Marathon offers buyout deal to refinery neighbors
Marathon Petroleum will purchase residential properties from willing sellers in the Boynton neighborhood east of I-75 and north of Schaefer Highway, near Marathon’s petroleum refinery in southwest Detroit, the company announced Friday.
Marathon is also working with the Detroit Land Bank Authority to purchase or lease 38 abandoned homes and 140 vacant lots owned by the city or authority in the north Boynton neighborhood, with plans to raze and remove the blighted houses and create a maintained green belt providing some buffering between nearby residents and the refinery.
“We take great pride in being a part of Southwest Detroit, and we are committed to continuing our partnership with the community to improve the quality of life here,” Dave Leaver, general manager of Marathon’s Detroit refinery, said in a statement.
The beleaguered Boynton neighborhood is across I-75 from the vast refinery, and sur
rounded by about two dozen other polluting industries. Though state environmental regulators regularly find air quality in the area to meet state and federal standards, residents for decades have complained of odors, soot and irritated eyes and breathing.
“It has been extremely difficult,” said Emma Lockridge, a neighborhood resident and environmental justice organizer with Michigan United, a nonprofit policy reform organization based in Detroit, who helped spur the buyout program with Marathon.
“Particularly in the winter months, we have a thermal inversion (a cold-air weather phenomenon that reduces air mixing) and the emissions can’t rise. It doesn’t matter which way the wind is blowing when you’re living in a snow globe. You get fatigue, coughing, congestion, all kinds of things when you are inhaling irritants that you shouldn’t be.”
Under terms of the program, Marathon is offering appraised value or $70,000 to Boynton homeowners, whichever is greater, along with an additional premium payment of up to half of the appraised value. “Uninhabitable” lot owners are offered $2,000 per lot, or $5,000 for lots along Schaefer Highway.
Residents can receive a relocation bonus of $5,000 to help with moving expenses, a mortgage assistance allowance of $2,000 to help with bank fees, and a bonus for having a lawyer look at the purchase proposal.
Marathon has contracted with Community Interaction Consulting to handle purchases, and has committed $5 million to the program for 2021. Marathon will review extending the program in future years “as part of the company’s annual capital budget evaluation,” company officials said.
The consulting company will establish an office in the Boynton neighborhood in January to assist interested residents with the process, and neighborhood residents will receive information packets on the program.
Homes on South Patricia Street, closest to the refinery, will be emphasized in the buyout program’s first year. Lockridge said she suspects residents along the street will enthusiastically participate.
“My neighbor cried yesterday, she’s so overjoyed,” she said. “I think they are going to get a very overwhelming ‘yes’ to this.”
But not from all. Lockridge said she has heard from other Boynton residents who have no intention of leaving — and that’s OK.
“If you want to stay there, that is your right,” she said. “What we are pushing for are the homeowners who are saying, ‘I don’t want to endure this any longer.’”
The green belt — which will be maintained by Marathon, meaning it might get more ready attention than the city can typically provide — will offer a better quality of life and improved public safety for those who stay, Lockridge said.
“I commend Marathon for taking on this program to buy our houses,” she said. “Start with Patricia, then go to Liebold,” one block to the east. “Keep this up. And all of those other corporations, everybody around us, should be held accountable as well.”
For more information on Marathon’s Boynton neighborhood buyout program, visit boyntonppp.com/.