Rubble-rousers

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Rubble-rousing

Detroit has long struggled in vain to keep up with its abandoned buildings. There are more vacant homes and businesses than the city can afford to tear down, and so the structures sit empty, adding even more blight to already blighted neighborhoods and creating new hazards. 

That's not a news flash to anyone.

But here's something we haven't seen before: A building that has collapsed, its rubble spilling into the street, partially blocking it off. 

OK, maybe we have seen that. But what we haven't come across previously — even to those of us who were charter members of this paper's long-disbanded Abandoned Structure Squad — is a level of municipal dysfunction so pervasive that it allows a problem like this to go unaddressed — not just for days, or weeks or even months. But for nearly two years.

But that's exactly what has happened on a section of the aptly named West End Street at West Jefferson in the city's Delray neighborhood.

We've been reading — at least we were reading until the issue moved back behind closed door — about Mayor Dave Bing's plans to "right-size" Detroit, or whatever euphemism it is they were using when the administration was in the information-gathering phase of the effort, and how that downsizing might include abandoning certain parts of the city, cutting off services to areas that have already been largely forsaken anyway.

But some of the people we've talked to in Delray feel as if the administration has already made its decision regarding Delray — a once-thriving community located in an area that has more than its share of polluting neighbors.

"This place is called Delray, but they should call it Deadray for the simple fact that the city is trying to cut it off," says resident Jonathan Hankins.

It's hard to imagine this kind of dereliction occurring in tonier neighborhoods such as Indian Village. Those areas, too, have abandoned buildings, but we haven't noticed any that have collapsed and fallen into the street.

"We're just little guys," says Doug Ferguson, another area resident. "If it happened out by the mayor's house, it would have been cleaned already."

It's not as if those who still live around here haven't tried to get the city to pay attention. Flora Moore contacted this rag after repeated attempts to get the city to clear the rubble produced no results.

> Email Curt Guyette