Posts by Cassie Owens
Supreme Court’s fair housing ruling could boost true neighborhood revitalization
Cross-posted from Next City, this article is one of a ten-part series inspired by the 2015 Reclaiming Vacant Properties Conference. In what’s being widely hailed as a gigantic victory for civil rights law, the Supreme Court ruled yesterday to uphold the use of disparate impact claims under the Fair Housing Act. The much-debated theory of disparate impact centers around…
Read MoreA 341-page blight-fighting plan requires a lot of teamwork
Cross-posted from Next City, this article is one of a ten-part series inspired by the 2015 Reclaiming Vacant Properties Conference. Three hundred and forty-one pages and 235.5 megabytes. That’s the length and size of the Detroit Blight Removal Task Force plan, published last year. Based on a survey of the city’s 380,000 parcels, the task force found some 85,000…
Read MoreToday’s land bank boom could lead to the extinction of land banks
Cross-posted from Next City, this article is one of a ten-part series inspired by the 2015 Reclaiming Vacant Properties Conference. Frank Alexander wasn’t expecting his book, Land Banks and Land Banking, to wind up so big. “In 2010, when we created the Center for Community Progress one of the reasons we did so, Dan Kildee and I, is [because] we…
Read MoreHow Detroit Taught Itself to Demolish Vacant Houses Safely
Cross-posted from Next City, this article is one of a ten-part series inspired by the 2015 Reclaiming Vacant Properties Conference. “It kind of used to be like the Wild West a few years ago,” Regina Royan recalls, thinking back on how buildings were being demolished in Detroit prior to 2014. The old norms, she says, lacked oversight. “We realized…
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