Here's why it can take months for a blighted home in Detroit to be torn down

The city of Detroit is working towards becoming blight free by 2024! It's a proposal so beloved by the community that $250 million was poured into it. But, the city is now more than a year into its demolitions and some Detroiters say they are growing frustrated with the pace of progress. “You don’t build a house in a day. You can tear it down in a day, but you don’t want to,” Rashad Montgomery the Environment Field Superintendent for Detroit's demolition department said. According to Montgomery, the process of knocking down a home from start to finish could take months. And abatement, an important step to the city, tends to slow this process down. The proposal and demolitions started at the beginning of 2021. So far the city has torn down 2,500 abandoned homes and has stabilized 1,500 others. The goal is to tackle 14,000 blighted homes by 2024.