A STUDY ON IMPLEMENTATION OF BLIGHT ELIMINATION BASED ON MASTERPLAN IN DEPOPULATION CITY

A case study on activities of Land Bank and CDCs in the city of Flint, Michigan, U.S.

Abstract

 Recent year, vacant properties has become a severe problem in Japan. Some of these properties in bad condition are called “blight” and they bring negative affect to urban environment. Japanese government formulated new law to demolish designated old and dangerous vacant houses. But this policy is based only on grade of damage and created without the perspectives of urban planning and design. Japanese local governments should create more comprehensive way to deal with such “blights” when financial and human resources are limited.
 This paper aim to clarify the effective planning methodology to manage huge amount of blights in the city. We focus on the city of Flint, MI one of the most famous shrinking cities in the United States.
 Flint has experienced the profound population decline since the end of 1970s and suffered from huge amount of vacant properties. In 2013, city government formulated a new master plan named “Master Plan for a Sustainable Flint”. They introduced new place type called Green Innovation that is designated to areas with heavy vacancy.
 After the master plan approval, the city of Flint and Genesee County Land Bank Authority(GCLBA), and some of the CDCs tried to plan a new framework for the “blight elimination” and aligned their activities based on the masterplan.
 The city of Flint planned the Blight Elimination Framework(BEF) to comprehensively manage huge amount of blights in the city areas. They focused on each stakeholder's activities and the place types defined by the master plan.
 They categorized 7 activities (waste removal, boarding, demolition, mowing, vacant lot reuse, building rehabilitation and redevelopment, code enforcement) to manage blight and allocate the relevance of each stakeholder. Maximally, they can save 21.7 million dollars (29% of the cost estimated without this framework) by the efforts based on this framework.
 GCLBA created the “Decision-Making Guide(DMG)” to align property sales based on the master plan. GCLBA has sold vacant properties based on each property's situation, such as condition of site boundary and adjacent house ownership. With the GMG, it became possible for GCLBA to consider the future land use and desirable physical environment logically. GCLBA can also contribute to lead the transformation for future land use by integration of individual property sales based on DMG.
 There are two major CDCs in Flint. Salem Housing shifted their activities to community engagement because of the difficulty of housing development in low demand housing market after 2000s. On the other hand, Genesee County Habitat for Humanity (GCHFH) aligned their activities based on the master plan. GCHFH converted the land uses from housing to greenery land uses such as pocket parks and pavilions in several Green Neighborhood area designated by the master plan. As a result, the following points are suggested.
 1) The city of Flint faces the financial gaps between the cost needed for blight elimination and the actual manageable budget. They planned comprehensive blight elimination framework to reduce the cost for blight elimination. The framework is to integrate each stakeholder's activities and is expected to reduce the cost by 29% from the cost estimated initially.
 2) GCLBA created Decision-Making Guide to convert the current land use to future land use planned by the master plan. This guide is considered useful because it helps to achieve integration of GCLBA's individual property sales. 3) CDCs in Flint are facing difficulty to keep their work after financial crisis of the 2000s and they had changed the direction of their work. GCHFH has aligned their activities based on the master plan and contributes to convert current land use to desirable land use.