Understanding Blight Ticket Compliance in Detroit

Property blight affects more than 20% of properties in Detroit. The City of Detroit issues tickets to owners of these blighted parcels, which incentivize residents to maintain their properties. However, the compliance rate for these tickets is under 10%, which leaves tens of millions of dollars in unpaid fines. In this paper, we seek to understand why compliance is so low and how violations could be better enforced to effectively address the city’s blight epidemic. To this end, we build a predictive model that forecasts ticket compliance, perform in-depth analysis on the groups of residents who own blight-ticketed properties, and investigate how compliance varies between these very different groups.