The Detroit Land Boat Report

Ahead of the Detroit State of the City, the State of the Detroit Land Boat

News hit the wire last night that Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan will lay out a plan for ridding the city of abandoned vehicles in his annual State of the City speech tonight — including boats.

This is of particular interest to me. Over the years in Detroit, while I’ve been out surveying properties and knocking on the doors of homes behind on property taxes, I’ve also been collecting pictures of boats. Detroit Land Boats.

Here’s a few favorites:

Why are there abandoned boats on the streets of Detroit? Typically you’ll find just the fiberglass hull left on the street with anything of value stripped out. I assume it costs to drop one of these in a landfill, and the fact they’re fiberglass is probably added cost so people just dump them.

Ronnie Dahl had a great recurring bit a few years back on the local ABC news where she’d find abandoned boats in Detroit and return them to their owner. Some were suburbanites dumping in the city, some were Detroiters.

Data Driven Land Boats

I don’t update my old Detroit Land Boat Tumblr anymore, but I’ve continued to collect pictures of boats as I come across them in the city. Their numbers have declined significantly since the years I first started photographing them, around 2011 - 2016 — or so I thought…

News that the Mayor is including boats in his abandoned vehicle plan made me wonder how the Detroit Land Boat index is performing, so I turned to the City’s Open Data Portal and its Improve Detroit dataset. Improve Detroit is an app Detroiters can use to report issues across the city — potholes, fallen trees, etc. Abandoned boats are often reported too.

While you can’t specifically report an abandoned boat in Improve Detroit, many of the notes people leave when they submit a report will include a mention of an abandoned boat to specify what they’re reporting. Here’s all 623 mentions¹ of abandoned boats reported via Improve Detroit since 2015 (you can explore the map here, too):

As you can see from the counts on the map, there have been more reports of abandoned boats in recent years. Here’s Detroit Land Boat reports in Improve Detroit by quarter, 2015 - Q1 2024:

Are Detroit Land Boats really making a comeback? It certainly doesn’t seem like it from my drives around the city. Instead, I think we’re just seeing increased usage of the Improve Detroit app. If you look at quarterly growth in Detroit Land Boat reportings via Improve Detroit against overall growth in Improve Detroit reports of all kinds, you can see they track quite closely with one another.

Are Detroit Land Boats returning to shore? No, I don’t think so.

Let’s close with some more Detroit Land Boats.

Also, if you really want to go down the rabbit hole — check out Scott Hocking’s fabulous Shipwrecks series. He’s collected far more than I ever will.

1. There have actually been a total of 800+ abandoned boat reports, but there are many duplicate reports, so I’ve tried to remove those from the count.