DIY Detroit by Kimberley Kinder

Kimberley Kinder’s book argues that in cash-strapped cities, residents have two options; either they handle their civil needs on their own, or they suffer from the lack of it. Detroit is her main example of a city where the residents are on their own to pick up garbage, maintain abandoned properties, and even to perform law-enforcement duties.

The idea of local residents having to handle everything on their own is nothing new. In parts of Vermont, you have to take your trash to the depot yourself, because there’s no trash pickup. In order to have public trash collection, the property taxes would have to be raised, which nobody wants. However, Vermont is full of pig farms, and the trash can be fed to pigs, so that offsets the cost. It would not work in a city like New York or Chicago. While services like ambulances and fire departments can be staffed by volunteers, as they are in small towns, it would not be feasible in a large urban area.

The chapter “Seeking New Neighbors” has the residents padlocking vacant houses and finding buyers themselves, rather than risk having the place sit empty. The empty house phenomena is one of Detroit’s biggest blights, because they obviously attract drug-using squatters. Some banks are open to this, because it saves them having to constantly replace stolen pipes and boilers. Others are not open this idea, and the houses become an eyesore. Though not mentioned in this book, there is a concept called “attractive nuisance,” where a property owner can be penalized if his property attracts trespassers. For instance, let’s say you own a house with a pool, but you’re way for a week at a time, and teens keep sneaking in to use it. The Sheriff can call this an attractive nuisance because of the hassle it causes him, but the property taxes pay for him to keep it safe. Detroit, however, lost its tax revenue, so the police can do nothing. It’s up to the neighbors.

Further chapters deal with urban farms, neighborhood watch, street lighting, and land use. With the city government practically non-functional, volunteering is vital. However, I’m not entirely sympathetic to everything in this book, starting with the handling of the empty house problem. Volunteering to maintain a property is great, but why aren’t the residents lobbying to have them demolished? So few people are moving into the city, so why would anyone think the houses will sell. The “Seeking New Neighbors” chapters discusses the foreclosures, and how residents walk away from $50,000 mortgages and pay $10,000 cash for the home next door. The residents could easily seek out an area with better police service, offer a pittance for a county-foreclosed home, promise to start paying the taxes, and there you go. Blocks of foreclosed homes could then be torn down and turned into farms.

Some of the problems here were discussed in an earlier book called The Metropolitan Revolution. It cites Detroit as an example of the “fractured municipality,” where the mayor and the selectmen can’t agree on what to do. Public works end up stalling, and the community decays. The role of the politicians is mostly avoided in DIY Detroit, and I don’t fault the author for it. I doubt they’re of much help, especially not after Mayor Kilpatrick spent the city’s money on his girlfriends.