City employees fail to find solutions

    When the January 1999 blizzard hit the Midwest, it left hundreds of thousands of Detroiters trapped on their streets. The city stuck to its normal procedure of clearing main arteries but not the 1,800 miles of residential streets. In response to a deluge of citizen complaints, Public Works officials pointed to unwritten past policy.

    The policy on abandoned buildings challenges logic.

    In the neighborhoods of Detroit, the most dangerous abandoned buildings — nowadays marked with a big yellow “D” — are not on a list to be boarded up by city workers. If they were boarded up, they wouldn’t qualify as dangerous, and couldn’t be demolished, according to Stephanie Green, interim Public Works director. So for years the buildings sit open, where squatters and drug addicts take over.

    One of them is an abandoned 20-unit apartment building at 1977 Elmhurst on the city’s west side, the subject of an article in The Detroit News last June. The building has been abandoned since 1988 and has been on fire several times. About two weeks ago, city workers finally spray-painted a yellow “D” on it.

    But Wanda Cowans, who lives down the street, says she still has to get up early every morning to make sure two little girls who have to walk past the building get to school safely.

    “It’s really dangerous,” she said. “I’ve seen people come out in the morning, like somebody’s been sleeping in there.”