Collective Responsibility: Blight to Beauty in Detroit

CM credit hours for mobile workshops are awarded based on the planned dedicated instructional time. Adjustments to CM hours will not be made after the live event.

This tour showcases locations where Detroit and its partners have moved "from blight to beauty" on varying scales: Roosevelt Park, the Dexter Avenue Streetscape, Fenkell Avenue, and West Warren Avenue. Along the way, discuss interventions for compliance, meet business owners, and tour beautification areas and community-driven murals.

Blight results from deferred maintenance and neglect. Detroit's blight remediation efforts focused on specific commercial corridors, their unoccupied structures, and the three highly visible indicators of deferred maintenance: peeling paint, mangled fences, and obsolete business signs.

Starting with a limited scope and led by top officials, several city departments took advantage of the American Rescue Plan Act funding window to set a baseline, clean public and private properties and demonstrate that maintenance could stimulate further positive action.

Over a two-year period, a variety of "sticks" were modeled or sharpened to disrupt ineffective processes and communicate expectations for property owners - public and private, local and overseas - to meet minimum code standards. Despite political sensitivity, the focus on inclusive and equitable expectations meant even faith-based owners and the city itself needed to be accountable for safe, healthy, and respectful outcomes.