Scarcity in Detroit

When I hear the words scarcity and austerity, my mind immediately jumps closer to home, to Detroit. Detroit was home at one point to 70,000 abandoned buildings (30,000 of those being houses), and 90,000 empty lots. The average cost per square foot for a commercial demolition decreases as the square footage of the project rises, but the general national average is $4.00-$8.00 per sq. ft. For a medium sized project of a 10,000 sq. ft. building, you could expect to pay between $40,000 and $80,000.With such extreme conditions in Detroit and high costs of demolition, many architecture firms are beginning to focus on adaptive reuse and develop these abandoned buildings into really interesting spaces Neumann Smith Architects has completed many interesting hotel and office building projects. 

While Detroit has a lot of large industrial buildings that work well for adaptive reuse of an office, hotel, or other larger function, I think that one of the huge questions in Detroit is going to be about the abandoned houses. The location, size, and most likely zoning of these homes will not provide an easy transition to a business function, and it will be more difficult to get the funds to improve these homes and find the people who will live in them.