metro >> on the cover
Blight Buster
Erica Ward Gerson heads the Detroit Land Bank,
renewing Detroit one home at a time.
Sam Gringlas I Special to the Jewish News
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1
Building An Institution
A corporate and finance lawyer by trade,
Gerson didn't know much about blight
busting or land banks — the public enti-
ties created to acquire, manage and devel-
op abandoned properties. But over the
next year, she worked with Duggan to con-
sult other land banks, interview experts,
sort through best practices from around
the country and compile an 80-page policy
paper that ultimately informed a central
pillar of his policy platform.
Two days after declaring victory last
November, he called Gerson and told her
it was time to implement the policy she
helped compose.
Gerson, who lives in Bloomfield Hills
and is a member of Congregation Shaarey
Zedek in Southfield and Temple Beth El in
Bloomfield Township, already had retired
from Skadden Arps, where she practiced
law for 30 years.
Her husband, Ralph Gerson, a nephew
of the late Bill Davidson and a director at
Guardian Industries in Auburn Hills, said
he wasn't surprised his wife took Detroit's
new mayor up on his offer to appoint her
chair of the Detroit Land Bank Authority.
"When someone asks her to do some-
thing that really has the potential to make
a difference in a community like Detroit, I
knew she would have a very hard time say-
ing no," he said.
In an interview with the IN, Duggan
cited Gerson's background in law and
experience as deputy director for domestic
policy at the White House as key factors
behind recruiting her for the project.
"The complexity of the blight problem
is amazing," he said. "You have HUD regu-
lations, you've got banking regulations,
you've got environmental regulations, and
so I was looking for someone who could
take this maze of complex regulations and
make it into an understandable program
to reuse the houses in the city:'
With a shoestring staff of five people,
Gerson started her tenure with the Land
Bank writing purchase agreements and
assisting with the other day-to-day tasks
needed to get the operation moving dur-
ing the administration's first month. Since
then, the team has grown to a 65-person
staff.
For outside observers, perhaps the most
8
September 4 • 2014
impressive facet of the initiative is the
speed at which the Land Bank has been
able to implement a plan to tackle blight.
Since starting the process in April, the
Land Bank has auctioned 130 houses and
closed on 40, generating $2.25 million in
sales.
That's no surprise for Larry Gold, CEO
of the Children's Hospital of Michigan,
who lauded Gerson's ability to understand
complex issues, unpack them and execute
a plan.
"She moves between strategy and imple-
mentation so easily," he said.
This house on Euclid is one of
21,579 homes now owned by
the Detroit Land Bank.
How It Works
Tackling blight in Detroit certainly
requires both the strategy to chart an
inventive plan and the agile machinery to
produce results. To start, the problem is
big. In Detroit, at least 48,000 homes are
unoccupied, totaling about 13 percent of
the city's housing stock.
On top of a long-term population
decline propelled by disappearing auto
industry jobs and flight to the suburbs,
foreclosures devastated dozens of stable
neighborhoods when the economic down-
turn pummeled Metro Detroit in 2008.
To address those realities, the Land
Bank's current model builds on a pro-
cedure called nuisance abatement that
Duggan first piloted as Wayne County
Blight Buster on page 10
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