A $500 House in Detroit

by Drew Philp

  While over the last sixty years or so Detroit itself lost more than half its population, the population of the suburbs has grown exponentially. In fact, the population of the Detroit metro area has grown since the ’70s. The narrative goes that people left Detroit. That is correct but not complete. What isn’t included is that those people didn’t go far. Mostly they just went to the ’burbs, and all of us paid for the infrastructure to get and keep them out there while the core of the city deteriorated.

  Occasionally Will and I would climb the ruined grain towers behind his house and look out over the city, smoking cigarettes and drinking 40s. Most of the fire escape had been scrapped away, and lifting oneself overhead onto the rusted stairs was a feat of gymnastics. I hated heights but I liked the view more. I’d try not to fall through the crumbling roof, and we’d point out landmarks, churches, schools, empty factories, trying to figure our place in it all.

  “It’s like the pilgrims,” Will told me, looking out over the city. “They came to America for religious freedom and got along with the Native Americans pretty well. It wasn’t perfect, but they ate Thanksgiving together, you know. It was the people who came after. They said, ‘I can make money from this.’ They were the ones with the smallpox blankets, not the pilgrims.”

  “That sounds like a total bastardization of history.”

  “It may be. But it rings true.”

  The cut abutting the silos was pulsing with all kinds of flora and fauna: pheasants, rabbits, the odd sapling, little red foxes, waist-high grass, chicory, cattails, burdock. Will swore he saw a deer down there once, staring at him with glistening eyes before bounding off. After dinner, cooked from what we grew in his garden and beans from a can, we would take walks down there with his dog, during what Will called the “golden hour,” quietly picking our way among the roaring yet silent nature. We could walk for forty-five minutes and not see a soul. Some evenings we would stumble on a stray spray-can artist or a gentleman making his home amid the rubble, but never anyone other than that.

  There was one guy down there that we called “the Oracle,” maybe cruelly. He lived in an igloo made from Vitamin Water and Gatorade bottles filled with chicken bones and other detritus, sometimes urine. We’d quietly walk by his home and occasionally he would stick his head out from the pile, his hair long and wispy, bleeding into his Fu Manchu mustache. He would never wave, but would recognize us, nod, and flit back inside his abode. There were other makeshift shelters that we treaded around carefully, not wanting to disturb the peace of the owners. Most were friendly but wanted to keep to themselves, and we respected that.

  Mostly we were alone. We would meander through the grass and industrial waste and climb out of the cut into Eastern Market, Detroit’s central open-air marketplace, all but abandoned at that time on weekday evenings. As we walked past the stout brick buildings with the sunlight peering down, the emptiness made it feel as if we could have been the only people left on earth.

  This was the first time I saw a pack of wild dogs. There were a half dozen hiding and romping in the bushes a hundred yards ahead of us. Will never left home without rocks or a chunk of steel in his pockets, to throw at the dogs if they looked like they might attack. He had to do so once, and I would find out soon enough how terrifying that was. We stopped for a moment to watch them play, wild and glistening and free like stallions, fierce and terrible and killers like wolves.

  Bloomberg News once put the number of wild dogs in Detroit as high as 50,000, one for every sixteen people in the city, which is an exaggeration. But the threat is real nonetheless. Dogs are generally cowards, and turning your back on one is never a good decision. It’s the only thing in the city I’m really scared of. You can’t reason with a dog. A mugger wants your money, a dog wants your flesh. This poses a problem for children. Imagine walking your daughter home from school with the threat of packs of wild dogs hanging over you.

  * * *

  I had a pile of logs to split, stacked in the backyard on Forestdale. While looking for houses and on other business in the neighborhood, we’d look for downed trees for firewood. Jake the redhead and I bought a chain saw, splitting the price. Along with Will, we would drive around the neighborhood after the summer storms, cutting up the dead or fallen trees that had collected in the empty lots and in some cases across the road. It would take the city days, and often weeks, to clear the trees blocking streets, and never if they had fallen in a lot. One of us would cut slices in a log lying on the ground, and all three of us would roll it over to finish the cuts on the backside.

  We didn’t really know what we were doing. We had very little knowledge of forestry and what was good for burning or how to identify trees, but the best teacher was experience. Sometimes we would cut down dead and standing trees, ones the city should have taken care of. Someone would climb the tree with a rope, tie it at the top, and then, back on the ground, pull as it was being cut to make sure it toppled in the right direction. I built a small woodshed at the Forestdale house, and thought I had enough with my pile stored up for the winter.

  “If you want to heat your house with wood, you need to be able to fill up the space you’re going to heat with split logs,” Molly told me, stopping by to check on my progress. A tile setter by trade, she was wearing the same rubber boots and Carhartt with the spider stencil she appeared in at the YES FARM.

  Filling the house with logs seemed impossible.

  “You might consider buying some,” she said.

  That seemed like throwing money away.

  “I guess I can cut some more in the neighborhood,” I told her.

  She launched into a story about Farmer Paul. He was a few blocks from Forestdale cutting firewood with a crew of his sons and neighbors. He had an enormous chain saw, with a bar longer than a man’s arm, which he was using. A smaller saw sat in the back of the truck. Someone walking by snatched it from the truck bed and ran. Paul chased him, still holding his. As Paul caught up, the thief turned on him, wielding the ultrasharp chain like a two-handed sword. Paul stopped, and they squared up like Wild West duelers at ten paces.

  “You want to go, old man!” the thief shouted.

  Paul started his chain saw.

  When the police arrived all the thief would say was “This man is crazy! He tried to attack me!” The cops knew what was up and took him away.

  A Detroit farmer who wasn’t afraid of a chain-saw fight?

  I still hadn’t been able to corner Paul, and he’d slipped away numerous times. I got the sense he wouldn’t give up what he knew to just anyone, who might leave and take it with them. He didn’t have time. Like a lot of people in the city, it seemed he wanted some sure investment, not empty promises. It wasn’t really that cold. I would be fine.

  The search for houses went on. Will and I again rode past that two-story Queen Anne. It was on a quiet corner on a street named after a dead slave owner and located halfway between Forestdale and Will’s. Next to it sat two empty lots, about a quarter of an acre in all, plenty of space for a dog and a garden, a shed and a pond. The neighbors on the block to the south were friendly and kept their homes well maintained, but there were four other naked abandoned houses on the block with the Queen Anne. A red one sat as open as the ocean right next door, not three feet away. If it burned, the house I had my eye on would go, too.

  The neighbors said the Queen Anne had been abandoned for at least a decade, simply left behind, anything of value stolen long ago. They described the last owner as a “slumlord,” and “maybe he was a racist.” He had been attempting to fix the house to rent as a business proposition. When the neighbors offered to help watch it so it wouldn’t get scrapped, he was rude. One day he came to check on the progress and all the brand-new windows he had put in had been stolen, frames and all. The neighbors were almost glad he was gone. I couldn’t blame them for being skeptical of me.

  The house had a mangy wraparound porch and a big kitchen, but no chimney—I could build one of those—and had been gorgeous at one
point. You could still make out its beauty, like a ninety-year-old starlet from the golden age of Hollywood. It had good bones.

  But it was filled with trash and had lived a hard life: two monstrous stories of no doors or windows, plumbing, or electricity—nothing. There was a pornographic hole in the roof. The backyard was a literal jungle, and it was going to take years to clear out with a machete and a rake. The porch needed to be ripped off and done again, the front yard looked like it wanted to be cut with a scythe. The piles of trash inside reached as high as my chest. The house was just a white-and-gray clapboard shell on a crumbling brick foundation, filled with junk. The first time I cautiously walked inside, I knew it would be my home.

  When I told the neighbors I wanted to buy it, they looked at me like I was insane. A young white kid stuck out like a snowball in Texas, and I was self-conscious and very aware of my color, stumbling over my replies. When I was moving in, most other people, white and black, were moving out.

  I found the neighbor to the south, a big guy, walking into his house. It was essential to speak to the neighbors at least for a moment. If you were going to live close to one another, you wanted to make sure nobody was against what you were doing, as it could make everything crumble. With no police protection and little security, the only safety was in the people around you and what you could do for yourself.

  “Just looking at it, it’s a lot of work,” he said, figuring I would give up after a year or two.

  But it was the one. I had heard rumors about a massive tax auction where houses were sold for $500. But first I had to find out who owned this place, the city or the county or a private individual. There wasn’t even an address, so figuring out whose it was was going to be difficult. There was also an orange square painted on the front. At the time, lots of houses in the city had these, some with a slash inside, others with an X like in New Orleans after the hurricane. We thought it signified how close the house was to demolition. I knew stories about people buying a place only to have it torn down by the city a month later.

  To find the address I went to Detroit’s property mapping department. I had been instructed by the gentleman working at the counter to fill in on my sheet that I was a college student doing a project and the printout would be done right away, for free, instead of going through layers of bureaucracy. I went in with my hand-drawn map of the cross streets and walked out with a computer-generated one of the parcels and their addresses. Next, I needed to look up the tax records on the Internet through the county’s website. It appeared the Queen Anne was owned by the county, also a good sign.

  I then went to the demolition department and asked if it was slated to be torn down. They explained it wasn’t, and the orange squares signified to the fire department how dangerous the houses were to enter. An orange box meant unsafe, if it had one slash inside it meant greater danger, and two slashes meant more dangerous still. The house I wanted wasn’t the most hazardous, and they weren’t going to tear it down, but it was a treacherous structure.

  Next, I had to go to the water department and find out if there would be an enormous debt from the previous owner. Water bills stick with the property in Detroit, not the homeowner, and it was possible that the bill could be in the thousands of dollars, even tens of thousands. For example, if the pipes had been stolen but not the water meter and the water had been pumping into the basement—possibly for years—it could be astronomical. I checked the bill in a separate building. Only ten dollars. Another good sign.

  The last thing to do was check the auction. This was not online at the time, as it is now, and each year the county would publish a book containing tens of thousands of properties for sale.

  The line to purchase one of these golden books was nonexistent and I bought it for a few dollars. Armed with my map, address, and clean water bill, I sat down in the marbled hallway inside City Hall, the Spirit of Detroit and Joe Louis fist statues standing proudly outside the window. I opened it and scanned for my page and then my house, my hands sweaty.

  There it was. For sale. The two lots next door were available also.

  I’ve just described in a few paragraphs the process of buying an abandoned house. In reality it took months. Nothing was streamlined and no information was available aside from hearsay about how to go about it, what to look for, and whom to speak to. It took trips back and forth between different municipal buildings, ending up in the wrong office or with the incorrect paperwork, asking security guards where departments could be found, questioning neighbors about which offices I needed to go to in what order in the first place. It was a scavenger hunt spanning downtown and the Internet. You’d think they’d make it easy for people to buy abandoned houses.

  * * *

  Will and I had gone back to the Queen Anne and measured the window openings, and I marked the sizes on a diagram of the house I had drawn. Friends at a community art gallery had donated some reused OSB plywood, the kind made from glued wood chips. I worked to cut the donated boards to size in Will’s backyard as he built a chicken coop using some little pieces of glass, hardwood flooring, and tin roofing he had found. Thrifty to the fasteners, he pounded secondhand nails straight on the concrete as I created what was to be the first separation between the inside and the elements that the Queen Anne had seen in a decade.

  We wanted to be able to do this as quickly as possible. It’s illegal to enter abandoned homes owned by the government, and I hadn’t bought it yet. If we were caught inside with tools, just a crowbar even, we could be taken to jail for breaking and entering. It had happened:

  Norman moved to town about a year after I did. He’s an MIT graduate and his mission was to start “maker spaces” for children to learn STEM trades. He spends his time visiting schools, teaching kids about magnets, electricity, and batteries, with readily available materials like copper nails and ten-cent lights. He set up one of his maker spaces in a church basement on Detroit’s east side, working with the pastor, who’s a special and fabled man himself (bursting out of caskets on Easter, waving around a pistol at service to decry gun violence, and having live donkeys present for the Christmas procession). By all accounts Norman’s an upstanding gentleman, an asset to the community.

  One day, he and some of his compatriots boarded up an abandoned building that was being stripped of valuables, the future site of a school that he would be working in. They had secured the building as best they could and from time to time would check on it. One day Norman was driving by and some of the boards had been ripped off, so he stopped to investigate. He chased away the scrappers inside, and was eventually able to flag down a police car. He told them the deal.

  “Were you just in there?” the cops asked him.

  “Well, yeah, I boarded it up. I just ran some people off who were inside scrapping it. If we hurry we can probably catch them.”

  He spent thirty-six hours in jail. He was lucky that was all. The police took him in, and since it was a weekend, he couldn’t be arraigned until Monday. He was finally able to get hold of one of the preachers he knew, who gathered up a posse of other religious men and community leaders and let the police know, in no uncertain terms, that Norman was to be released.

  I didn’t know any pastors who could spring me from jail. Will gave me an unused steel door for the front so I could enter and exit easily, and I would lock it with a padlock from the outside. Garrett agreed to help, along with Jake. Will and I loaded everything into my truck and headed over and inside.

  The house became darker as we added boards to the window openings, and we had to labor to keep from stepping in the piles of human shit the scrappers had left in the middle of rooms, the uncapped needles, and the crack vials. We all wore leather boots with thick soles.

  While Jake and Will worked together downstairs, Garrett and I took the second story. We nailed two-by-fours into window openings with a cordless framing nailer that Jake had brought and attached plywood to these makeshift brackets. The master bedroom, a shallow room that spanned the width
of the house, looked like it had once been two bedrooms and a hallway. The previous owner had removed the walls and vaulted the ceiling, removing part of the floor in the attic to do so. He’d begun to drywall but had failed to put any insulation in first. All that work would have to come out, and much of the framing would need to be redone.

  “The piles of shit are the worst,” Garrett said, grabbing another board.

  “I can deal with the shit, it’s the needles I hate,” I told him. “AIDS is real, man. Hepatitis.”

  “The worst is when the needles are sticking out of the shit,” Will chimed in. He was wandering around taking pictures with his digital camera because I didn’t own one. He had found a raccoon living in the house and had taken photos of his muddy little paw prints exiting the windows.

  I was finally seeing what this would entail. The house was huge, bigger than I needed. I had probably chosen—on the spectrum of abandoned houses that were feasibly repairable—one of the worst. Everything needed to be redone. I could see daylight through the hole in the roof, and I would have to string a tarp up there first thing after I bought it. The trash was overwhelming. Even just the windows would cost a fortune, if I had someone else do them. The only way I got comparatively lucky was there were only a few holes in the floor and the risks of falling through a story was minimal.

  As we finished there was a spectacle in the neighborhood, caused by our presence. Will busied himself hanging the steel door in the front while I told the neighbors about my plans. They looked at me as if they didn’t know whether to laugh or call the authorities. The only other two occupied houses on my block were inhabited by single women. Behind the Queen Anne was only one house, holding a friendly elderly family and their children, the rest of their block recently cut grass. I recognized some of the people to the south and got the sense everyone knew one another, and many of the people were family. Nobody called the police.