Every city has blight – the unsightly, derelict, abandoned, disheveled, and under-utilized spaces of our urban areas. It drains the life out of neighborhoods, drives down the values of surrounding properties, and just looks really bad. So what do cities do about it? Some seize it through eminent domain for redevelopment and others offer incentives to developers to replace it with something better. Many of them, though, don’t do anything at all. But removing blight from a city is not impossible, and it doesn’t have to be an elaborate multi-party scheme or a drawn-out political process. It can be as simple as a coat of paint.
In most cases blighted properties are left to rot on their own, below the eyesight of city officials and politicians. But blight out of sight is still blight in the end, and it is a situation that not only feeds on itself, but feeds on its surroundings. Stopping the blight monster from swallowing up entire neighborhoods does require effort, but maybe not as much as some would think...
In most cases blighted properties are left to rot on their own, below the eyesight of city officials and politicians. But blight out of sight is still blight in the end, and it is a situation that not only feeds on itself, but feeds on its surroundings. Stopping the blight monster from swallowing up entire neighborhoods does require effort, but maybe not as much as some would think...