job, that is to fight blight. They are not neighborhood city halls. Their job is to fight blight and that’s what they will be measured on. When it comes to issues like Marygrove, their job is to generate as many buyers as possible out of the local neighborhoods. Because there have been a lot of houses in this city that have been bought by people who are renting them, and Detroit is moving faster from a traditional homeowner community to a rental community. We want to reverse that. So one of their charges is to partner with local neighborhood groups to generate buyers. They are also working on Motor City makeover. Anytime a group wants to clean up they are figuring out how to get the dumpsters, the garbage bags. They essentially become the troubleshooters for all blight issues.

MC: You gave yourself a deadline in your State of the City speech to get things done. Are you still sticking to that deadline?

MD: I said in six months, I think that our team (worked hard in the winter), the streetlights are being installed at the rate of 600 a week with these LED lights, I think the public is seeing that a step at a time we are making city government work. I think there is a sense that the property values in this city are going to improve and that you don’t want to sell too soon because the person who buys it will get the benefit of that.

MC: What do you foresee in a post-bankruptcy Detroit?

MD: I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing. It will be a lot easy to do once the emergency manager is gone.

MC: What would significantly change for you?

MD: I will be responsible for a public safety strategy that I think would be more comprehensive than what we have today.

MC: Do you think the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department is under-utlilized?

MD: I think we need to put the full force of city government behind the water department.

MC: What are options in post-bankruptcy in light of Gov. Rick Snyder indicating he’ll use a New York model to put in place a board over the city?

MD: It’s all in the details. In 1987 when we passed the bailout package for Wayne County there was an oversight board. Had we run deficit they had the right to step in. That was fair. We never ran deficits. If that’s the kind of structure, I’m very comfortable with that. Those are the conversations we are having now.

MC: Whose idea was it for you and the council president Brenda Jones to issue joint press releases?

MD: I would say 60 percent is the council president and 40 percent mine. But you have a different dynamic. You have seven council members, most with less prominent names who were elected knocking doors. We are keenly aware that we have to deal with the abandoned buildings, streetlights so we have a strong alignment, and then you’ve got an extraordinary president in Brenda Jones.