Going Home

Not good enough

Leon Nolan, in front of his house on Dobel St.

Leon Nolan supports the rebirth of Fletcher Playground. He is happy to see kids he helped raise and their parents, old acquaintances and neighbors, once again becoming involved in the neighborhood. He likes seeing children once again playing in a well-kept playground near his house. He likes the thought of a revitalized Dobel Street.

After witnessing the neighborhood’s slow decline, though, witnessing years of the city of Detroit spreading federally-funded, city-owned blight here, he doesn’t see much hope for the future.

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Leon is a GM retiree who has lived on Dobel Street since 1975. When I asked his opinion of where the neighborhood is headed, he said it is “going to nothing” and that he is waiting for the city to buy his house so he can get out and start over.

I think Leon respects what Happy has started in the neighborhood, but Leon doesn’t seem to have much hope that Happy or I or anyone else can do anything to stop Detroit’s plans to expand City Airport’s safety zone, a plan to buy up most of the houses in this area and knock them down so the resulting field can be a safety buffer for the airport (for more details, see this related article on the state of the neighborhood).

I suspect that all he envisions in the future is more of the same – the city slowly using federal tax dollars to buy properties and then pretty much abandon them.

Interactive: Life in the shadow of City Airport

If you haven’t yet been to the neighborhood, you owe it to yourself to check out our online tour of the area (and not just because we worked hard to get it together) – you can see how much land the city owns and what land is empty, look at how that land is being taken care of, and watch as Edith Floyd, a resident and head of the local neighborhood watch, and Leon show and tell about life in the neighborhood.

Words alone can’t describe it. Whole blocks once lined with houses have returned to prairie, with only an occasional fire hydrant or an overgrown hint of a sidewalk serving as reminders that you are in Detroit.

There are people living here (around 400 people came to the first event held in the park), some in isolated houses in the middle of expanses of un-mowed grass, some in clusters of houses where they and their neighbors have not yet sold to the city. Some blocks are even in good enough shape that they offer a hint of what living here used to be like, and show that these people still care about their homes and take care of them.

A well-cared-for house on Dobel St.

But the signs of life are overwhelmed by the decay and neglect that surround them.

Residents say city services are inconsistent. Some have received tickets for not maintaining their property in the midst of city-owned land that is going to seed. Before we started asking why they weren’t on, the street lights here hadn’t been lit for years (and we haven’t yet heard what the problem was).

City-owned houses, or “tombs” as Happy calls them, sit all over the area in varying states of disrepair, addresses spray-painted on their sides, caroming back and forth between being boarded up and being opened again to anyone who wants to use them.

Most of these houses have been stripped of anything of value within weeks or even days of their tenants leaving. Some are filled with mattresses, discarded clothes and other evidence of people living in them even though residents face the occasional inconvenience of their doors being re-covered with plywood. Some are burned out hulks. Some are filled to the brim with trash and discarded furniture.

The city says it is about halfway done purchasing houses in the area and is speeding up the process of buying, and, to their credit, they have been knocking down houses more frequently. The airport’s director, Delbert Brown, says completing the acquisitions is a high priority of his department and that “we’ve made a lot of progress.”

But when asked, Brown declined to give a timetable for completing the project, and a drive around the neighborhood makes one wonder about Mr. Brown’s definition of progress.

A city-owned house in the neighborhood, vacated in mid-September.

The city’s broken, stripped, burnt-out houses and unkempt fields in this neighborhood show a disregard for the people who live here, and though the city says it is speeding up its process, the number of years it has taken to get to halfway (the proposal for the take was initially presented to Detroit City Council on October 9, 1991, and slated to take 18 months) and the lack of a clear plan and a firm timeline make the chances of this project getting done any time soon pretty slim.

The city has financial limitations it must work within. It shouldn’t, however, be allowed to use them as an excuse to force residents who choose to remain here to live in the ruins of a once-vital neighborhood, and it shouldn’t be allowed to use them as an excuse to indefinitely put the lives of these people and the future of their neighborhood on hold.

The residents of this neighborhood deserve better.

It isn’t good enough to talk of progress, and of speeding up a process that has no end date and that can’t be put in the perspective of a broader plan.

As far as we know, the city has no concrete plans for the airport and no real idea of when it can finish the acquisition of the homes it needs for its buffer zone.

The people living here now deserve a clear reckoning of the city’s plan for the area and a timetable for acquisitions so they can start to look to the future. And those of us who care about the area and have begun investing in its future expect the city to stop talking about speeding things up and “progress” and lay out concrete plans for the future.

Detroit owes the people who live here an explanation of why the city is ruining this neighborhood, what specifically they are trying to do here, and when they plan to do it.

These residents deserve better from their government, and deserve to know why the city has treated them as it has.

And we all should expect better from Detroit.

Comments, Pingbacks:

Comment from: cantoniceblue [Member]

i have wonder the same thing,i live close to your area.you are so right.i have drove around the area it
is terrible at one time our area was the worse but after seen what the city has allowed to happen in that
area it is outrage their should be something the people can do. the city allowed the area to become the
way it is .by keeping city service from them and that a shame those folk are tax payer to i bet the city didn't turn down their taxis. i know the citizen in detroit don't control the city anymore but their should
be some kind of action they can take.if illegal immigrate can sue the federal government surly their is a
way for these citizen.someone should be accountable for what has happen in the area.also where i live
to. we have new house in our area but the catch is they are all for rent. why they are not for sale i don't know.except someone is making a lot of money and not giving anything back to the community!!
cantoniceblue'''

Permalink 12/16/07 @ 17:52

Comment from: rz0bwr [Member]

What is the plan for Detroit???? Ugh, if you read all these columns from Mike Happy and what is going on around the city airport and Doebel street it seems pretty clear to me there isnt any plan....my old neighborhood of Harper and Van Dyke is as desolated and burned out as any place in Iraq.....what would be the purpose I suppose to try and resurrect a "corpse".....tearing down old rotted, abandoned homes is fine but if nothing replaces them where is the gain....check out my old street of Carrie and Helan St. from Miller to Georgia and beyond.....flattened years ago and now there is just a vacant field.....King Kwame and other mayors of Detroit want the development in the downtown area....that seems to be the mecca for them and the big business people...the Illitches, Fords and all the other high rollers have no interest in 6 mile and Livernois, or Doebel......if the truth would be known I think the politicians in Detroit gave up long ago on the prospect of saving the city and keeping people from moving out...as the citizens have left the schools have closed and closed and closed and the old neighborhoods just sit there rotting from lack of development.
The Detroit city council does nothing but argue with each other and throw insults....how do you get progress with that???? Complicating matters is that the federal government knows the most all of the major cities in America are shot and they dont want to waste a ton of money on saving them. _Philadelphia, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Newark, New Orleans and many others have had pockets of desolation for many years....even today do you see how much misery there still is in New Orleans 3 years after the hurricane....people have been forclosed on by the mega thousands and many thousands of others are living in tents and lean tos........such is the state of american cities today....complicating matters is the fact that the high rolling politicians do not live in big cities, they are well ensconced in rich suburbs...they just dont care about cities all that much. Is there hope? Well, I guess if you are marooned on an island you have hope for rescue.....bottom line is that the people in a neighborhood must make the changes themselves and do what Mike Happy did, get the lawnmowers and rakes out to the fields and do the work yourself. You may be much better off in the long run if you dont expect the city of Detroit to help you.
It is probably help that is never coming.......Mike Brachakowski*********

Permalink 12/16/07 @ 19:00

Comment from: Jim Morey(Kustarz) [Member]

Id say we have plenty of fuel for a class action law suit, a capable and willing attorney would probably get the city moving.

Permalink 12/16/07 @ 21:48

Comment from: leeharding [Member]

Thanks for the Interactive video: Life in the Shadow of City Airport. You have been an integral part of the effort to refurbish Fletcher Playfield even though you did not grow up in the neighborhood. We all thank you for your efforts and we are all better off for having you on our side.

Permalink 12/18/07 @ 12:40

Comment from: debras [Member]

Hello all. This is a great blog. While I didn't live in the same neighborhood as most of you, I had similar experiences. My neighbor, Gary Bonior, went to Holy Name in the early seventies. I grew up around Nevada and Sherwood (6 1/2 mile east of Van Dyke). Most of my older relatives are buried in Forest Lawn cemetery (German Lutheran) south of Six Mile on Van Dyke. I left the city about thirty years ago and finally got my parents out in the late 80's. I have great memories of our area as a kid...Silverstein's...remember the tank at the entrance? My first job (hamburger flipper) was at the Snack Shack on Six and Sherwood. I walked the half-mile to work at 4:30 AM on Saturdays. Unthinkable nowadays (not only walking, but getting up that early as a teenager!)Riding bikes through Mt. Olivet on Sundays was great as we watched planes take-off and land. I had a transistor radio that could pick up the radio communications between the tower and aircraft. Remember the red and white DC-3s from Wright Airlines? Before GPS, the check-off point on approach to landing was a visual sighting of the Bel-Air drive-in on 8 Mile. When we heard the pilot radio in that he was over the drive-in, we would strain our necks to see who could see the plane first in the distant sky. I digress, but a flood of memories pour back from what was a great neighborhood. I live in Traverse City now and on my few trips back to Detroit since I moved here, I have driven my kids through the old hood....they sit in disbelief, eyes wide open. I do too! What a shame...it is a very sickening feeling. One last thing...remember the siren from the firehall on Mt. Elliot on the first Saturday of the month?
Regards,
Dave

Permalink 12/18/07 @ 13:08

Comment from: Jim Morey(Kustarz) [Member]

Lee do you rememberGary Bonier? he was in our classes for at least a few years

Permalink 12/19/07 @ 00:32

Comment from: dennis [Member]

oh my gosh, bob zona, man, i remember you(sure you dont remember me cause i was younger then you not much)tim warnack, julian dombroski(dont know if its spelled right) you guys all used to sit over by harry's store on almont, i think tom kubiak used to be there with you, boy i was so suprised to see your name, i graduated in 68 from holy name, donna stambolia lived on almont, i also rememeber me & my friends used to be a little scared to walk by or go into harry's when you guys were all sitting in that little corner, funny thing one of us had a crush on you.
good luck to you up north & farming.
DEBRAS, my cousins the furmans, steve, tom, paula & maryjane lived over on buhr i wonder if you knew them. we remember going to silverstein's, we just talked about that not to long ago, remember going to the drive in on 8 mile, getting into our pj's then going with our parents, those were the good old days
HAPPY HOLIDAYS TO ALL

Permalink 12/19/07 @ 07:09

Comment from: leeharding [Member]

Yes, Jim, I remember Gary Bonior. In fact, I remember most of the kids from our class.

Permalink 12/19/07 @ 16:47

Comment from: wick [Member]

Oh my gosh, Tim Warnack, Julian Dombrowski goodness. I remember when they formed the group " The Huns" and clashed with "Lyle Gibson" and his group in the "fat alley". In the day that was considered gang banging although it was nothing more than a shoving match. And yes Silversteins and the tank. I worked at the gas station for awhile on six mile just a short way. To think of Roje ripping all those people off while checking their oil. Good olde Harry' meat market. I remember when I finally reached age to legally buy beer and he still refused to sell to me so I had to go down to Dubay to Mutts? Bob Zona, great scott it can't be true? Man it was like yesterday.

Permalink 12/27/07 @ 13:18