I am writing today to announce the closure of the Michigan Messenger. After four years of operation in Michigan, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news into a single site, The American Independent at Americanindependent.com. This is part of a shift in strategy, towards new forms [...]
An abstinence-only presentation provided to numerous school districts in Calhoun and Eaton Counties in October of this year provided false and misleading information to students about HIV, experts allege.
Two county registers of deeds filed a class action lawsuit Monday on behalf of Michigan’s 83 counties alleging that the Mortgage Electronic Registration Services owes millions of dollars in property title transfer taxes.
Despite evidence of the impact of mercury on children and public health, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette last month joined with 24 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit to scuttle new EPA regulations that would reduce mercury emissions from power plants.
A new study from the University of Michigan provides a great deal of information on the patterns of foreclosed and abandoned properties in Flint, data that could be very important to the city and county in future plans to shrink and realign the city limits. The Flint Journal reports:
After a year filled with theoretical talk about shrinking Flint, a new study pinpoints the city neighborhoods that could be the leading candidates for total demolition, including parts of the city where more than half the houses already are gone.
Vacant lots will “increase significantly” in what are already the city’s most deserted neighborhoods, according to a new study by University of Michigan graduate students.
The study finds miles of empty neighborhoods — including large stretches west of the old Buick City complex in northern Flint, immediately southeast of Buick City and the Flint River, west of Thread Lake in southern Flint, and a small area wrapped around Flint Park Lake on the city’s north side.
They are the city’s most abandoned neighborhoods. Here there aren’t even vacant houses. There are just empty lots, usually covered with overgrown weeds and sometimes filled with trash.
The 100-page report recommends the Genesee County Land Bank help speed up the process of transforming select parts of these neighborhoods from housing to other uses such as farms by buying property rather than waiting for it to fall into tax foreclosure.
The Genesee County Land Bank is the best-established of 29 land banks in the state of Michigan and is in line for more than $32 million in federal funds to help the local community reclaim blighted and abandoned properties. State law allows a land bank to transfer the title to a property that has been abandoned without having to wait several years as would normally be required to do so.
Once a title is transferred to city or county hands, the land bank can then decide what to do with it. In the case of Flint, they are likely going to attempt to shrink the city by taking neighborhoods with the highest percentage of abandoned properties, moving the few remaining residents from that area to one more populated in the city, and then razing the buildings, taking out the concrete and shutting off all the utilities to the area. That empty land would then return to nature, or perhaps be used for urban farms.
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