Detroit Mayor Dave Bing Offers Cops Abandoned Homes for $1,000

Detroit Mayor Dave Bing doesn't just want cops to police the city's neighborhoods -- he wants them to live in them as well.

The mayor has launched a new program offering police abandoned homes in Detroit for $1,000, in the hopes of enticing the city's officers -- more than half of whom live in Detroit's suburbs -- to return to the underpopulated city.

Bing said the program would help improve the relationship between the Detroit police and the city's crime-plagued neighborhoods. He also said he hoped it would encourage others to return to Detroit, whose population has steadily declined since the 1950s. Bing said he has been looking for innovative ways to reverse the decades-long trend.

Detroit Mayor Offers Cops Abandoned Homes for $1,000

Carlos Osorio, AP

A vacant house sits north of downtown Detroit. Mayor Dave Bing is offering police officers abandoned homes for $1,000 to entice them to live in city neighborhoods.

"We hope this serves as a call to action for other corporations, organizations and individuals to live where they work," Bing said at a press conference Monday, according to the Detroit Free Press. "Detroiters want to live in safe, clean neighborhoods. They deserve nothing less."

The city is making 200 abandoned homes in two of Detroit's most stable and historic neighborhoods available to the officers, who will also receive $150,000 each in federal grants for home renovations if they join the program, according to The Detroit News. Until 1999, Detroit police officers were required to live within the city's borders.

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Detroit police officer William Booker-Riggs, 37, lives in the suburban city of Southfield but said he was looking forward to moving back to Detroit and buying one of the abandoned homes. He told The Detroit News he was looking at "three-bedroom bungalows to mini-mansions" and said his daughter has already "asked for three bedrooms for herself."

Officer LaDawn Russell said she was considering buying one of the homes as well. She told the Free Press she moved to the suburb of Oak Park in 2007, where "around New Year's Eve, I don't hear gunshots."