Week 6

I cannot believe that we are already more than halfway through this program. I feel like we have not been here that long, but then I realize all of the facts and information that I have learned about Detroit since coming here, and I realize that it has been a great deal of time. I have a better understanding of the different neighborhoods within the city, better comprehend key social issues that plague the city and cause people to become mobilized, and I have observed some of the beautiful places in the area like the Detroit Institute of Art, the Riverfront, Eastern Market and more.

This week at my placement I sat in on a workshop that was hosted by the Loveland website. What I learned from this workshop will be the main focus of this blog post. They have an application called Loveland that can be downloaded by any smart phone or tablet. Using this app, anyone can take pictures of any parcel within the city of Detroit and answer some questions about the state of the property (i.e. Is it vacant? Is there fire damage? etc.) Through doing this, Loveland can make this information available on its website Motor City Mapping, so that information that is usually hard for the average citizen to access is available to all who want it. Loveland can also keep track of the levels of blight and vacancy within the community through this gathered information. The process of using the app has often been nicknamed ‘blexting’, which is a clever way of saying that you are texting the blight within the city.

Through this workshop I learned a couple of interesting things. First off, I realized what a problem blight is for the Hope Village community (which is the neighborhood that my organization Focus: HOPE resides in). As my supervisor phrases it, she sees blight and vacancy as the root of the deepest problems within the neighborhood. Every time I saw a documentary featuring Detroit before starting this program, I saw partially destroyed buildings and broken windows, but I was not fully aware of the severity of the blight and vacancy until I started my internship.

I also recognized the high level of fire damage that exists within this neighborhood. The presenter went into depth on the different clues to look out for when seeking whether there is fire damage on a building that you are blexting. Before I lived in Detroit for this program, I viewed house fires as a rare tragedy. In this city, I have realized that they are common occurrences that plague a great deal of homes. These fires not only hurt the homes themselves, but also hurt the neighborhood by becoming eyesores and a danger to the community. Unlike in most cities, many of the burned buildings remain standing even after the fire has been extinguished in Detroit. According to a report by The Detroit News, at the time this article was written, two-thirds of the houses that were damaged by fires between the years 2010 and 2013 were still in the neighborhoods standing and not yet demolished. Fires and the aftermath of them is an issue that is not even on my radar in Ann Arbor.

One final lesson that I learned through sitting in on this Loveland workshop is the innovativeness of this city. The Motor City Mapping website is an incredibly thorough resource, and it is updated by citizens who voluntarily take pictures and update information to ensure that everyone can know the state of their neighborhood and city. This type of collaboration and community organizing is not so easily found in other big cities that I have been familiar with. This collaboration is also not what media generally focuses on when it talks about Detroit. Through living here and through working with Focus: HOPE, I am learning about more of the negative and positive attributes of this city everyday.