Fights Over Parkland

  • Ken Cheyne says trash piles like this one are evidence that the city of Detroit has abandoned Eliza Howell Park. (Photo by Sarah Hulett)

Have you ever given someone a
gift, only to have that person
break it, mistreat it, or take
it for granted? Well, the grandson
of a man who gave a big chunk
of land for a city park says
that’s exactly what’s happened
to his family’s gift. So he’s
going to court to get the land
back. Sarah Hulett has this story about the dispute –
which highlights a problem facing
many cities:

Transcript

Have you ever given someone a
gift, only to have that person
break it, mistreat it, or take
it for granted? Well, the grandson
of a man who gave a big chunk
of land for a city park says
that’s exactly what’s happened
to his family’s gift. So he’s
going to court to get the land
back. Sarah Hulett has this story about the dispute –
which highlights a problem facing
many cities:

Eliza Howell Park is an oasis from the blight, traffic, and hard-knocks neighborhoods that surround it. At almost 140 acres, it’s one of Detroit’s biggest parks. It has woods, and trails, and a pair of rivers that come together at the south end.

But it’s also got some problems.

“Those little red posts, that’s actually a picnic table. It’s all gone, people have stolen, broken everything. All the sewer grates in the park have been stolen. They maintain nothing.”

That’s Ken Cheyne. It’s his grandfather who deeded this park to the city more than 70 years ago, with the requirement that it be used “for park and recreation purposes.” Now, he says, the city has virtually abandoned it.

“There’s been burned out cars in here. On the south end there was a boat for over two years. Just this old, awful, derelict, broken boat.”

The city has also barricaded the park’s entrances at times. Cheyne says that also signals abandonment. But it’s open to traffic today. As Cheyne drives around the park, he’s got to steer around huge potholes in washed-out parts of the road. People have dumped trash in the park. And the grass is waist-high.

Cheyne says all this adds up to neglect. So he’s asking a judge to give the land back to the family. And Cheyne, who’s a developer, says, if that happens, he wants to build new retail stores on the land. He also says he’ll keep part of it a park that the public can use. But he says he’ll pay to have it maintained so it’s much more attractive than it is now.

“It’s a land grab.”

That’s Larry Quarles. He’s the head of a group formed to help fight Cheyne’s effort.

“It’s pure and simple. If the land goes back to him, he’s going to develop it and this park is gone forever. Kids from now on will never have a chance to play in this park. It’s the wrong thing to do just because this city has fallen on hard times.”

And Detroit is not the only city struggling to keep up its obligations when it comes to maintaining parks and vacant land.

“It’s happening all over.”

Robin Boyle is a professor of urban planning at Wayne State University.

“Many of these cities are facing similar problems. Nothing quite to the scale of Detroit. The story of what’s happening in places like Flint in Michigan, or Youngstown in Ohio – and these are just the poster children for this challenge.”

Last summer, the mayor of Toledo, Ohio asked residents to bring their lawnmowers to city parks, and spent several Saturdays cutting park lawns himself.

A recent audit of Milwaukee County’s park system suggests selling some parkland to help deal with a maintenance backlog.

And just two years ago, Detroit’s former mayor pitched a failed plan to sell 92 city parks to help close a budget deficit.

Detroit’s attorneys are trying to hold onto Eliza Howell Park. They say even if a park is barricaded to vehicles, or the grass isn’t mowed, it’s still a park.

George Bezenar agrees. He comes to the park with his dogs several times a week.

“Just because the lawn isn’t mowed all the time, that doesn’t matter to me because, to me, it represents more like a natural preserve, where you see birds, you see deer, you see fox. You see everything here.”

Including things you’d rather not see in nature, like bags of garbage, and rusted playground equipment.

Neighbors like Bezenar say they hope Detroit will someday have the money to properly maintain this park.

A judge is expected to decide this spring whether the city gets to keep the parkland.

For The Environment Report, I’m Sarah Hulett.

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Bike Shop in a Box

  • A mechanic works on the bikes to make them as compact as possible - removing pedals, kickstands, and turning the handlebars (Photo by Karen Kelly)

So many of us have an old bike collecting
dust in the garage. More often than not,
they end up in the garbage. But, as Karen
Kelly reports, one group has found a unique
way to recycle them:

Transcript

So many of us have an old bike collecting
dust in the garage. More often than not,
they end up in the garbage. But, as Karen
Kelly reports, one group has found a unique
way to recycle them:

(sound of banging)

“That’s a sweet ride!”

A volunteer drops a bike into a pile at the back of a huge shipping container in Ottawa, Canada.
The bikes are stacked one on top of the other.

(sound of tools)

Just outside, a mechanic is stripping the bikes down to make them as compact as possible.

“If it has a kickstand, we have to remove it. We take the pedals off and turn the handlebars.”

In a few hours, this cargo container will be jammed with hundreds of donated bicycles, bike parts, and backpacks.

The gear is collected by a group called Bicycles for Humanity.
They have 20 chapters, most of them in North America.

Each chapter raises a couple of thousand dollars to buy a shipping container.
They pack it full of donated gear, and send it off to a community in Namibia, Africa. The shipping cost – another several thousand dollars – is also raised by the group.

A volunteer group there turns the container itself into a locally-run bike shop that provides jobs and transportation.

Some of the bikes are donated to health care workers who use them to pull patients on a stretcher.

Others are piled high with stacks of food and household items that defy gravity.

Martin Sullivan points to some of the pictures on display.

“These are the bakers who are able to sell their bread. And also wood, you can stack wood. It’s just amazing what they do, how they make use of these bikes that we take for granted. We throw them out, and they can do so much with them.”

(sound of traffic)

In Namibia, cars – and even bicycles – are scarce. Sullivan says these bikes make life easier for people who are used to walking miles to get to school, work, or to find the basic necessities.

Seb Oran is the co-founder of Bicycles for Humanity in Ottawa.

This is the fourth container of bikes that she’s sent to Africa.
Each one supports a local community group.
Sometimes its a hospital, sometimes an orphanage, sometimes a women’s empowerment group.
She remembers one run by former prostitutes.

“Six of them became bicycle mechanics now. And now, they don’t have to sell their bodies to put food on their plate.”

But there are some challenges.

Michael Linke runs the Bicycle Empowerment Network.
He helps the Nambians set up the bicycle shops.

“Because this is the first time a lot of these people have had formal ongoing work, it’s often difficult to get people to understand a long-term ongoing business.”

But with some mentoring, they’ve been able to make it work.
There are now 13 successful projects, with more containers filled with bikes on the way.

The group estimates that these bikes will last another 20 or 30 years in Africa. They might be junk to us, but in Namibia, they’re a precious resource.

For The Environment Report, I’m Karen Kelly.

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Hard Times and Heating Homes

  • 31% of low-income people said they kept their home so cold it felt unsafe. 20% said they had their electricity or gas shut off for some amount of time. (Photo by Gerald Downing, courtesy of FEMA)

Now that the price of oil has
dropped, the cost of heating your home
won’t be as high as experts were predicting
this summer. But millions of Americans
are still struggling to pay their heating
bills. Rebecca Williams reports in some
rare cases having your heat shut off can
mean being evicted from your home. And,
in the worst case, it can even mean losing
your children:

Transcript

Now that the price of oil has
dropped, the cost of heating your home
won’t be as high as experts were predicting
this summer. But millions of Americans
are still struggling to pay their heating
bills. Rebecca Williams reports in some
rare cases having your heat shut off can
mean being evicted from your home. And,
in the worst case, it can even mean losing
your children:

Demetria Salinas has three kids. Money is tight and she’s worried about
getting through the winter.

“I’m kinda nervous because I mean what if we don’t have enough to pay the
bills, then what do we do?”

She says she tries to save on heat by putting extra sweaters on her kids, and
turning the furnace off.

“Put the gas on for a little bit and turn it off, and when it gets a little bit
colder, put it back on. But it does definitely mean layering up, even in the
house.”

She says that’s hard on her kids.

Many parents are in these impossible situations. The National Energy
Assistance Director’s Association has found low-income people often have
to choose between paying their heating bills and feeding their kids.

31% said they kept their home so cold it felt unsafe. 20% of low income
people said they had their electricity or gas shut off for some amount of
time.

Phil Thompson works for Capital Area Community Services in Lansing,
Michigan. His agency helps people pay their bills and talks with utility
companies to buy people more time. He says usually utilities won’t shut
heat off in the coldest days of winter.

“Most utility companies are sympathetic to the situation of not having heat
in the wintertime. There’s always those horror stories of a senior or
handicapped individual who froze because their utility was turned off.
They’re going to do everything they can to keep that from happening.”

But Thompson says he sees a lot of people get their heat shut off in the
spring, and it can still get cold then.

Now, in some states, if the heat is shut off – even for just a little while – you
can be evicted.

“In some cases where there’s small children it’s very possible that Child
Protective Services would get involved and possibly remove the kids from
the household when there’s no utilities.”

That’s right – the state can take kids away if the utilities are shut off.

We talked with foster care workers in several states, and they all said that
this is rare. They said they do everything they can to keep families together,
and they can sometimes help pay heating bills. But they also said a home
with no heat is often a sign that something else is wrong.

Andrea Yocum is an investigator with Child Protective Services north of
Detroit.

“Typically there’s other reasons why they’re removed for example, if the
family’s just not willing to pay their bills because they’re using the money
for other things like drugs or alcohol.”

But Yocum says sometimes it’s just not the family’s fault.

“I have had families that were evicted as a result of their landlord not paying
their bills, and utilities turned off the same because the landlord’s not taking
care of what’s happening within the home.”

If families are evicted, it can be temporary, maybe just a couple days until
the heat’s back on. But for families living in poverty, having the heat turned
off again can happen as soon as the next bill is late.

There is some good news this year. There’s federal money that states use to
help people pay their heating bills. Because fuel prices were expected to go
up, Congress doubled that pot of money this year. Most states are reporting
they’re in a better position to help people now.

But winter is just beginning and they’re already getting a lot more people
asking for help with their heating bills than in the past.

For The Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

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Searching for E-Waste Solutions

  • Many people do not know what to do with old computers and equipment, so they end up in the trash.

If you bought a new computer over the holidays, there are plenty of places to drop off your household’s old computer. But to prevent more of the old monitors, laptops and other items from winding up in landfills, some Midwest states are looking to make sure computer makers get involved in recycling their products. One of the few manufacturers that already helps re-use old computer parts is Texas-based Dell, Incorporated. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Chuck Quirmbach went to a Dell-sponsored recycling center and has this
report:

Transcript

If you bought a new computer over the holidays, there are plenty of
places to drop off your household’s old computer, but to prevent more
of the old monitors, laptops and other items from winding up in
landfills, some Midwest states are looking to make sure computer
makers get involved in recycling their products. One of the few
manufacturers that already helps re-use old computer parts is
Texas-based Dell, Incorporated. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s
Chuck Quirmbach went to a Dell-sponsored recycling center and has this
report:


About a year ago, Dell helped set up and publicize a computer
recycling plant at a Goodwill Industries facility in Dell’s home city
of Austin.


(Sound of clunking)


Goodwill employees and volunteers sort through the hundreds of
boxes of computers and computer parts that are dropped off – at no
charge to the consumer – at the site. Newer computers are set aside
for repairs, and hard drive memories are erased. Older computers go
to a bench where workers like Paul take apart (or demanufacture)
them.


“I’m taking apart all the useable parts. Motherboard, power sources,
cards, ports, metal goes into bins, plastic goes into bins for
recycling and what not.”


(Sound of ambience switch)


Goodwill sells the reusable parts at its retail store elsewhere in the
building. Used LCD monitors, for example, go for as low as twenty
dollars.


Manager Christine Banks says some of the equipment is under
a 30-day Goodwill warranty. Other parts can be exchanged if the
customer isn’t satisfied. Banks says Goodwill is happy this computer-
recycling program makes a profit.


“Our operation does. However, there are 7 or 8 other Goodwills
throughout the country that do this that barely break even. We’re just
fortunate we have higher tech donations, a pool of employees with
more technology, it’s very tricky.”


Some states charge high disposal costs for unwanted computer parts,
which can contain potentially harmful chemicals. Those high costs can
make it difficult for a recycling program to get off the ground, but
environmental groups say the fast-growing pile of circuit boards,
monitors, and plastic parts can leach poisons like lead, mercury, and
cadmium into the environment.


They say small-scale projects like the one in Austin have to be part of a
broader effort to keep electronic waste out of the nation’s landfills. That
effort could include government mandates forcing manufacturers to
safely dispose of old products.


Robin Schneider is with the Austin office of the National Computer
Takeback Campaign.


“So, to really deal with the environmental problems of millions of
pounds of toxins, we’re gonna need something bigger than this. This is a
piece of it…and gonna need lot of pieces of it.”


Schneider says she’s encouraged that some Midwest states are
looking into manufacturer takeback programs. She acknowledges that
recycling may drive up the cost of new computers, but she also says
manufacturers may start redesigning computers so that it’s more
profitable for the companies to take them back.


For the GLRC, I’m Chuck Quirmbach.

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