Detroit Is Turning Vacant Lots Into Sponges for Stormwater

In Brooklyn, a developer plans to back dirt-filled dumpsters into parking spaces this summer, the Brooklyn Paper reported, in the hope that the soil and plants will soak up storm water before it breaches the nearby Gowanus canal—a Superfund site with a famous and fetid tendency to flood. In a borough that’s increasingly squeezed for space, these small-scale interventions make sense: real estate is at a premium, and green interventions can be wedged into any available sliver.

Detroit, on the other hand, has considerably more space to work with. “What comes to the rescue here is having plenty of land,” says Joan Nassauer, a professor of landscape architecture at the University of Michigan. It’s a sprawling city, with vacant or buckling properties scattered across its 139 square miles. As of April 2016, 66,125 vacant parcels were held by the Detroit Land Bank Authority, which has received more than $100 million in federal funds to demolish blighted structures. Already, 2,112 such buildings have been razed this year. “This is really good news in a way you wouldn’t necessarily expect for opportunities to be creative,” Nassauer says.