David Coates / The Detroit News Vincent Cooper, owner of a roofing and construction company, says he was unsuccessful in trying to buy and repair this property on Ohio after working with the city for months.

Low priority placed on serving residents

    Vincent Cooper, who rehabs houses for a living, wanted to buy a two-story house at 17141 Ohio on the east side from the city to rehabilitate. He spent June 1 at City Hall trying to get the building removed from the demolition list so he could buy it. The city has owned the building since 1998.

    Cooper took a letter asking to buy the building to the Ombudsman’s Office on the 1st floor of the Coleman A. Young Municipal Center and to Council President Gil Hill’s office on the 13th floor. Hill’s office sent him three blocks away to Planning and Development on the 23rd floor of 65 Cadillac Sq.

    A Planning official told Cooper to go to the department’s Real Estate division on the 11th floor to complete the necessary paperwork. A Real Estate official sent him back upstairs saying he couldn’t buy the property. A Planning official signed a document giving Cooper the right to buy the building and sent him back to Real Estate. A Real Estate official said the division would look into the matter and then refer his request to the Law Department. Then Cooper was sent back upstairs, where a Planning official told him the department would get back to him in a few days.

    He walked away from the experience exhausted.

    “They send off a lot of negativity down there,” he said of the bureaucrats with whom he dealt. “They act like they are doing you a favor, like they don’t have to provide you with information. But at the end of the day, I was geeked, because I had a house.”

    Or so he thought.

    A few days later, he got a call from the real estate division of Planning and Development. The property had a title problem, and the law department was working it out. They would be in touch.

    He heard nothing. In the meantime, Cooper used his own work crews to haul off the house’s collapsed garage, and he mowed the house’s lawn. He kept vagrants away.

    On Aug. 21, an Ombudsman’s office employee called and talked at length. The official said he would get back to Cooper.

    In mid-September, Cooper was working on the home next door when he noticed a man entering the house he was trying to buy.

    “He told me he was the owner,” Cooper said. “Then he showed me the papers. Damn! Do you know that no one at City Hall called me or wrote me to tell me anything about it? Stuff just falls through the cracks and nobody cares.”

    Cooper was upset by the process, but not surprised. It’s much easier to work on homes in the suburbs, he said.

    “To get permits and licenses pulled in the city of Detroit can take days,” Cooper said. “In Southfield or somewhere else you can be in and out in hours.”

    Seeking help from the city is a confusing process. Detroiters can call any one of nine council members who will, invariably, forward the complaint either to a city department, over which they have no authority, or to the city Ombudsman, who also has no authority.

    Or people can call departments directly. Or the mayor’s office. Or a neighborhood city hall.

    Matt Prentice, owner of Duet, an upscale restaurant next to Orchestra Place, said that opening the restaurant in 1998 led to various problems with inspectors. While planning Duet, Prentice was advised to hire a consultant just to handle city permits, licenses and inspections. Prentice, who owns several suburban restaurants, had never done that before, but said doing so turned out to be necessary.

    He credited Archer with helping him navigate red tape. He wondered if that treatment was because he was a high-profile restaurateur, and he said he knows the city bureaucracy needs to be reformed.

    “The city went without accountability for a long, long time,” Prentice said. “I know what Mayor Archer inherited and it doesn’t get a whole lot more broken.”