Detroit Foreclosures on Street View

One in three homes in Detroit has been foreclosed in the last 15 years. The result of all those lost homes is physically evident on the city's streets. It is also very evident when exploring the city on Google Maps Street View.

GooBing Detroit uses the historical imagery function in Google Maps Street View to show how Detroit has changed over the years. By juxtaposing Street View images of the same location from different years GooBing Detroit is able to provide an insight into how the streetscapes of Detroit have changed in the first two decades of this century.

The historical Street Views used on GooBing Detroit can be accessed on Google Maps. If you open a Street View panorama on Google Maps a little clock icon in the top left-hand corner of the scene allows you to access the historical Street View captured by Google. If you click on the icon a timeline opens allowing you to view the available Street View imagery by year.


Back in 2014 the New York Times also used Google Maps Street View to take a closer look at foreclosures in Detroit. The Times created a really impressive montage of properties facing foreclosure using Google Maps Street View to show the 43,634 Properties in Detroit That Were on the Brink of Foreclosure in 2014.

The mosaic of 43,634 pictures of Detroit houses is a very effective method to convey the sheer scale of the problem facing many Detroit homeowners in 2014. If you click on the small thumbnail image of a property then a larger image of the home will appear. The good news for Detroit is that the number of foreclosures in the city fell for the third year running in 2018.

Gentrification in Detroit

Turning the Corner is an Esri story map which identifies Detroit city blocks which are most likely to experience transformational neighborhood change. Using the map you can view which city blocks in Detroit are most and least likely to become gentrified and most and least likely to experience the displacement of local residents.

The map assesses the likelihood of transformational neighborhood change in a block based on both qualitative and quantitative research. The qualitative research includes surveys of residents’ own perceptions about neighborhoods. The quantitative research is based on factors such as residential vacancies, residential turnover, demolition permits, business investment and local crime data. How these factors can effect neighborhood change is explained as you progress through the story map.

Blocks on the map that are colored yellow are most likely to experience (or are already experiencing) neighborhood change. Blocks colored blue are the least likely to change. If you click on a yellow block on the map you can view details on which factors are most likely contributing toward neighborhood change (and toward potential displacement).

Detroit's Deadliest Days

50 years ago, in July 1967, a riot broke out in Detroit which lasted five days. By the time the riot ended 43 people were dead, 1,189 were injured, over 7,200 people had been arrested and more than 2,000 buildings had been destroyed.

To mark the 50th anniversary of the 1967 Detroit Riot the Detroit News has released a map exploring every single one of the 43 deaths that occurred during the riot. The map doesn't attempt to explain the causes of the riot or how it progressed. It just attempts to explain who died, where they died and how.

Five Deadly Days in Detroit uses Carto's Odyssey.js story map format to provide a simple chronological account of what happened in Detroit. The basemap used for the story map is a United States Geological Survey map from 1968. As you scroll through Five Deadly Days in Detroit the map pans to the location where one of the 43 people were killed. The text beneath the map provides an account of who died and how they were killed. This text is illustrated with vintage images from the Detroit News coverage of the riot in 1967.

Property Speculators of Detroit

Nearly 20% of Detroit properties are owned by speculators. You can explore these speculator owned properties on the PropertyPraxis interactive map.

All speculator owned land parcels are colored on the PropertyPraxis map. If you select one of the colored buildings on the map you can view details on the property's owner and view a Street View image of the building.

It is possible to refine the properties shown on the map by individual property speculator. You can use the in-built search facility to search for individual speculators. Alternatively if you click on a speculator's name in the information panel the map display all the properties in the city owned by that speculator.

Demolishing Detroit to Make it Better

Q. How do you improve Detroit?
A. By knocking it down.

It may sound like the punchline to a cruel joke but one way Detroit is planning to improve its built environment is through blight elimination. Detroit has received $107.3M to help remove blight in the city through the demolition of abandoned and neglected buildings.

Demolition Impact has mapped the 5,812 building demolished in Detroit from January 2014 - September 2015. Once buildings have been demolished neighbors are able to purchase the now empty lots. Some other vacant homes in the city have been sold at public auction and the new owners have been given six months to restore the properties.

The Detroit Creative Solutions map shows not only the city's demolished buildings but also buildings sold at auction and side lot sales,

43,634 Street View Houses in Detroit

The New York Times has released a really impressive visualization using Google Maps Street View to show the 43,634 Properties in Detroit That Were on the Brink of Foreclosure This Year.

The mosaic of 43,634 pictures of Detroit houses is a very effective method to convey the sheer scale of the problem facing many Detroit homeowners.

It's possible that the New York Times gave the job of hunting out the Street View images of 43,634 properties to one of their interns. However it is more likely that the Times used the Google Maps API to geocode the addresses and then used the latitude and longitudes to return the static Street View images of the houses from the Street View Image API.

This isn't as easy as it sounds. If you just enter a latitude and longitude into the Street View Image API you will get a random facing Street View from that location. To actually retrieve the Street View image of the desired house you also need the correct heading to tell the API which direction to look.

Herein lies the problem. How do you quickly retrieve the correct heading for 42,623 addresses to ensure that your Street View images are all facing in the correct direction. One solution is to use the Google Maps API to find the nearest available Street View to the address and then use the computeHeading (from: LatLng, to:LatLng) function to calculate the correct heading (the two LatLngs being your nearest available Street View latitude and longitude and the latitude and longitude of your address).

I can't find a good map that demonstrates this function in action - in order to show the Street View of a house. However this Point the Street View to a Marker demo uses the exact same principal to find the correct heading to show a Street View looking towards a marker on a map.

Mapping Blight in the Motor City

The Blight Removal Task Force was set-up in Detroit in order to address the growing problem of blighted properties in the city. The first step in being able to clear and remove the blight affecting residential, commercial, and public structures in the entire city is to know where they are.

Motor City Mapping is the result of a city wide physical survey of all land parcels in the city. The map visualizes the results of the 5,279 parcels surveyed so far and allows the Task Force to identify and prioritize parcels requiring attention.

The map provides heat map views of the condition and occupancy of buildings surveyed. Heat maps can be viewed by neighborhood, zip-code areas, council districts and by census tracts. The map also provides heat map views of vacant lots with dumping, structures with fire damage and structures that need boarding.