The Vacant Lot as Blank Canvas

I often think of Detroit as one of Memphis' sister cities.

Detroit has 834,000 residents; Memphis has 643,000. Both have large African-American populations; both have fairly high rates of poverty, though Detroit has more. The median household income in Detroit is $28,000. In Memphis, it's $32,500. Then there's Motown and Stax.

It's not the exact same city, but I think both cities struggle with a lot of the same problems.

Detroit's Metro Times has a piece this week that says Detroit's greatest resources are its abundant land and artistic talent. And suggests ways to use both.

(BTW, if you click on this link, you might notice they are in the midst of their Best Of issue, too. Rest assured we didn't steal it from them; it's a pretty common issue in the alt weekly world.)

From the story:

"Detroit, through misfortune, has one natural resource which every other major city in the world except for Paris, with its extensive parks system, covets: land space. It allows for many opportunities transforming the land or placing objects on it. Working with vacant land in some manner is probably the least expensive way to make transformation. You could change the city landscape more cost effectively than a $20 million building could."

With quite a few vacant properties here, I just thought it was something to think about.

Farming in Foreclosures

Here's an idea that could take root in Memphis. So to speak.

A nonprofit group in Detroit — Memphis' unofficial sister city — is farming derelict land to grow food for the needy.

NPR's Morning Edition says Urban Farming has a 20-plot pilot program in which volunteers tend the gardens and the city of Detroit picks up the water bill. The plots aren't fenced off, so anyone can pick the produce for free and anything leftover is donated to a food bank.

If that weren't enough, the program fights blight in a city that last year, with more than 7,000 idle properties, topped the nation in foreclosures.

"Turns out that urban farms do attract people, says Gail Carr, one of Detroit's city managers. She has houses boarded up nearly every day and sees what a dramatic difference the gardens have on communities.

'People are coming out of their homes who wouldn't come out under other circumstances because they didn't think there was still a community or a neighbor or a friendly person nearby,' she says."

The last time I looked at vacant property here, Shelby County was the "proud" owner of about 3,000 parcels it couldn't get rid of. There was talk of creating a land bank with the city — part of the problem is that when property owners default on their taxes, they default to both the city and the county.

The other part of the problem is that those properties weren't earning taxes for anyone, but were actually a drain on the coffers because of maintenance, mowing, and in some cases, demolition. But the alternative, letting them deteriorate even worse, is even more expensive.