This is a story about a number…
MONTAGE: 40 square miles/40 square miles/40 square miles/40 square miles.
and how it became a fact illustrating Detroit's decline. I've read it in the Detroit Free Press, the Detroit News, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal. I've heard it on Fox and I've used it here on the radio. That's when Margaret Dewar called me out.
DEWAR: Wait, this can't be true.
Dewar is an urban planning professor at the University of Michigan. She says there's tons of vacant land in Detroit. Just not 40 square miles.
DEWAR: It's too good a number to let go of, it's such a wonderful number, it's so shocking.
And it makes the 139 square mile city sound so empty. An abandoned city. It's true a million residents have left. But now, some people who've been using 40 square miles are rethinking the number. So let's rewind to early last year.
HENDERSON: 40 square miles of vacant land. So vacant land area is overwhelming for the city of Detroit.
That's city official Karla Henderson at public meeting of Detroit Works, which is supposed to reimagine the city. The stats were stark and some folks were anxious about the fate of their neighborhoods. Last week I asked Henderson to revisit the vacant land numbers…
HENDERSON: We estimate there's about 37 square miles. I do want to put a caveat on that, that that does include our parks.
Seven square miles of parks. Plus 2 square miles of cemeteries
HENDERSON: I think that that's kindof gotten lost in the message.
KINKEAD: The 40 square mile number is probably not terribly accurate.
Dan Kinkead is on Detroit Works' technical planning team. He says a good number is 25. That includes empty land, 19 square miles, and land with empty houses. No parks. It's similar to what Rob Linn found over at Data Driven Detroit.
LINN: My figure is 21.39 square miles. Just a hair over half of the 40 square mile figure.
Which is a departure, because his boss has been citing 40 square miles for years. Demographer Kurt Metzger is known as the data guru. In 2009, his group did a big survey. Teams drove the city block by block, literally counting every house and residential lot. About a third were vacant or blighted. Metzger figured if a third of residential properties were vacant, it confirmed this idea that a third of the city was too. The idea was already out there. But where did it come from?
METZGER: I have no idea. There are a lot of numbers that we keep pushing back on, um, but I don't know where that original number came from. DAVIDSON: Mr. Metzger, you're the data person. METZGER: I know … I should know.
Detroit is largely residential but the new figures adjust for commercial and industrial property. Plus, 30% of the city is roads: sweeping boulevards, a massive freeway system. So there's less buildable land than is often conveyed. Still not everyone buys into 20 square miles of vacant land.
GALLAGHER: In my own experience driving around, it just seems like a lot more than that.
John Gallagher is a veteran reporter at the Detroit Free Press and he often uses 40 square miles. He says it's reasonable, given the population decline, the industrial decline, the housing survey, and the staggering return to nature.
GALLAGHER: There's a phrase from Willa Cather's book My Antonia, "stifled by vegetation." And sometimes in the height of summer, when you drive down these streets with no homes, and the trees and the weeds and the tall grass, that's how, that's how I feel sometimes.
In Detroit, thousands of buildings are slated for demolition. So whatever the number, Detroit's vacant land is a huge challenge. If it doesn't add up to the size of San Francisco, looks like it's still as big as Manhattan. For Changing Gears, I'm Kate Davidson. }
