Journalists - and particularly out-of-town journalists - seem obsessed with the life of the city's most isolated residents. A typical news story about the city's developing right-sizing plan almost always begins by interviewing an isolated resident whose house is the last one on the block. In a standard article, this homeowner usually bemoans their isolated location, but insists that they will never leave. These stories usually cite these residents as both a reason for, and an obstacle to, efforts to right-size the city.
NPR, The Huffington Post, Time Magazine, Lost Magazine, The Metro Times, Harper's Magazine, Fox 2 News, Forbes, and Architect Magazine all subscribe to this narrative. In fact, almost every national or local paper - except for the Detroit Free Press and Model D - has run at least one article on the city featuring an interview with one of these "last house on the block" (LHB) residents. NewsBank and Lexis Nexis return stories from more than 30 newspapers featuring an LHB resident. This resident on St. Aubin, for example, was interviewed earlier this year.
But just how common are these rural Detroiters? Does the size of the city's LHB population warrant the attention? Using Detroit Residential Parcel Survey and City of Detroit data, I tried to measure this phenomenon. I used the radius of a short block, 300 feet, as my threshold for isolation - if a resident's nearest neighbor was more than 300' away, I included them as a LHB.
Perhaps Detroit is not home to enough rural residents to warrant the attention. In total, only 134 occupied homes in the city were more than 300' from the nearest occupied home in 2009.
Rob,
ReplyDeleteThis is such an interesting thing to research! I'd love to see you refine the study a little bit to get even better results. Maybe use Census Blocks? I'd love to see every block in the city classified by the number of occupied structures...
This is great Rob, I would be curious to see the tallies for 200', 150', etc.
ReplyDeleteThis is cool. I'd be curious to what the stats are for other rust belt cities though. Doing quick math, these 134 properties are surrounded by at least 1.35 miles squared of open space. Is that a lot? Could be.
ReplyDeleteLooking at your map, I see that many of the 134 "LHBs" you found are literal corner cases: they appear to be up against freeways, industrial properties, or major commercial corridors - places where they could not reasonably expect neighbors in much of the area around them, regardless of how well- or sparsely-populated the neighborhood is.
ReplyDeleteAll of you- thank you for your comments. All three of you suggest interesting topics. I'll try to work on all of them soon.
ReplyDeleteMurph- That is an interesting point that I hadn't really addressed. Thank you! It does, indeed, look like 10-15% of the properties are up against streets or industrial properties.
Robert, Good show! Can you do this for all of Wayne County or another study? I'll be you'd find that Inkster, Wayne and some of the other western suburbs have similar or greater isolation. The "last home on the block in Detroit" misses the bigger pattern of neighborhood change in the entire metro region. Inner ring suburbs also have vacancies. Alternatively, pick a comparable city for comparison, like Cleveland (see NEOCANDO's website for data), Baltimore or Atlanta. Heck, pick a city that is a model for growth like Portland, Phoenix or Vegas. I'll bet you could find 134 homes in either of those cities that are 300 ft from the nearest other residential property. Portland recently spent $250 million relocating families from a riverbed that flooded seasonally and some refused to move. Likewise, many fringe subdivisions out west (most famously Victorville, CA) had to be demolished even though they were never even occupied! My point is that these "last home on the block" articles are making normative as well as assumptions about the norm about urban density that might not pan out today.
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