the will to remove

“Last summer, demolition crews planned to use dirt scoured off of the I-96 reconstruction project to fill up basement holes. But road salt deposited on the freeway over the years contaminated the dirt too much to meet legal standards for residential neighborhoods. Demolition crews have had to buy sand and other fill from quarries at increased cost and inconvenience.”

http://http://www.freep.com/story/money/business/michigan/2014/12/14/detroit-blight-duggan/20360959/

MOTHER

Alas you will die.

REBEL

Killed….. I killed him with my own hands……

Yes, a fecund and copious death…….

It was night. We crawled through the sugarcane.

The cutlasses were chortling at the stars, but we didn’t care about the stars.

The cane slashed our faces with streams of green blades.

MOTHER

I had dreamed of a son who would close his mother’s eyes.

REBEL

I chose to open my child’s eyes to another sun.

MOTHER

……O my son…… an evil and pernicious death.

REBEL

Mother, a verdant and sumptuous death.

MOTHER

From too much hate.

REBEL

From too much love.

Spare me, I’m choking from your shackles, bleeding from your wounds.

REBEL

And the world does not spare me…… There is not in the world one single lynched bastard, one poor tortured man, in whom I am not also murdered and humiliated.

MOTHER

God in Heaven, deliver him!

REBEL

My heart, you will not deliver me of my memories……

It was a November night……

And suddenly clamors lit up the silence,

we had leapt, we the slaves, we the manure, we the beasts with patient hooves.

We were running like lunatics, fiery shots broke out……… We were striking. Sweat and blood cooled us off. We were striking amidst the screams and the screams became more strident and a great clamor rose toward the east, the outbuildings were burning and the flames sweetly splashed our cheeks.

Then came the attack on the master’s house.

They were shooting from the windows.

We forced the doors.

The master’s bedroom was wide open. The Master’s bedroom was brilliantly lit, and the master was there, very calm…… and all of us stopped….. he was the master……. I entered. It’s you, he said, very calmly…… Its me, it was indeed me, I told him, the good slave, the faithful slave, the slave slave, and suddenly my eyes were two cockroaches frightened on a rainy day…….. I struck, the blood spurted, it is the only baptism that today I remember.

– Aimé Cesairé

“Indeed, a historic blight removal effort is ramping up in Detroit, fueled with $57.2 million in Hardest Hit funding. This year alone, 2,368 blighted properties held by the Detroit Land Bank Authority (DLBA) have been removed, and another 1,400 will be taken down before April, but this is merely a scratch on the surface of what’s to come, with an estimated 40,000 properties with severe indicators of blight coming down the pipeline in the next five years.”

Can deconstruction of vacant homes help grow Detroit’s economy? Some local businesses hope so

“In addition to providing information on what constitutes blight, users would be able to report an issue to the city and send an image of the blight. The submission would include the location of the offense if the smartphone’s GPS is enabled, or the customer could type in the address with the complaint, she said.”

http://www.jaxdailyrecord.com/showstory.php?Story_id=544258&__scoop_post=3e9cb950-675f-11e4-b89e-842b2b775358&__scoop_topic=3267207#__scoop_post=3e9cb950-675f-11e4-b89e-842b2b775358&__scoop_topic=3267207

“Cleveland, with as many as 12,000 abandoned buildings and entire streets that are virtually uninhabited, would need about $120 million to completely meet the city’s demolition needs.”

http://www.cleveland.com/cityhall/index.ssf/2014/10/millions_of_dollars_for_demoli.html

“Columbus needs a bigger hammer to force owners of blighted properties to fix them up, tear them down or sell them.”

http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/editorials/2014/10/24/get-tougher-on-blight.html