Cody Rouge Green Stormwater Infrastructure — Turning Detroit Vacant Lots into Rain Gardens

In November 2015, the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD) built its first green stormwater infrastructure project on Detroit Land Bank Authority vacant land: four bioretention rain gardens on vacant lots in the Cody Rouge neighbourhood on the city's west side, designed by a University of Michigan team led by Professor Joan Nassauer. It was the first DWSD–Land Bank collaboration of its kind.
Each garden is engineered to capture up to 300,000 gallons of stormwater underground per year, roughly 1.2 million gallons across the four lots combined, reducing combined-sewer overflow into the Rouge River watershed. The project sits within a broader, permit-driven commitment: DWSD's federal NPDES permit required $15 million of green stormwater infrastructure investment between 2013 and 2017 to cut 2.8 million gallons of stormwater flow during the two-year design storm.
A follow-up University of Michigan research programme (Neighborhood, Environment and Water — Green Infrastructure, “NEW-GI”) studied resident perceptions of different vacant-lot greening designs and their relationship to depressive symptoms and household flooding; planted bioretention designs scored significantly better than unmanaged control lots on perceived home value, safety and neighbourhood interaction.
The Cody Rouge project itself remains small in scale — four lots — relative to Detroit's tens of thousands of vacant parcels, and the sources found document this specific pilot's engineering and perception outcomes rather than a citywide gallons-captured total, so its evidence should be read as a validated design model rather than a fully scaled citywide result.

Read the full analysis: https://nextcity.org/urbanist-news/detroit-vacant-lots-green-stormwater-infrastructure