450 Volunteers Help Board Up 100 Blighted Detroit Properties
DETROIT (WWJ) - More than 100 vacant homes in Detroit have their windows and doors freshly boarded up after a volunteer effort called the 100 Houses Project.
The Detroit Rescue Mission Ministries helped organize the event, along with author Mitch Album's "A Time To Help" Charity, Detroit Works Project and about 450 volunteers.
Rescue Mission President Chad Audi says more than 30,000 homes in the city need to be boarded up.
"A hundred homes may not be a lot - but makes a lot of difference as a beginning in the community that we are in today," said Audi. "We know that in this neighborhood today that there is a lot of kids - they don't have to worry about someone jumping them from those vacant homes (as they) go back and forth."
Audi says he hopes they can board up a couple hundred more homes near schools in the next few months. He says they want to focus on school areas, "we want to make sure that the kids go back and forth, safe," he said.
Gregory Chupek is a volunteer who helped in the Osborne neighborhood; "It takes one house at a time ... hopefully (we'll) clean up a little bit at a time, because this is so close to a school," he said. "It'll be safer for everybody."
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