TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE

Technical Assistance Programs
The DVPC provides technical assistance through four main programs:

The Vacant Property Toolbox
This is a publication that provides residents, block clubs, community groups, and community development corporations with tools and resources related to vacant properties.

Vacant Property Planning
DVPC completes two vacant property plans per year. These are conducted in specific geographic areas and provide local stakeholders with strategies to turn vacant properties into neighborhood assets.

General Technical Assistance
Through our general technical assistance program, Detroit-based groups can request a number of services including: vacant property educational presentations, mapping, survey development, strategy development, and ownership information.If your organization is interested in receiving some of the aforementioned services, fill out the Request for Assistance form (see download) and return it following the instructions on the form.

The DVPC Approach to Technical Assistance

Through the DVPC technical assistance program, we provide technical assistance to community development corporations, non-profits, and community groups that will empower these organizations to achieve two goals: mitigate the negative impact of vacant property on the surrounding community and turn vacant properties into neighborhood assets.

Our technical assistance approach is defined by the following four characteristics:

Data Driven
Chiefly, our technical assistance is valuable to local organizations because our data driven approach. Often, there is a significant separation between data and decision makers. When this separation exists, community and economic development decisions can be based on subjective criteria, short-term goals, and available resources. Our technical assistance attempts to join data analysis with decision makers to improve their ability to respond effectively to vacant properties on a local level. Our approach marries external data with community-generated data. We believe that by incorporating community-generated data our technical assistance will benefit from data left out of external sources, such as quality of life variables.

Market- and Asset-Based
In order to develop an appropriate response to vacant properties, it is imperative that plans and strategy recommendations are firmly based on the market conditions in a neighborhood. In addition, a neighborhood’s assets can play a large role in resident attraction and retention strategies. For this reason, our technical assistance also focuses on reinforcing and generating neighborhood assets.

Strategic
To address vacant property issues, DVPC encourages the use of multiple strategies in a targeted and phased approach. Due to the complex nature of vacant properties, there is no single “silver bullet” strategy for responding to vacant properties in Detroit. Even when looking at vacant properties in the same neighborhood, the same strategy may not work for a property that has been vacant for five years and a property that was just foreclosed upon. In order to respond effectively to vacant properties, any plan must employ the use of many layered strategies that take into consideration variables such as ownership, property condition, and location.

Neighborhood-specific
We believe that though most communities in Detroit are incurring problems associated with vacant properties, these communities are not all experiencing these problems in the exact same way. Variable factors impacting a neighborhood’s experience include, but are not limited to, the neighborhood’s
foreclosure rate, area median income, quality of housing stock, local capacity, and market strength. Due to differences in vacancy impacts across the city, we provide neighborhood-specific vacant property technical assistance.