Urban Blight Gets a Paint Job

  • One of the abandoned houses that a group of artists has covered in "Tiggerific Orange" paint to get the attention of city officials in Detroit. (Photo courtesy of the artists... who wish to remain anonymous)

Football fans are gearing up for the bright lights and glitz of this year’s Superbowl in Detroit. One event that won’t make the halftime show is a tour of the city’s dilapidated and abandoned buildings. They’re everywhere. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Jennifer Guerra reports on a group of artists sneaking around late at night hoping to draw attention to the urban decay:

Transcript

Football fans are gearing up for the bright lights and glitz of this year’s Superbowl in Detroit.
One event that won’t make the halftime show is a tour of the city’s dilapidated and abandoned
buildings. They’re everywhere. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Jennifer Guerra reports on
a group of artists sneaking around late at night hoping to draw attention to the urban decay:


When you drive around Detroit, you can’t help but notice the abandoned buildings. Houses with
caved in roofs and charred out insides line the streets. I met up with Christian, an artist who’s
been living in Detroit for the past 15 years. He says when people from the suburbs drive into
Detroit… they don’t see a city so much as a burnt out chasm, and that’s not the kind of symbol
he wants associated with his hometown.


“I just think that the symbol of a burnt out abandoned house is a horrible symbol to grow up
around for the kids in the city. Some people have to look at beaches and mountains, these people
have to live with this sort of symbol of defeat. You almost feel like a social responsibility to do
something about it, you know.”


So Christian, along with his friends Jacques, Greg and Mike grabbed some smocks, a bunch
of rollers, and gallons of orange paint, but not just any orange paint… this is the shockingly
bright, stop-you-in-your-tracks kind of orange paint that you can’t help but notice… it’s called
Tiggerific Orange. And with that, the artists headed out in the middle of the night to paint their
first abandoned house. It should be noted here that what the guys are doing – trespassing and
vandalizing property – is illegal. So they’ve asked that their last names not be used…


Around 3 a.m. – while painting their first house – Christian noticed that they had some
company… the police:


“Well I was outside and they came by and he said ‘what are you doing?’ And I said we’re painting
the house. And he said ‘why?’ And I said because it needs a paint job, and he said ‘Have at it
bro!’… and he drove away… and it was like all right, cool!”


From there the guys went on to paint eight more houses around the area. They’re very choosy
about which houses to paint. The structures have to be residential and clearly abandoned. Also,
they have to be in a high traffic area.


(sound of cars driving by)


Mike – one of the painters – took me to a side street above two freeways. There, the artists had
recently slathered Tiggerific Orange paint on six abandoned houses clustered together.


“You wanna go closer? Just watch your step…”


From pretty much every angle along the freeways you can see all six houses. Each has fallen
victim to arson. Tires, wood planks and garbage cover what was once somebody’s front yard.
Even some of the debris is splashed with orange paint.


“There’s part of the floor that is fallen and is now perpendicular to the ground…so we painted
the underside of that floor…”


Through the windows you can see dirty, old-looking stuffed animals litter the floor. Mike says he
sees that kind of stuff left behind all the time.


“Families used to live in these buildings and now the buildings are not worth enough to tear it
down, the property’s not worth enough to bulldoze, and that’s not a judgment on the city or anything. I wish
it was worth someone’s time to bulldoze. If I had the resources to do that I guess I would, but all
I can do is spend a couple hundred bucks on paint.”


Mike would need a lot more than a couple hundred bucks to bulldoze those houses. Amru Meah
– the Director of Detroit’s Building and Safety Engineering Department – estimates the average
demolition cost for a residential building to be somewhere around 5500 dollars.


“No city could actually effectively demolish every building that became an eyesore or in bad
shape because you could actually have a situation where you gotta whole bunch of buildings… so
you’d run around and try to demolish two, three, four thousand buildings a year. That’s not
realistic.”


But the Tiggerific Orange paint is working. Of the nine houses painted so far, two have been torn
down, and according to Jacques – one of the guys with the orange paint – putting pressure on
city officials and creating awareness are huge motivators.


“People will drive by the houses on the highways and they’ll kind of catch a glimpse of it, but
they’re on the highway so they just drive right by. So the next time they go down the highway
they might remember, ‘oh my god, I want to look for that orange house!’ And so as they’re
looking for the orange house, they’re looking for all the other houses in turn. What that does is
that that raises sort of an awareness of what’s going on, and as we’ve already seen as two houses
have been destroyed: awareness brings action.”


But, as Jacques points out, four guys can only paint so many houses on their own:


“One of the beautiful things about the project is that it’s such a simple move. All we’re doing is
taking a roller, taking a paintbrush and painting the façade of a house orange, and it’s already
had so many ramifications. So, you know actually we would encourage anyone out there who feels the desire
to do it to just go pick up a roller and paint a house.”


But keep in mind… just because the police let the orange painters off the hook the first time…
doesn’t mean they’ll be so lucky in the future.


For the GLRC, I’m Jennifer Guerra.

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RACE’S ROLE IN URBAN SPRAWL (Part I)

  • Urban sprawl sometimes conjures up images of subdivisions sprouting up in cornfields. But land use experts say the term should also include a focus on the central cities that are left behind. (Photo by Lester Graham)

Experts seldom talk about one of the driving forces behind urban sprawl. White flight began the exodus of whites from city centers, and racial segregation is still a factor in perpetuating sprawl. In the first of a two-part series, the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports on the issue that’s often overlooked:

Transcript

Experts seldom talk about one of the driving forces behind urban sprawl. White
flight began the
exodus of whites from city centers, and racial segregation is still a factor in
perpetuating sprawl.
In the first of a two-part series, the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports on the issue that’s often
overlooked:


Land use advocates argue that urban sprawl and deteriorating inner cities are two
sides of the
same coin. The tax money that pays for new roads and sewer systems for sprawl and the
investments that pay for new strip malls is money that’s spent at the expense of
city centers
because it’s not invested there.


For the most part, all of that investment is made in communities that are
overwhelmingly white.
Those left behind in the cities are often people of color who are struggling with
high taxes to pay
for the deteriorating infrastructure and government services designed for
populations much larger
than are left today.


White flight was aided by government and business institutions. Government home
loans for
veterans of World War II that made those nice subdivisions possible didn’t seem to
make it into
the hands of black veterans. Banks often followed a practice of redlining. And
real estate
brokers also worked to make sure the races remained segregated.


Reynolds Farley is a research professor at the University of Michigan’s Population
Studies
Center. Farley says today, when planners and government officials talk about white
flight and
segregation, they talk in the past tense. They don’t like to acknowledge that
racism like that
still exists…


“Well, I think there is a lot of effort to underestimate the continued importance of
racial
discrimination and the importance of race in choosing a place to live. There’s been
a modest
decrease in segregation in the last 20 years. Nevertheless, it would be a serious
mistake to
overlook the importance of race in the future of the older cities of the Northeast
and Midwest.”


Farley says as recently as two years ago a federal government study looked at real
estate
marketing practices and found there were still “code phrases” that indicated whether
neighborhoods were white or black.


“Subtle words would clearly convey to white customers the possibility that there are
blacks
living there, the schools aren’t in good quality. And the subtle words could convey
to blacks
that they wouldn’t be welcomed in living in a white neighborhood.”


In the North… racism has evolved from overt to covert. It’s a wariness between
the races not talked about in polite society. It becomes more evident as solidly
middle-class blacks begin to move into older suburbs and whites flee once again to
newer
subdivisions even farther from the city core.


Land Use and ‘Smart Growth’ advocates say it’s time to face up to the continuing
practice of
segregation. Charlene Crowell is with the Michigan Land Use Institute. She says it
starts by
talking about the fears between white people and black people.


“By not addressing those fears, the isolation and the separation has grown. So,
until we are able
to talk and communicate candidly, then we’ll continue to have our problems.”


But it’s uncomfortable for most people to talk about race with people of another
race. Often we
don’t talk frankly. Crowell says we’ll be forced to deal with our feelings about
race sooner or
later. That’s because as more African-Americans join the middle-class, the suburbs
are no longer
exclusively white…


“My hope is that those who feel comfortable in moving further and further away from
the urban
core will come to understand that they cannot run, that there are in fact black
homeowners who
are in the suburbs and moving into the McMansions just as many whites are. And we
all have to
look at each other. And we all have to understand that this is one country and we
are one
people.”


In cities such as Detroit, white flight led to rampant urban sprawl in the
surrounding areas
and left huge pockets of poverty and streets of abandoned houses in the inner city.
Heaster
Wheeler is the Executive Director of the Detroit chapter of the NAACP. He says
while his
constituents often worry about more pressing urban issues, he knows that it’s
important that
African-Americans living in the city recognize farmland preservation and urban
revitalization
are connected. The investment that paves over a corn field is investment that’s not
going to
rebuild the city. But… black politicians largely have not been
involved in land use issues and usually they’re not asked to get involved…


“There is a racial divide on this particular issue. Often times African-Americans,
people of color and folk who live in the urban centers are not present at the
discussions about
Smart Growth.”


Wheeler says policymakers on both sides of the racial divide need to recognize that
land use
issues are as much about abandoned city centers as they are about disappearing
farmland…
which could put urban legislators and rural legislators on the same team. That’s a
coalition
that could carry a lot of sway in many states.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.

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IS IT SPRAWL? OR URBAN ABANDONMENT? (Part II)

  • Urban sprawl doesn't just alter the land in the suburbs. Central cities are affected by the loss of investment when people leave the cities and tax dollars are instead invested in building roads and sewers in the surrounding areas. (Photo by Lester Graham)

Concern about urban sprawl is often limited to the loss of farmland, traffic congestion, and unattractive development. But urban sprawl has other impacts. Building the roads and sewers to serve new subdivisions uses state and federal tax money, often at the expense of the large cities that are losing population to the suburbs. In the second of a two-part series, the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham looks at the divide between city and suburb:

Transcript

Concern about urban sprawl is often limited to the loss of farmland, traffic
congestion, and unattractive development. But urban sprawl has other impacts.
Building the roads and sewers to serve new subdivisions uses state and federal tax
money, often at the expense of the large cities that are losing population to the
suburbs. In the second of a two-part series, the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham
looks at the divide between city and suburb:


What some people call urban sprawl got started as the federal government’s answer to
a severe housing shortage. There wasn’t a lot of building going
on during the Great Depression. At the end of World War II, returning GIs needed
houses.


Reynolds Farley is a research professor at the University of Michigan’s Population
Studies Center. Farley says the federal government offered veterans low-interest
loans and developers started building modest homes on green lawns on the edge of
cities. But because of discrimination, the loans didn’t as often make it into the
hands of African-American veterans. Instead of segregated neighborhoods in the
city, segregation lines were newly drawn between city and
suburb.


“Very low-cost mortgages accelerated the movement of whites from the central city
out to the suburbs… built upon the long racial animosity that characterized cities
beginning at the time of the first World War and continuing, perhaps up to the
present.”


With segregation, there was a shift of wealth. Farley says jobs and purchasing
power were exported to the suburbs with the help of the interstate highway system.
And big new shopping centers displaced retail in downtowns.


People with low-incomes, often people of color, were left behind in cities of
abandoned houses and vacant storefronts that often didn’t have enough tax base to
maintain roads and services.


John Powell is a professor at Ohio State University. He’s written extensively on
urban sprawl and its effects on urban centers.


“So, we move jobs away, we move tax base away, we move good schools away and then
the city becomes really desperate and they’re trying to fix the problems, but all
the resources have been moved away.”


With no way found to fix the cities, whites have been moving out of cities to the
suburbs for decades. And now, middle-class blacks are moving out too. For some
metropolitan areas, leaving the city has become a
matter of income… although Powell says even then African-Americans have a more
difficult time finding a way out.


“Race never drops out of the equation. In reality, even middle-class blacks don’t
have the same mobility to move to opportunity that even working-class whites do
because of the way race works in our society.”


So, segregation continues. But now the line is drawn between middle-class blacks in
the older, inner-ring suburbs, whites in the outer-ring suburbs… and for the most
part in cities such as Detroit, poorer blacks left behind in the central city.


Smarth Growth advocates say part of the answer to urban sprawl is finding a way to
get more money back into the central-cities to make them more attractive to
everyone. That’s worked in cities such as Portland, Oregon and Minneapolis-St.
Paul. But those cities and their suburbs are predominantly white. For Northern
cities with greater racial divides, cities such as Cleveland, Pittsburgh, St.
Louis and Detroit it’s different. A lot of white suburbanites don’t want tax
dollars going to blacks in the city. And African-Americans in the city don’t see
urban sprawl as their issue, so ideas such as tax revenue sharing for a metropolitan
region are not a priority. The issue of regional tax equity that
works in predominantly white regions… becomes muddied by racial animosity in
segregated regions.


“Buzz’ Thomas is state senator in Michigan who has taken on the issue of urban
sprawl and its counterpart, the deterioration of city centers. Senator Thomas says
if state legislatures can’t find an answer to help cities, sprawl in the suburbs
will continue, paving over green space and farmland.


“You know, poverty and jobs and access to health care and access to quality
education are very realistic issues for cities like Detroit. But, a reality is they
go hand-in-hand with sprawl. As your black middle-class moves out of the inner city
because they’re not satisfied with those resolution to those issues. You know, it
links sprawl.”


Senator Thomas says legislators from rural areas and from urban areas are beginning
to realize they have a common issue. But before they can get to discussions of
regional tax equity, they first have to talk about the more difficult issue of
race…


“And have a discussion that might make me uncomfortable, that might make those
that I discuss it with uncomfortable. Only then, I think, can we really adequately
figure out how long it’s going to take us to resolve that issue.”


In the meantime, many cities are still losing population and revenue. Suburbs
continue to sprawl. And farms are becoming subdivisions, retail strip malls and
fast food restaurants.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.

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