Episode 91 - Bill Pulte, Founder of Blight Authority, Solutions for Urban Decay/Crime

Date: 2018-06-14 | Duration: 31:55

Topics

Time to start thinking positively Bill’s company is helping remove wide scale blight in Detroit Detroit has 30,000 abandoned homes now owned by the government Bill has cleared 10 city blocks of blight in just 10 days Removed dangerous and dilapidated buildings where crime was flourishing Result has been a natural reduction of crime, drugs, prostitution Reducing blight significantly reduces the costs of police and fire services Developer & manufacturer interest in the now cleared, inexpensive land Key focus is using the land to provide jobs, improve economy

Transcript

[0:06]

Doo-doo-doo bum bum bum bum bum bum mmm. Come on in here. We’ve got a very special Coffee with Scott Adams. It’s the second day of what I’m calling the Summer of Love. We’re going to turn from the partisan bickering that we’ve been enjoying for the past two years—and I do say enjoying because it’s kind of fun, but it’s kind of corrosive. It’s time to start thinking positively and today is all about the positivity. Today is about solutions. Today is about Coffee with Scott Adams, and we’ll be introducing Bill Pulte in a moment. But first, do you have your beverage and are you ready for the simultaneous sip? Everybody… oh, that’s good. Simultaneous sipping right there. As I said, I’m pivoting over this summer to talk about things that work, things that are inspiring, things that are just good news, and I’m hoping that some of you

[1:09]

will join me in the switch to positivity. It’s easy to be bickering with people, but every now and then you find somebody like Bill Pulte, whom I’ll introduce in a second, who is a solution-oriented, get-it-done, make-the-world-a-better-place kind of person. I think we all need to hear more about that. So let me introduce Bill. Bill Pulte is a businessman and founder of the Blight Authority. Blight in this context is an urban area that’s rundown and neglected, and the Blight Authority is involved with a wide-scale removal of blight—in other words, the buildings themselves—in America’s inner cities. Bill’s work has been nationally recognized by Forbes magazine, CNBC, and MSNBC, and Bill was named Michigander of the Year by The Detroit News for transforming Detroit neighborhoods—the

[2:09]

toughest place you could possibly imagine to make anything better, and he’s doing it in two beautiful areas. Bill was named a top 50 philanthropist in the United States by Town & Country magazine. I think I’m going to put him higher than that: top 10, top 5 maybe. I’d like to introduce Bill. Bill, say hi to everybody. You’re talking to a few thousand, Scott. I’m hoping our sound is here. Bill, could you describe where you’ve done this work? Just give us the high level—what exactly are you doing and where have you done it so far?

Sure. We’re looking to bring our model to a bunch of different cities. We’ve gone to the city of Detroit, which obviously is very famous. There were abandoned homes—in fact, there’s over 30,000. It’s pretty hard to believe: 30,000 abandoned homes in Detroit. And then the other city that we’ve done work in is called Pontiac, which is in Pontiac, Michigan, and

[3:12]

we’ve done a tremendous job there as well. We’re looking to go to other cities right now. We’re looking at Chicago; we’re looking at parts of Ohio. Frankly, we’ve been talking to Baltimore a lot recently. Unfortunately, Scott, so many cities across the United States have this abandoned housing crisis and, as far as we know, we are the only wide-scale solution to fixing this housing crisis that exists in urban America, and that is specifically blight—rundown homes. We can talk a little bit about what happens and why this is so.

In some of our cities, let me fill in some texture here. Now, you are a private organization, or is it a public-private organization?

We are a non-profit. Therefore, we work with a private-public organization, but I make no money on it. Media and everybody are wondering what money is involved with all this—I am totally 100% non-profit on this issue, and that gives me total clearance because I’m able to just get

[4:12]

the job done.

So in the case such as Detroit, Detroit had massive amounts of blight—buildings that were just filled with crime and drugs and prostitution and that sort of thing. They had a budget to do something, right? But they just didn’t have the resources to figure out how to use that money. Is that true?

They did. Imagine that. Detroit is actually 135 square miles, so you could basically fit Paris and San Francisco in the city limits of Detroit. But the way that the government had always taken down homes was they would take down one home here, one home here, one here. What we’ve done, Scott, is we’ve gone in with a holistic approach. We concentrated in a particular geography and we go into a neighborhood that’s really suffering. For example, we went into ten city blocks in one neighborhood and combined it all together. We didn’t do this scattershot approach. We ran into this neighborhood and cleared up ten blocks of blight, Scott, in ten days. We cleared out 218 lots. It was a big area for prostitution. There were properties in the area; they left and

[5:14]

fled the area. The drugs stopped. Everything stops when we come in with our bulldozers and knock down the bad buildings. The people who are living in the perimeter, they were able to live there happily. The gunshots stopped, and the prostitution and the drug activity moved out.

I talk with my audience all the time about the power of persuasion, and especially visual persuasion, and how that could affect your psychology, your optimism, and everything else. So you say, as you just mentioned, the old way of doing it was you’d find a building and you’d tear it down, but it was still surrounded by other buildings that are full of crime and problems. It was basically like a tree falling in the woods and nobody knowing it even happened. Compare that to your approach, which is taking out entire contiguous areas. I understand that you make a big show of that with the big equipment. You do it in a compressed time which shows

[6:15]

a tremendous amount of action. It’s visual, it’s exciting, it’s big, it’s noisy, and people just come to watch, don’t they?

Fundamentally, as you said, we fundamentally alter reality in these neighborhoods. We fundamentally change the psyche of people in real-time. When they walk into these neighborhoods, imagine it’s gloomy and dark. You’ve got these abandoned homes and then all of a sudden our machines come in. It’s a look, it’s a ray of light, and it’s loud. People’s psychology—people come out on the streets, they’re cheering for us. It really is a moment that is spectacular in these cities because these people haven’t heard from people for 10, 20, 30 years. They call the police sometimes and the police won’t show up for an hour or two. Imagine if something happens. So we’re coming there and we’re offering real solutions that are visual, and so people actually start to believe.

[7:16]

There’s nothing that succeeds like success. Everybody believes that whatever they’re seeing is a trend, even if it isn’t. Your mind naturally goes to, “Well, if this is happening, there’s going to be more of that tomorrow.” In the past, what they saw was more blight every day. Every day they woke up and thought, “Well, there’s more blight. I guess tomorrow there’s going to be more blight.” You go in there and you totally shake the box and you say, “Look, there’s your blight. It’s gone now. And next week we’re going to work on another block, and that blight is going to be gone, too.” What that does is it opens up possibilities in people’s minds, right? They see an empty field in real estate that’s within a city. You normally don’t see that much empty real estate, and you just start thinking, “What can we do with this? What’s the upside?” We’ll talk about the upside in a moment, but give me an idea of the size of this. How much have you done

[8:19]

and do you have any sense of how much more could be done in the same way?

Much could be done. In fact, I think blight could be totally eliminated from the United States if we had the right leadership. I think that there’s a lot of momentum on this issue, Scott. If we took this all across the United States, you could fundamentally transform urban America. I think people are excited about what I’m doing. I’ve gone to the White House, I’ve gotten great reception, and spoken with Ben Carson. I think there’s a lot of momentum and there’s a lot of other people who are doing this. To answer your question specifically: we eliminated ten blocks in ten days. Just knocked them out.

Let me stop and pause on that because that is such an impressive number. There were ten blocks of buildings—ten city blocks of buildings in Detroit—that

[9:19]

made disappear in ten days. Imagine watching ten blocks disappear in ten days. That changes the way you think. Do you have any sense of… have you done 1% of what needs to be done in urban America? Is it 10%? How much of a dent are you putting in it?

It definitely is less than 1% in terms of the total scope, but it’s 100% of the areas that we’ve come onto. Give me another example. We went into a neighborhood called Brightmoor in Detroit. Anybody who knows Detroit knows that Brightmoor is one of the toughest areas—drug activity, gunshots. We went into Brightmoor and in under 30 days we cleared out ten city blocks of blight. It was over 500 lots. We were able to knock down not only homes but also clean up trash and debris. What’s amazing, Scott, is in these urban

[10:20]

areas, people are actually dumping trash on people’s lives. We collected over 300 car tires. We collected ten boats. We collected over 200,000 pounds of trash. This is what people are having to live around in our area, and that’s what we’ve been able to clear. We’ve cleared 100% of the areas that we’ve gone to. This is now almost like a park—people are calling it the Irish Hills of Detroit. It’s got these rolling fields when beforehand it was all trash. So I would say we’ve knocked out 100% of the stuff we focused on.

That’s amazing. In a moment I want you all to be thinking who are watching this—we’re going to ask you for some suggestions about what would be the best thing to do with this new land that’s available. What’s the best thing for the inner cities? Think about that while I talk about this. I’ve been trying

[11:24]

to figure out, talking to people who are smarter than I am, how do you handle the total problems in the inner cities. The thing that people who know more than I do say consistently is that if you don’t fix the crime, nothing else works. There is definitely a starting place, and that starting place is crime. Since you’re making such a big dent in that, one would think that you’ve gotten closer to the root problem than I’ve ever seen anybody get with any other kind of project.

Thank you for saying that, but fundamentally you have to change the visual landscape of these neighborhoods and the environment that people are living in. For instance, when a kid can’t walk to school safely because they’re afraid of a predator being in one of these abandoned homes—by the way, a true story—in Detroit there are kids who are worried about people coming out and dragging

[12:26]

them and raping them. Excuse the word, but we’ve got to identify the problem in order to solve it here. A lot of politicians don’t like me saying these things; they’re more interested in poll numbers. I’m more interested in solving the problem. Literally, kids get raped in these buildings. This shouldn’t happen in America. So we’re going in and we’re knocking down these buildings. When that kid does get to school—if the kid gets to school—they can properly study. I appreciate you saying that. In many ways, that is the root cause. I actually believe that it is, and I’ve never seen anything like it. Many people who have worked for decades have never seen anything like what we’re able to do when we go into these neighborhoods.

In your introduction when I was saying that I think you’re closer to the top philanthropy-wise in the United States… somebody can write a check, but who knows where that’s going or how well that’s being used. But people don’t like to do

[13:28]

the dirty work. You’re going to some of the worst places and doing the hardest, least rewarding kind of jobs, but it is the root cause. You went after the actual problem; it’s not just for the show.

Let’s change this to the positive now. It’s all positive that you’ve got rid of the blight, but rather than talking about the blight, let’s think of some ideas for what to do. I’ll prime the pump here. I’ve suggested that there are a number of smart startups especially who are trying to figure out how to rapidly build low-income housing with robots and everything else. There may be cool things that people can do as projects; there may be experimental companies that just need cheap real estate, possibly startups. Bill, have you seen other ideas that people suggested for the use of this cleared

[14:28]

property?

One of the things that works real well is that people naturally expand their property. For instance, let’s take the ten city blocks. Beautiful land now, totally clear. What these people actually can do in some cases for a dollar a lot is take an adjacent lot. In order to keep the integrity of the area and the beauty of the area now that it’s been officially cleaned up, how do you preserve it? What we’ve done is the government that we’ve worked with has turned to the residents and said, “Hey, would you want to own the property next to it?” You can build on it. In one case, Scott—again, remember the environment that these folks are in—they were able to add a playground for their kids. We’ve actually been able to increase property ownership by the people who have a vested interest in the success of the land.

The other thing that I’ve heard—and I have no interest in doing it myself, I’m philanthropic—is I understand in some of the areas that we’ve gone to in

[15:28]

Detroit, there’s been a lot of developer interest. When we cleared the slate, it finally gave people the visual understanding of what happened in the area, and so you can see a way where developments could happen. Another thing that we’ve been talking about with an actual NBA team has been putting a basketball court in one of the areas that we worked in. These are the kinds of things that we’ve looked at so far, Scott. But I’d like to ask you and your audience: what ideas do they have? Because that really is the part of the equation we haven’t figured out. I’ll leave you with one last thought: people always say, “What goes here after the fact?” In my opinion, there are four steps to this whole thing. I’m only step one, but I can tell you right now we won’t get to three or four until we take care of step one. I would just leave you with that thought, but I really need help figuring out step two because we haven’t quite figured that one out. I’ll admit it.

[16:30]

Yeah, so I’m seeing people saying ideas like urban farms, after-school programs, and midnight basketball. A lot of people are saying farming ideas. We’ll talk about that in a moment. Corporate headquarters. Bill, have you done any research on if you could do it, what would be the one most useful thing to do? Is it put a charter school? Is it put a basketball court? If there was one thing that made the most difference—Boys & Girls Clubs, education—where do you think is the biggest lever?

Trade school is also something we’ve seen. Urban farming and people actually bringing bees and honey into some of these urban areas that we’ve cleaned up. To answer your question specifically, I think what folks in

[17:30]

these neighborhoods need is jobs. I think if there were some kind of incentives or security—the fact is when people walk into these neighborhoods when they’re beautiful and clean, from an economic standpoint they say, “I want to put a manufacturing plant here. I want to put a business here.” I actually think that would be a huge thing. I know they have these economic zones. If you were really able to mash this blight and move across the United States with some of these incentive programs, not only could you clean up areas and make them beautiful and potentially add development and housing to them, but you could actually have the economy thriving within neighborhoods. I really firmly believe that, Scott. I mean, these people are hardworking people.

At that point, I’ve got to mention one thing. We’re going into these neighborhoods and people say to me, “How are you able to get away with not getting shot?” or something like this. I say, “Well, I partner with the

[18:31]

real humans who are amazing people, and when you come into their neighborhood, they will work tirelessly.” These are hardworking people. We actually employed most of the people as laborers. They would clean up. We trained them in asbestos abatement in these homes and we’ve given them jobs. So I really think the positive force here is employment. If we have a thriving economy in these areas, you could have a real state. You’ll have good education.

So employment. If you could do one thing to make it better, it would be jobs—reasonably good jobs. That almost requires a factory, doesn’t it?

In some cases, yes. In some cases, no. There’s been a lot of urban farming, for example. There could be some urban farming businesses that could support the local community. In the case of abandoned homes, you can’t clear 20 to 30 acres of urban

[19:34]

farming. So, yes, I think business on urban farming would be one. It could be pretty incredible, the possibilities.

Have you ever heard of the phrase “food equality”?

No.

That’s something I heard from Hawk Newsome, a Black Lives Matter leader. Apparently, one of the big variables in school performance and also violence is food. If people are eating the right kind of food—in other words, they have a good diet—they perform better, they’re less angry, and apparently, there’s some science to that. Now, when we talk about urban farming, I don’t think it would be efficient to actually just grow outdoors, right? Are you talking about an indoor farming facility?

Actually both. It’s amazing what’s happening. I’m trying to stay positive here. We haven’t yet had that opportunity to really explore that because

[20:36]

some of these areas just don’t have the land. These abandoned homes are scattered all throughout the city in Detroit. But an interesting thing going on right now is people actually using bees and using honey and using that in terms of the blight, and actually, I think those are pretty viable businesses. Again, I don’t have this equation figured out, that’s why I would be really interested in what folks have to say.

I have a small investment in a company in this field—indoor farms. I’m not going to pimp the investment, but the point is that I’ve seen it up close and there are a lot of firms that are in this space now. I would think that they’re looking for a cheap space and cheap labor to take it to the next level because they want to build something, but cost is really everything if you’re doing indoor farming. So if there’s anybody listening to this who has a connection to any indoor farming people, by the way,

[21:37]

if somebody had a great idea and wanted to take advantage of this, how could they contact the right person? Would they contact the Blight Authority or somebody else to actually use the land?

Yes, blightauthority@gmail.com is our email. We’ve got a lot of volunteers through that and through Twitter, Scott. At symbol… hello? Can you say that again? We lost the connection just for a moment when you said the address. It’s an email address?

Yes, blightauthority@gmail.com. We’ve got a lot of volunteers from that as well. Also, my handle on Twitter is @pulte. I’ve urged people to tweet ideas at me, frankly, Scott. Much like you’ve done, I’ve been able to get some good ideas, so I can direct message people on there. If anybody has ideas, please tweet at me @pulte.

[22:39]

Alright, so @pulte or email blightauthority@gmail.com. I saw a question go by that I meant to ask: who owns all this land after it’s cleared?

This will shock people, but in many cases in these urban cities, the government is actually the largest or one of the largest landowners in the city. We didn’t talk a lot about this earlier, but the big problem is foreclosure. What happens is a lot of these homes get foreclosed on and so, inevitably, the government owns them. So that’s actually one of the things that happens in terms of the blight. It’s terrible, but the government owns them.

It’s sort of the good news/bad news. Whenever I see a disaster I always say to myself, “Well, there’s something good in here; we just have to figure it out.” Urban blight is an enormous disaster, but one of the odd outcomes of that, after you’ve cleared the land, is that the ownership of all

[23:40]

these contiguous blocks is the same entity: the city. So that’s like an opportunity that you wouldn’t get if you hadn’t had this problem. Would the government give it away to people who could do something with it? Frankly, that’s where the opportunity is for your listeners and for a lot of other people across the United States. The government, in many cases from governments I’ve spoken to, doesn’t really want to own this land.

The government doesn’t want this land and they would give it to you or sell it to you for a dollar? What’s the situation there?

In many cases, a dollar a piece. I’m not totally up to speed on it, but if you want large swaths of contiguous land it probably costs more. That’s just me thinking out loud, but the government does not want to be in this. You may remember when Detroit went through its bankruptcy, there was this whole thing of whether this land was an asset or a liability. What we’re trying to do is take it from a liability and turn it into an asset. Unfortunately, though, a lot of

[24:41]

this land is still available for a low price. But if we go in there and do a good job and then other people come after us, hopefully, it’ll be worth a lot more than a dollar in the future.

There’s a question that says “What are the lots zoned for?” which is a good question. And related to that, I saw another question: are the local governments helping or are they part of the problem? I’m going to say that they’re helping, otherwise, you wouldn’t have been able to do what you’ve done.

Well, let me say this: I would say that I’ve been uniquely able to go into these governments and deal with politicians, both Republicans and Democrats. I call this a bipartisan issue. I go in there and I really partner with them. You’ve talked a lot about the prisons of the mind, and I firmly believe that by talking to people about this solution, we are breaking people out of how they thought about it. When you’re able to do that with some of these folks—both the bureaucratic people as well as politicians—we’ve actually been able to break them out of that mental prison and they’ve partnered with us beautifully. In fact, they’ve thought through some of the solutions on

[25:42]

this issue. So my experience has been that it is difficult, but with the right partners, the government can work very easily on this. To get to your second question about the zoning: that definitely is an issue, but I would say it’s a very small issue because if you go to the government in some of these urban areas and you have a legitimate good idea that the community is behind, often you can rezone. It really comes down to the merit of your idea and whether you can get it done.

How long do you think it would take for somebody who had a good idea to get rezoned? Even though it’s possible and the system exists for that and everybody wants it, could it still take a long time just because that’s the way cities work? I would guess that if you were behind the idea, it might get done a little bit faster.

[26:43]

Alright, so I’m looking at the comments. Somebody asked to clarify your Twitter: it’s @pulte. Alright, just looking at people’s comments coming back. Somebody has asked a few times what you think about cops on foot instead of being in their cars? That’s a little off of your beat, but it’s one of the things you can imagine for these areas once they’re transformed.

I think if you get rid of the blight, the need for the police and the fire officials frankly goes down. That would be really my only comment. I’ll tell you, in some cases, there are thousands of fires in abandoned homes in many of these cities a year. In some cases, the fire department is one of the

[27:45]

biggest parts of the budget because they go out there and fight fires in buildings where people are setting fires. So I would just say that if you get rid of the blight, it takes care of a lot of the problems with the police and the fire. These people in these urban neighborhoods, in my experience, they are amazing people. They just want somebody to help clean things up, and they don’t have bulldozers and machines to go in there and knock the stuff down.

Okay, so I’m just looking at the comments now. Any other ideas for what to do with that land? I do like the idea of using them for technology-forward ideas. There must be people who want to build structures that are the best technological structures, the ones that are the cheapest. There are companies doing 3D printing. If you ever wanted a place to

[28:46]

do a thing that hasn’t been done before and is also cool and helpful, it feels like this would be the place. I’d have to say indoor farming looks like a good bet, but I don’t know how many jobs that produces. I think I would go for jobs over indoor farms, although that might be part of it. Bill, have you seen any types of businesses in particular that are just ideal in terms of the types of people they need for the jobs? I’m thinking of things like call centers where there’s a high density of employees in the space. Has anybody suggested a thing that just jumps out as the obvious kind of business you’d do out there?

I think call centers would be a huge one to your point, Scott. Call centers would be great. The other thing is that in many of these urban neighborhoods, the infrastructure has not been updated for 20 or 30 years. If somebody wants a job right now

[29:46]

in an urban environment, there’s a whole thing in Detroit right now about how if you want a job in the suburbs, you have to travel God knows how long. So this is really the Golden Age of bringing factories into these urban environments and really creating an opportunity for people who frankly haven’t had opportunity in 10, 20, 30 years.

Wow. So just by having affordable housing closer to the jobs, that’s got to be a big part of the solution. We’re having a little bit of clipping on the audio now, so I think we’re going to wind down because I think we’ve said what we need to. Thank you so much, not only for joining me on the Periscope but for the work you’re doing. This is exactly the sort of thing that the Golden Age, as we like to say, is perfect for.

[30:46]

I like it for its example; I like it for its optimism, its inspiration, and I think the country owes you a big debt. To anybody who thinks they can help out in some way, you know how to find him. I’m going to thank you for joining us. Thank you.

Alright, that was Bill coming to us through the WinHub interface app. Our connection wasn’t as strong there at the end; the sound got a little choppy. I’m not going to go too much further on this; I want to keep it on this single topic. I’m going to figure out how to get better audio to do this model—having a microphone on the phone is not ideal, but we can improve that as we go. Let’s keep it optimistic, let’s focus on what works, and

[31:50]

let’s have a great summer.