A Community Standard To Determine What is Blight?

As a community, we are increasingly asking our local government, City, Township, or County to enact and enforce ordinances to eliminate blight or nuisances. Intelligent people approach the subject with trepidation. While we might agree upon the appearance of a blighted or diseased plant, it is not so easy to identify or define blighted private property.

Decades ago, before much of society accepted pornography and obscenity as a norm, the Supreme Court recognized the risk in legislating what constitutes obscenity, and necessarily limited the scope of the criteria. The first measure was “the average person, applying local community standards, looking at the work in its entirety, must find that it appeals to the prurient interest”.

Cheboygan County is by no measure a racially or ethnically diverse community, but it is a very economically diverse community. Bridge magazine in 2015 reported Northern Michigan has some of the worst income disparity in the country.  In Cheboygan County, the top 5% had a median income of $241,494 in 2015. The lowest 20% of income earners had a median income of $10,927. If the Cheboygan County income inequality seems outrageous, Emmet County with a median income for the top 5% of $374,282 and the bottom 20% median income of $13,656 ranked 2^nd in the state among Michigan’s 83 counties.     

The community standards of what looks nice, looks right, looks attractive to these economically diverse groups can vary widely. The owners of a modest home in the City of Cheboygan or a more rural location living within the statistical median family income of $38,000 might have one standard. Keep the grass cut, bring the garbage can back in, and do not turn the front yard into an automobile parking lot or worse, a wrecking yard. The ownership of a nice boat, travel trailer, snowmobiles or atv’s is a matter of pride and will invariably get parked in the front yard for all to see and perhaps envy.

People living in a more up-scale neighborhood or with a cottage on a lake, some of them in that top 5%, with a median $241,494 income, will have a very different standard. Manicured, fertilized, irrigated lawns, leaves raked as they fall, with professional landscaping and flowerbeds surrounding an always maintained and immaculate residence. I know many including myself enjoy that curbside appeal that results from pride of ownership and money freely spent. I cannot personally afford that standard. I know the majority of my neighbors by choice or economic necessity have some lower standard of aesthetics. 

How do we control, minimize, or eliminate private property blight with this huge disparity in incomes, expectations, and community standards? If I were protective of my investment in a $500,000 home, I would organize a formal or informal homeowner’s association to assure everyone in the neighborhood had similar expectations and a shared community standard. Pride of ownership must also compete with our Christian ideology condemning the worship of material goods. Never love anything that cannot love you back.

If you expected me to offer some simple solution to blight, I am sure you are disappointed. After listening to many people’s expectations of what they want a blight ordinance to accomplish, I am always disappointed. I watched the Mullett Township Board under the leadership of Supervisor Mary Anne Gale waste thousands of dollars in legal costs revising and revising again a blight ordinance that she eventually tossed. It started with the most onerous of enforcement action available under Michigan law, eminent domain. Make your house and property meet some community standard set by the top 5% or we will take it away from you. That is as ridiculous as telling a native Cheboyganite that our rusty, trusty, salt corroded winter beater needs to be patched, painted, and polished before it can be driven down your street.  

I do know some of the factors that contribute to blight. Eliminating risk factors, quitting smoking, is easier than curing the disease of lung cancer. We have low-income neighborhoods, old housing stock, many landlord owned units, high poverty rates, people on assistance, low-pay jobs, high seasonal unemployment, high drug use, and many elderly retirees on low fixed incomes. If we want to reduce blight, each of us within our personal means and abilities should be working to mitigate those risk factors.  

There is also public property blight. Our blighted infrastructure, neglected roads, sidewalks, lighting, and other things that new eyes identify as ugly can create a lasting and negative memory for visitors. That is another subject for another day.