LOVELAND in the News

To get a handle on how bad of a tax mess Detroit is sitting in right now, look no further than this depressing map showing every property in the city suffering "tax distress."

One of the biggest changes to WDWOT is a new premium section, which for a $25 annual fee offers select features like the ability to save maps and searches. Premium members can also make private comments only available to other premium members and access an alert system that notifies members when a property's status changes.

the compilation of data showcases the county's online tax payment portal, where the tax status of every property in the city is assembled into what is called a 'tax distress map'. the statistics visually demonstrate that half of detroit is not paying property taxes - where a quarter of the city is eligible for tax foreclosure seen with a revenue gap of $450 million.

"If the data is in a closet, it's not going to change," said Alex Alsup, the chief product officer at Loveland Technologies, the company behind the website. Wayne County Deputy Treasurer David Szymanski praised the project, saying it serves "as an excellent tool in the rebirth of this great city."

Starting Friday morning, users will find a new, more powerful WDWOT, with added features and information. And it's right on time -- this year's foreclosure map is absolutely terrifying.

An hour later, it was standing room only. The audience was composed of a diverse group of Detroiters, some of whom had been negatively affected by the auction, some of whom had purchased properties in the auction, and others who were simply curious.

Until properties from the recent auction are sorted out, Loveland Technologies will be focused on foreclosure prevention, staff member Alex Alsup said Wednesday night. A large part of that will be educating the some 43,000 residents at risk of losing their homes to tax foreclosure. Alsup said that in the past some homeowners have thought that they could buy their house back in the second round of the auction at less what they owe in taxes, "an extremely risky proposition."

Building on that, why not clearly show people where they are, what they are, let them talk about them, apply for them, consider best options, offer contracts to clean, build or deconstruct them? Then migrate the successes of that to dealing with the city's other 120,000 or whatever number of vacant lots and buildings. That's part of our focus with Why Don't We Own This? and we're ready to work with any level of government that can make it happen at scale.

Paffendorf toured 20 empty homes that are up for auction Monday, meeting maybe 15 neighbors. "None of them had any clue the auction was happening," Paffendorf wrote in an email.

"I've seen people being a lot more vocal about plans for properties, which is a really constructive conversation to have in the light of day, rather than a bunch of people feeling blindly around the auction and running into other peoples plans and interests," says Alex Alsup of LOVELAND.

With properties freshly left-over from the auction, there's a total logic for why they should be tracked and managed this way, serving as a sort of virtual land bank. Successes from the approach can then be applied to the tens and tens of thousands of other empty buildings and vacant lots not at this auction.

"We are trying to build a better Detroit through transparency," he said. "The city is just so bad at that. There is an uninformed people and an uninformed marketplace, which makes it somewhat impossible for a democracy and a market to function properly."

I recently met up with Jerry P. holding a roundtable discussion at a bar called PJ's Lagerhouse, where each night that week, they had posted up for hours and invited anyone interested in learning more, contributing opinions, or spreading the word. Keep in mind that they stand to make zero dollars from the sale of any of the homes.

"Somebody’s been mowing the same vacant lot for 10-20 years sometimes, or boarding up the houses, and you ask a simple question like ‘Who’s the owner of that, who’s responsible for that?’ and people just don’t know because there’s no easy resource to know. There’s no easy resource to take you through the next steps of, 'Where do you go next, who do you get on the phone or ask if you want to buy it, or get permission if you want to build something somewhere.' So, a lot of the tools we build are designed to answer just that question, they’re like x-ray glasses to see what’s really going on in the city, in the physical space around you."

It is looking to create a bigger conversation about vacant, underutilized property next fall at the next Wayne County Tax Foreclosure Auction. Paffendorf equates it with a aggressive grassroots effort to find owners for every building. "LOVELAND has been talking very seriously about the possibility of doing a large crowd-funding effort for next fall's auction," Paffendorf says. "We're think of it as a no property left behind thing."

The idea has since been moved from inches to city scale with a full-blown virtual city map complete with advanced data about Detroit properties – including detailed information pertaining to auctions. It’s a gamified way to look at property ownership and it has become, to Paffendorf’s surprise, a quasi-government in itself.

For those who want to streamline the process, the Detroit-based tech startup Loveland Technologies is offering a free online service that provides information about the auction's properties at whydontweownthis.com, which features an easy-to-use interactive map and Google Street View images of properties.

Paffendorf says he looks forward to working with Yeoman’s partner/manager James Feagin again. “He has a lot of interesting ideas for how to bring diverse groups into Detroit,” Paffendorf says. One idea is Peak Population Day, where organizers would try to lure 1.3 million people to the city for a massive block party along Woodward Avenue from the Riverfront to 8 Mile. That will require building some digital tools for organizing big groups, which Loveland is working on now.

Making this information transparent, Paffendorf reasons, will spur the sale and repair of properties—a vital service in a city where more than a third of all residential parcels are vacant.

LOVELAND Technologies is planning a project called Imagine Detroit Together, a technological and organizational infrastructure that allows Detroiters to link up with one another rapidly for large-scale demonstrations of unity.

The goal of the event is to kick off a 30 day drive that will generate 10,000 new volunteer hours for neighborhood-based not-for-profits. The event will introduce a new, web-based data site that will help volunteers match themselves with not-for-profits. This tool, developed by Loveland, will build on the platform developed for "Why Don't We Own This?" The site will be the region's largest, web-based collection of volunteer opportunities...

"You try things and some work, some don't, you retreat back into your shell a little bit, and then you try again," he says. "I try to just listen to people, go to neighborhood meetings. Social permission goes a long way. You'll get smacked if you don't make friends, don't put in some time to get people's stories."

His new venture, Loveland Technologies, is an experiment in using cyber-technology to tackle Detroit's huge housing and delinquent property problems... He recently launched an interactive web site mapping and profiling for potential buyers each of the roughly 13,000 houses in foreclosure that the city put up for sale in an eBay-style auction last month. Prices started at about $500.

It brings order to what used to be a phone book of confusing information, making it easily accessible to everyone — for free. It puts local residents on an even playing field with speculators so they can take charge of the problem properties in their neighborhood and turn them into assets.

Ever been at the Dollar Store and thought, what the hell, give me that WHOLE SHELF! Such is the mentality that might apply to this round of the Wayne County Tax Auction's High Roller List.

That interactivity helped one city resident sidestep a potential auction disaster. A visitor to the site saw Michael Lee's metal finishing business on the auction list and posted a message about it.

This is information everyone should have access to. If we try to charge people for it, we would just be repeating the same mistakes. That's not what we're about. There are people who are moving out of the city or missing out on opportunities because of the environmental conditions here.

What’s really great is that what was, for a very long time, a very murky and unclear process (as of last year when I participated) is getting much more visible and easier to circumnavigate– thanks to the good work of Team LOVELAND.

This year's tax foreclosure auction promises to be the biggest yet with a record number of properties and Wayne County extensively promoting it. Add in the convenience of it being online and participation could be record setting. Paffendorf and his two other co-founders at LOVELAND Technologies hope WhyDontWeOwnThis.com will enable locals to buy problem properties and turn them into assets, keeping them out of the hands of speculators and absentee landlords.

So thank goodness for LOVELAND Technologies and its founder Jerry Paffendorf who found this presentation of info wildly inadequate. "Someone needs to make this clear. Otherwise it's just a phone book."

Either one incredibly wealthy entity buys you or a whole bunch invest in the success of your project without the legal sense of ownership and controls. The latter option is all about spiritual equity. - Jerry Paffendorf

This new mapping system would create an individual profile for each apartment, allowing perspective tenants to find out the basic information about the unit and take a virtual tour of it. The system also would make it easier for tenants to communicate with management to solve problems and increase the quality of life.

In addition to talks with IMDB, Proulx said he's had discussions with the folks at the Guinness Book of World Records, who tell him his film should set a new mark for the number of producers.

“We want to do some more planting, gardening and landscaping; make it so it’s a visitable park,” Paffendorf said. “We want to get into building it out so that it feels good to go over and hang out at.”

Detroit can be futuristic again, according to artist Jerry Paffendorf. Not simply by building a RoboCop statue, but by recreating itself in innovative ways.

In Detroit, entrepreneurs rave that if you want to get something done, people will help you do it. Local business owners are often happy when another business opens on the same street-instead of taking away their business, it increases it by making their neighborhoods safer and nicer.

The Inches are a powerful metaphor for units of measurement in a shrinking city. The project is a collaborative hybrid-reality experiment, with the idea being that the crisis faced by Detroit is so massive that an inch is a simple platform on which to build, the same way a seed can become a tree.

At 5:07 p.m. Saturday, the Coys will publicly unveil their newest — and most ambitious — project, a large $13,000 neon sign mounted on the Roosevelt Hotel on 14th off Michigan Avenue in Corktown. Called "No Vacancy," it plays off the emptiness of the defunct hotel and features pigeons, which are often seen in their work to represent their ubiquity in urban settings.

The point of Loveland is to start somewhere, together, to connect with people, amplify the awesome and see where it goes. And so far, as the mayor of Loveland, I find the inchventure tremendous, for all its ostensible tiny-ness.

The first project that Loveland helped to fund was "Monumental Kitty". This was part of the Corktown Pedestrian Overpass Improvement Project connecting Corktown with downtown via a safe, lit and vibrant overpass.

People involved in the type of social entrepreneur projects DeBruyn and Paffendorf are working on find plenty of opportunity to work together in the real world too. And the scene in Detroit is open, DeBruyn said. Anyone with an idea shouldn't be too timid to speak up or think only cool, hipsters are welcome.

Another fantastic project from Detroit: Catie Newell's Salvaged Landscape takes wood reclamation one step further, transforming burnt lumber from an arsoned house into a new spatial volume and material landscape. Supported by Detroit nonprofit The Imagination Station...

This way of thinking small can have a big impact. It's different, adds value to the community and to individuals and makes you sit back and think about the possibilities. Just think about micro funding a novel all the way up to a project to bring clean water to Africa.

Whether it amounts to a huge revival of investment real estate in Detroit or an interesting art project is a moot point. Our focus is on the Loveland Project as another step in showing the world the creative talents in Detroit and the ability of Detroiters to reinvent (dare we say, ‘cultivate’?) what’s around them.

Boston-based filmmaker Erik Proulx is working to tell a story of rebirth and reinvestment in Detroit, and to complete the project he's asking individuals to fund the project. Frame-by-frame.

“We started realizing that if we could get the real-life data, we could use the same social map system we have [for Plymouth and Hello World] and apply it to the whole city,” Paffendorf says. “You could mouse over every parcel and see who owns it; if it’s the city, if it’s private, if it’s vacant, if it’s for sale, then you could click on it and comment on it. Block by block, people in the city could have a conversation about the things they want to see.”

Work, though, is what this D.I.Y. city has not shied away from. In June a group including Mr. Paffendorf of Loveland spent $1,000 for two abandoned houses across from the vacant Michigan Central Station, a symbol of Detroit’s decline, and, along with the Packard plant, a must-stop on any hardscrabble tour. They renamed the buildings — shells filled with debris and a few squatters — Imagination Station and hope to transform them into an artists’ enclave and green space. There wasn’t much to see yet, but Mr. Paffendorf offered a tour. “Welcome home,” he said, pushing open the battered door, with a hole where the lock should be.

The Imagination Station is exploding from the ashes of a firebombed flophouse standing — barely — in the shadow of Detroit's abandoned, antique train station. Painted colors splash from a second story window, and people congregate on the lawn to plan the future.

Detroit has real problems and in addition to all the necessary ground work it needs new online and mobile solutions for connecting and empowering people and communities, increasing transparency, fundraising, mapping, planning, globally showcasing the great local work of the less internet-savvy, making it fun to participate in reinvention, and so on down the line.

We went through appropriate city channels to try and purchase a specific lot for that but have been temporarily held up by who-knows-what city decision-making process, so the physical land for Hello World has yet to fully manifest. But that’s OK! It’s all part of the inchventure, and we promise to secure the land that people inchvest in as soon as we can.

Jerry Paffendorf, who spearheads a project to sell square-inch plots of land in the city, is building on the project's healthy Internet buzz to throw a bash Saturday at the Isaac Agree Downtown Synagogue and the adjacent Café D'Mongo's Speakeasy.

Half of everyone’s inchvestment in season 2 will go to the seven projects, including the Motor City Blight Busters and The Pedestrian Overpass Improvement Project. “So our first one that we have…we’re raising 1500 dollars to help do a sculpture called monumental kitty, which is going to be on the overpass by old Tiger Stadium. We keep working on the system trying to come up with fun ways to get people participating in the city and bringing in the cool ideas and hopefully bringing in more money and engagement on top of the inches.”

At SF Beta last week, I had the chance to meet the folks behind Loveland, one of the coolest and most unique groups to ever pass through our doors — and that’s saying a lot.

I would like to see Detroit get put back on the network. I find that idea very cool, and hopefully inspiring to other people, to think outside the box and begin a process of putting it back online, showing people things in the city. Inviting them to have an ownership stake in the city, however modest, still has a psychological impact.

Then there's Loveland, Jerry Paffendorf's "wild social network of people, literally built out of the dirt." Paffendorf bought a vacant lot for $500 and sold it, an inch at a time for $1 per inch, to almost 600 "inchvestors" around the world. It's called Plymouth.

Today at Institute for the Future, Jerry Paffendorf is telling us about Loveland, his art/game/activism project to sell real land in Detroit, Michigan inch-by-inch, for $1/inch.

Paffendorf says Detroit is a place of opportunity and creativity. He shares an optimism about the city and his project with Ricki Collins. She's 9 years old and lives next door to the empty lot Paffendorf bought. Hers is the only house left on the block. "I want people to remember this place. Remember it. And I want people to come over so we can get to know each other, learn new things about each other," Ricki says.

I'm working hard to turn my inches into opportunities to connect people in Detroit with a larger community of innovators around the world, and I need your help, your ideas, your support and most of all, your imagination. Inches are tiny, but I hope you'll think big.

No property taxes. In some ways I look at loveland as a BS buffer - I own the property in the catalog of the city, I pay the taxes and give the inchvestors a clean-burning ownership experience. They have a piece of the world that's theirs, they can visit... all the fun things about having land, without the minuses of having to mow your lawn.

One of the innovations here I think is that just as easily as you could buy a bag of virtual fertilizer at Farmville on Facebook, you could have an actual property, even if it is Loveland terms of ownership. That is a way you could make a whole bunch of ownership and redevelopment pretty seamless. We’ve got to find ways to make land ownership more simple, cheap, fun, and social. And then highly creative.

I told him I plan to put a tomato plant on my square inch. The stem itself would take up about that much space, and if any adjoining landowners or passers-by want to help themselves to a tomato, that'd be fine with me.

I'm always motivated to work on and open up new spaces, where there's not just one particular application, but with this model you can run a number of different activities through it. Just taking land and parceling it out in such a way, even land so small, inspires ideas in everything from games and reenactments to urban farming to murals to solar power...

The metaphor of city as canvas works especially well for Detroit, a city seeking a new identity. This relatively ‘open’ landscape, coupled with inexpensive living and even cheaper real estate, make Detroit an ideal setting for these roots rebuilding efforts.