Inside one in a series of abandoned homes along a blighted block of Detroit's Brightmoor neighborhood, filmmaker Tom McPhee walks through the remnants of a life – broken furniture, scattered knickknacks, and a flooded basement.
"This is fresh water that's coming into the basement here," McPhee points out. "All of that plumbing has been ripped away 'cause someone found a value in it, so they don't care that it's running. This is all over the city."
People like him help catalogue blight in Detroit, but the sheer size of this city makes it hard to pin down: Detroit has 380,000 parcels of land stretched across 139 square miles, so many parcels that its antiquated computer system can't keep up.
Last fall White House officials created a Blight Task Force here in partnership with some private foundations, to determine just what property is salvageable, among the estimated 80,000 abandoned buildings.
Now that information is pouring into a long room with dozens of people poised over laptops — a White House Situation Room-style mapping area with computerized images of all buildings in the city, and outlines of what should be done with them. This is "Mission Control."
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