Back to episode — Episode 411 Scott Adams - Bill Pulte Talks About Progress on Inner City Blight and More
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y prepared. And you will join me for the simultaneous sip. All right. With my microphone on you could hear Bill but I couldn't because I used the same plug for my microphone as I do for the headphones on the iPad. So this is... thank you all for coming. And Bill P, let's talk about the Blight Authority. Can you give us the quick description of what it is for the... probably let's do it. Sure. Go…
← Previous segment →e Blight Authority is we take large equipment and other resources and we go into neighborhoods that are completely forgotten about in America, whether that be urban or rural neighborhoods. We go into neighborhoods where the police don't want to go, where frankly the government and politicians have failed the people in the neighborhoods, and we go in, we clean up the area, we get rid of the crime, we get rid of the blight, and we make the areas beautiful. And we're doing it neighborhood by neighborhood, Scott, city by city.
We've done great work in Detroit. We did 14 city blocks in Detroit. We went to Pontiac, Michigan, where we've only got about 99 homes to go, and we're turning around America's cities one city at a time.
So I'm showing a few pictures that you sent me. So here, here's the type of house in these blighted urban areas. This is just a corner of it. I blew it up so you can see. Yes, and the reason I sent that, Scott, was because this is an example of a home that is... or structure, as I call it, a vacant blighted structure that needs to come down. And there's a whole debate right now about whether these structures should come down, but if you live in these neighborhoods it's a no-brainer. It's like that structure needs to come down. And so I gave that as an example, Scott, to basically show that's totally non-repairable.
Now there's another one that I sent you that shows what can be repaired.
Yeah, that's totally not repairable. Just, you know, that needs to go. But some others can be fixed up.
Now which cities are you working on?
Well we're working in Detroit, Michigan, and Pontiac, Michigan. We're about to unveil in the next four weeks, Scott, a new inner city that we're going to. It'll be either Atlanta... Bill P got disconnected, which he will realize in a moment, and then when he comes back... so he was going to tell you that we've got other cities lined up. There he is. He's back.
All right, Bill will be back and finish that sentence in a moment. Bill P, are you back?
Yes. New option here with Periscope. This is pretty cool.
So all right. So you were just saying which cities. You mentioned Detroit and Pontiac and it'll either be Atlanta, Baltimore, St. Louis, Los Angeles. We're looking at maybe even Miami. So we'll have an announcement on which city we decide in the next four weeks and we'll let everybody know.
Excellent. And so step one is to get rid of these homes which are sources of every kind of crime, drugs, prostitution, rape, you name it. It's all happening there. And when you clean it out it gives that neighborhood a chance to rebuild once you've gotten rid of that.
Now you work with the locals, right?
That's correct. Entirely with the locals. And as you said, step one is to get rid of the crime, get rid of the drugs, make it a beautiful clean area again. And then steps two and three is to do something different with it. And I know we're going to talk about that in a second. But yes, we work with the locals and I say that we bring them the artillery and the locals tell us where to shoot the artillery. We defer to them.
So you work with the city as well as the residents and the neighborhoods. Who pays for it all? Where's the money come from?
Mostly philanthropic. Everybody can visit blightauthority.com. We've raised a ton of money specifically in Detroit and other cities. It goes to knocking down homes and cleaning the blight. So it's all philanthropic, Scott.
All right. That's amazing. And the locals love this, right? When the bulldozers come in they get pretty happy, don't they?
Oh yeah. And I'll tell you right now, we say when the equipment moves in we turn on the lights and the cockroaches scatter. And I'm not kidding you, Scott
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. I mean we bring these big pieces of equipment in. If you could just imagine these big pieces of equipment running down the street. Essentially we've seen drug houses scram out of the area before. When these people see these big machines they get the heck out of the area because they know overwhelming force has arrived and that we're not screwing around anymore. All right. I love the visual pers…
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