Baton Rouge City Leaders Look to Detroit for Blight Answers
One Community Update
January 7, 2026
Source: www.wbrz.com
One of Mayor-President Sid Edwards’ focuses during his campaign for office was blight, similar to former Detroit mayor Mike Duggan, with Detroit’s success at tackling blight.
Edwards says there are some ideas he plans to bring to Baton Rouge.
In 2014, the Detroit Land Bank owned 47,000 abandoned homes. According to former Mayor Mike Duggan, one in every five houses in Detroit was vacant.
Fast forward to December 2025, and that number sits at a little over 900.
Duggan says the city was demolishing 25 houses per week, which would’ve taken 32 years to address. Through his blight removal effort, it was done in just 12 years.
“The idea that we sold more abandoned houses than we knocked down over the last five years,” Duggan said during his Blight Removal Final Report Press Conference.
So how did they do it?
Well, Duggan says they created a Blight Removal Task Force plan that aimed to increase the rate of demolitions for houses that could not be saved, sell houses that could be, and set high environmental standards for demolition all at once.
In 2014, the city of Detroit received 265 million dollars in federal funding for the demolition of land bank houses. With this funding, the city completed 18,701 demolitions in four years.
In 2020, voters approved a $250 million city bond proposal for demolishing and rehabilitating properties across the city, allowing the city to sell 10,037 abandoned homes and demolish over 8,000.
A program offered by the Detroit Land Bank Authority allows property owners to purchase lots adjacent to their homes for as little as 100 dollars.
“What Detroit did is for the neighbor, they said, listen, we’re going to take this structure down. We’ll give you the lot for free, would you take it? And the only deal is you got to maintain it and cut your grass, and they did that, and we want to look to that in Baton Rouge,” Mayor Sid Edwards said.
Mayor Edwards and members of his administration returned from a trip to Detroit on Tuesday. Edwards says he looks to bring some of Detroit’s practices to the city of Baton Rouge.
“In Detroit, that area of town has become the country, it’s just open lots, and then people are selling it on the dollar, you can go in and buy a lot for $17.50, that’s what they are doing for their citizens, and then they’re helping people build these homes,” he said.
In the last 12 years, the city of Detroit demolished 27,000 homes and sold 19,000 formerly abandoned homes for rehabilitation.
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