Macon-Bibb seeks Michigan ideas about fighting blight

Clearing blight from Macon-Bibb County can’t be a government-dictated effort, and it’s as much about the future as about the past or present.

That’s according to local officials who took a trip this year to see how two Michigan cities are dealing with the problem.

Eight people took the trip to Flint and Detroit, including code enforcement and legal staff, funded by a $10,000 grant from the John S. & James L. Knight Foundation. Traveling as a group, they talked to officials and community leaders in the blight-fighting effort in each city, from financiers to demolition managers.

The only elected official on the trip was Macon-Bibb County Commissioner Virgil Watkins. Flint and Detroit both saw devastating population losses when auto plants moved out, on an even greater scale than Macon’s departures following the closure of cotton mills several decades ago and Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp. in more recent years.

Now about 700,000 people live in Detroit, down from 1.8 million in 1950. Flint has about 99,000 residents, roughly half its 1960 numbers.

“Population-wise, the scale (of Flint’s example) is a better match for Macon,” Watkins said.

While Macon-Bibb County’s consolidated government covers 156,000 people, the former city of Macon has about 90,000 now, down roughly 32,000 from its 1970 peak.

Macon-Bibb has a “fairly decent guesstimate” of about 4,000 abandoned and dilapidated buildings, Watkins said. As serious as that is, the local issue is dwarfed by what Flint and Detroit faced when they began formal planning to deal with blight, he said.

“It forced them to get really good at it,” Watkins said.

Both cities received infusions of federal Hardest Hit Funds, which they put toward planning and blight clearance.

“Georgia has received Hardest Hit Funds, but we’re using them right now for mortgage relief, foreclosure relief -- those type of things and not for (demolition),” Watkins said. Those federal funds in Georgia are parceled out to agencies that work statewide, according to the U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development.

In Michigan, federal money for blight clearance was only the start, he and Assistant County Manager Charles Coney said.

“Partnering organizations” took the lead in Flint, helped by local governments. But the real work was driven by “large amounts of human capital,” Coney said. That means a grass-roots effort by residents to identify and help clean up blight.

“Volunteers offer time and passion that cannot be paid as workers,” Coney said. They often got small stipends for data gathering or cleanup, but nothing close to what regularly hired workers would cost, he said.

COMMUNITY MAPPING

Detroit and Flint both did broad community plans, assembled through literally hundreds of public meetings. Those dealt not only with existing blight, but also with what people wanted their cities to look like afterward, such as greater swaths of green space, Watkins said.

That desire is something Macon-Bibb recognizes, government spokesman Chris Floore said.

“We need to move beyond just tearing down buildings and find ways to help rebuild the neighborhoods,” he said.

Then the cities conducted detailed surveys of all properties, grading them by condition to tag what needed fixing and what needed tearing down.

In Flint, the mapping was a genuinely grass-roots effort, relying on resident volunteers, Watkins said. Detroit built an even bigger database. That effort was funded by Dan Gilbert of Quicken Loans, who has made a huge investment in revitalizing the city.

Loveland Technologies put together a “very high-tech and very high-end” map of Detroit’s 84,000 dilapidated properties, Watkins said. That company could do the same in Macon-Bibb, though he expects a mix of professional and grass-roots work here, he said.

It will take good, specific data to make the best decisions, Coney said. Absent that, “emotional attachments” to neighborhoods can affect perceptions of condition and relative needs, he said.

BANKING ON LAND BANKS

In Detroit, Flint and other troubled cities, land bank authorities play a major role in dealing with blight by taking over abandoned properties and getting them ready to resell. A 119-page report from the Center for Community Progress, given to Macon-Bibb officials, offers profiles of a number of land banks -- including Macon-Bibb’s.

Alison Souther Goldey, executive director of the Macon-Bibb County Land Bank Authority, was one of the people who went on the Michigan trip.

The Macon-Bibb land bank held 96 properties in 2014. In the previous four years, it had turned around 70 properties to nonprofits for rental or resale, and maintained 105 vacant lots, according to the report.

The Macon-Bibb land bank averages three buys per month, but it generally does so only when someone is lined up to get the property, due to the cost of insurance and maintenance.

“To date, approximately 95 percent of all acquisitions have been project-driven,” the report said.

By contrast, Detroit and Flint land banks process thousands of properties annually, Watkins said. That is due in part to a Michigan law requiring that a property with three years of delinquent taxes be turned over to the land bank, he said. In Macon-Bibb, that seizure remains optional.

Similar standards here would put a lot of pressure on the local land bank but would ease other problems for agencies seeking to clean up properties, Watkins said.

Macon-Bibb has struggled to tear down 100 dilapidated houses and buildings per year, and Mayor Robert Reichert has acknowledged that the pace won’t make a dent in the local problem. Detroit, in particular, had to streamline the process, Watkins said.

“They got up to a point where they were tearing down 300-plus houses a week,” he said. Most of that work is subcontracted out, with private contractors assigned hundreds of houses at once, Watkins said.

Detroit officials told him their biggest problem with maintaining that pace was finding enough dirt to fill in demolished basements and foundations.

WHAT’S NEXT

Macon-Bibb commissioners have agreed to spend more than $10 million in bond funds on dealing with local blight. The next special purpose local option sales tax, up for a vote in 2016, also could include money for “infrastructure and blight,” Watkins said.

But first there has to be a plan, and that means assembling the sort of grass-roots survey Flint has done, he said. That data can be linked to tax records and utilities, then used to apply for Hardest Hit Fund demolition money, Watkins said.

A local blight task force will work on a plan for best using the available money, starting with the bonds, Floore said.

Macon-Bibb isn’t far from having the level of expertise and multi-agency collaboration Flint did, Watkins said.

Some changes are already underway, such as commissioners’ recent approval of a way to issue $100 tickets for code violations, he said. Changes to zoning standards, such as creating new categories for community gardens, also could come, Watkins said.

More ideas came from a “poverty summit” held last week at Mercer University. But proposals such as selling empty houses for $1, tried out in Baltimore, would require legal work and careful selection to be put into place here, Floore said.

“The concept of occupying houses is certainly innovative, though an organization spearheading that would need to review the houses,” he said.

“You’ve seen some of the houses we’re tearing down, and many of them are already falling in on themselves.”

This story was originally published March 8, 2015 at 10:33 PM with the headline "Macon-Bibb seeks Michigan ideas about fighting blight ."