"Mini Ruin Zone" around Biltmore / W Outer Dr - How did it happen? (Detroit: low income)

[313 TUxedo]

I recently discovered a strange "island" of severe blight in an otherwise passable, even livable, part of Detroit's west side.

It is centered around the intersection of W Outer Drive and Biltmore (in turn, just northeast of McNichols / Southfield Freeway M-39).

This is total blight. Blocks with no houses at all, roads being overgrown, large appliances and old doors being dumped on the streets themselves.

The line is very distinct. The odd side of Ferguson has a house (albeit a shabby frame bungalow) on nearly every lot. The even side of Biltmore (directly over the fence) is urban prairie. Everything south of McNichols appears to be well-kept brick bungalows with not a square foot of plywood to be found.

Sometime about 2005, a very large new church, Fellowship Chapel, was built right in the middle of it. The church is built over several blocks of what used to be the actual roadways a few years before. At some intersections, fences have been built to close some of the roads.

The road closures and the building of the church somehow seems reminiscent of the I-94 Industrial Park on the east side (south of Huber from Mt. Elliott to St. Cyril), a former neighborhood that was methodically closed and demolished, and no houses a trucking terminal, with plans for more industrial uses (that site was home to the Cooper School, whose ruins went viral on the internet on several urbex sites that failed to mention that the school and the neighborhood were shut by decree, not just neglect).

The difference with the Biltmore site, however, is that a check of previous year satellite views show that this small cluster of blocks was well into decay into the early 1990s, and significantly worse yet in the late 1990s, so this little zone may have been going down before anyone had conceived of the idea of building the church.

So, the question is, what went wrong to cause this little area to have such a drastic downfall, and what lessons could be learned to prevent such a phenomenon from occurring in another neighborhood in the future?

[animatedmartian]

I used to live on Sunderland and Outer Drive from the late 90s into the early 2000s. Honestly never noticed anything except for that church and the stripmall adjacent to the freeway.

I do recall a few years ago that there was a homicide on Oakfield in front of a vacant burnt out home. The suspicious part is that neighbors reported the victims had been there for a few hours as if they were waiting for someone. My guess is that it just happen to be a prominent block for drug trafficking and it was bad enough to send a lot of people out in only a few short years. Though I'm not sure how plausible that might be.

My other wild guess is that the area was purposely neglected with the aims of redevelopment. Maybe a developer was interested in building another stripmall or office park. Buy a few houses, burn a few of them, collect insurance, wait for the block to fall apart and buy up the empty lots. While I'm not sure if that's any more plausible than the above scenario, there is this mysterious real estate sign, yet clearly no signs of a new development in the area.

http://goo.gl/maps/Ha7Vm

"Village Estates Detroit"? Most likely a planned development killed by the real estate crash. If this were any other vacant area of the city, I'd be less skeptical, but definitely given the somewhat concentrated and almost contained area of blight plus the blocked off streets, it does seem atypical of normal neighborhood deterioration. Add to the fact that it's directly adjacent to a major commuter freeway and if planned right, those few empty blocks would be valuable to someone.

I kind of want to believe the area was selected for redevelopment during the 90s, but much like the 94 industrial area, never really panned out whenever it was originally planned due to changes in the economy. Detroit was sort of gaining real estate steam in the earlier 90s, but then it chilled out and really didn't pick up again until the later half of the 2000s right up until the crash. Until there's something that proves otherwise, I'm going with that idea.

[Retroit]

Could it be that the church is buying up all the surrounding property in the hopes of building more facilities (school, retirement community, low income housing for parishioners, etc.)?

Perhaps we can find out who owns the vacant lots?

Update: Most of the properties are owned by Amandla Community Development Corp. http://whydontweownthis.com/sc/mi/wa...1765/-83.21239

http://www.faqs.org/tax-exempt/MI/Am...tml#overview_a

[animatedmartian]

^That explains the blocks on the south side of Outer Drive, but what about the vacant ones on the north side? A majority of them are owned by the city, which is typical in areas with vacant lots. But there's still the mystery of why these few blocks went vacant seemingly during the late 80s or early 90s while the rest of the area is still pretty solid.

[Tex?Il?]

Originally Posted by Retroit

Could it be that the church is buying up all the surrounding property in the hopes of building more facilities (school, retirement community, low income housing for parishioners, etc.)?

Perhaps we can find out who owns the vacant lots?

Update: Most of the properties are owned by Amandla Community Development Corp. Detroit: WDWOT?

Amandla Community Development in Detroit, Michigan (MI) - faqs.org

I have absolutely no idea about this particular example, but I can say that large institutions that occupy a lot of space look to expand, buy up properties and let them rot until they are ready to expand.

This happens all the time with airports, even large hospital complexes, even large urban universities, etc.

Looking at the Google Maps view, its not a bad guess, that a church like that would do that.

[animatedmartian]

That's definitely not an unusual process in Detroit and actually happens quite often. Most of the time, in areas that already have seen much decay. No doubt the church saw the vacant land as an opportunity to develop.