Torn Down / Built Back

Detroit has torn down more than it has put up in every year on record. Between 2014 and 2026 the city completed about 31,600 demolitions against roughly 940 new-construction permits — but new construction was never where the rebuilding happened. Rehab permits climbed from 48 a year in 2019 to 558 in 2025, the Land Bank moved 54,000 properties into private hands, and from 2021 the city began boarding up and stabilising buildings instead of demolishing them.

Raw counts of demolitions mostly map where the houses used to be. The share of standing stock lost is the honest measure, so every cell here is divided by the buildings actually standing in it — 235,947 citywide, walked backwards year by year. The median half-mile cell lost about a tenth of its buildings over the period. The worst lost more than half.

The permit record stops dead at 2019, so the long arc comes from the parcel file's year_built instead, and it reaches back to 1870. You can watch the city build itself: the streetcar core filling in through the 1910s and 1920s, then the enormous postwar ring — 10,497 buildings still standing went up in 1950 alone, against 4,181 in the whole quarter-century since 2000. Peak surviving years are 1950, 1948, 1941 and 1925.

That series counts survivors, not starts, which matters more the further back you go: a 1920s bar is what is left of the 1920s, not what was built then. It is labelled “still standing” everywhere for that reason. Dates run to 1701 — Detroit's founding year, on one building, plainly a placeholder — and only 32 buildings predate 1870, so the window opens there. Demolitions before 2014 and permits before 2019 are simply not published; the map greys those years out rather than drawing them as zero, and the slider spans whatever the metric you picked actually covers.

For loss behind 2014 there is one other witness: the decennial census. Detroit held 349,028 housing units in 2010 and 309,789 in 2020 — a loss of 39,239, of which the demolition record can only account for the years from 2014. Those counts are published by tract, far coarser than a half-mile hex, so they are spread across the grid by where the buildings actually are rather than by area. Housing units are not buildings, and the two censuses are ten years apart, so read that pair as a second opinion on the loss, not as a finer version of it.

Cells are pointy-top hexagons 0.5 mi across the flats, kept when their centre falls inside the Census city polygon — which carries the Hamtramck / Highland Park enclave as a hole. Building stock is the sum of num_buildings over improved parcels; stock in earlier years is reconstructed by adding back demolitions and subtracting new builds. Cells holding fewer than 25 buildings are shown but excluded from rate shading, because a rate over a handful of buildings swings wildly.

Permit types are our split: new builds are New and Foundation Only; rehabs are Residential Rehab and Addition; alterations are the Alteration type, by far the largest and covering everything from a furnace swap to a gut job — read it as investment activity, never as structures gained. Revisions are excluded so nothing is counted twice.

Coverage differs by source and the map says so rather than drawing a gap as a zero: construction dates from 2000, demolitions from 2014, permits from 2019, stabilisations 2021–2025, Land Bank sales throughout. The most recent year is partial.

Data: City of Detroit Open Data (completed demolitions, BSEED building permits, completed property stabilizations, Land Bank sales, parcels) and US Census TIGERweb. Basemap © CARTO, © OpenStreetMap contributors.