Vacant Lot Clearing & Property Maintenance in Detroit, Michigan

Detroit, Highland Park and Hamtramck are the closest ground we work to Royal Oak, twenty to thirty minutes down the Lodge or Woodward depending on the neighborhood. Highland Park and Hamtramck are their own cities, each surrounded on every side by Detroit, and all three share the same lot sizes and alley layouts from when the whole area was built out solid a century ago. Highland Park’s population today is a small fraction of what it was at its peak, and that history is written on the ground: side lots, corner lots and whole stretches of a block that sit vacant now, next to the houses that are still occupied. Detroit’s residential streets were laid out with a house on almost every lot and an alley behind nearly every block, a pattern Highland Park and Hamtramck share since all three grew up together as one built-out city.

A vacant lot left alone grows mulberry, box elder and tree-of-heaven volunteers within a couple of seasons, thick enough to hide what gets dumped in it and tall enough to reach the power lines. Alleys and fence lines between lots go the same way, and once a block’s lots are overgrown the ones next to them follow fast. Fence-line brush between a still-occupied house and the vacant lot next to it is its own steady job, since an owner who keeps their own yard mowed usually still has a wall of volunteer growth standing along the neighboring property line. We already run recurring cuts on vacant lots in Highland Park on a repeat schedule, which is the only way to keep ground like this from sliding back into brush between visits. Industrial edges and larger commercial parcels get the same equipment on a bigger scale.