A $500 House in Detroit

by Drew Philp

  Yet in a way the house didn’t own me at all. The house was me. And I was it. I had put all of myself into this once-living building; it was my other, an extension of my body, my being, my soul. It wouldn’t be that way if I’d just bought it new. I wasn’t building a portfolio or an investment, I was building a shelter, a necessity of life, and by extension myself. It took everything I had, everything I learned, everything I knew, all the space in my brain and my muscles. It didn’t own me any more than my body owned my mind. It’s said that C. S. Lewis once wrote, “You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.”

  The value of the house is not just in dollars and cents, property value. The value is in shelter, warmth, a place to rest and feel safe and cook for my friends. It’s in security, keeping me from the elements and danger, and always having a place to call home. It’s in the knowledge I’ve gained, the hard muscles, the satisfaction of doing something right. My house isn’t a commodity. All my work cannot be bought or resold; the hard muscles, the mental strength cannot be purchased. That dollar-and-cent value matters only when housing, shelter, is a commodity, when homes are meant to be discarded, the occupants moving on to bigger and better things. When a house is just something meant to be consumed.

  * * *

  I had picked the day after the Harvest Party to move in. I needed to give myself a deadline or I would be able to justify pushing any date further back until I was wintering on Forestdale for another year. No matter what I had gotten done, or had not gotten done, I would sleep in my own house the night after the party and every night after that.

  I was broke. It was looking like I wasn’t going to have a furnace the next winter either, and I was going to be lucky if I had enough credit left to scrape together a water heater.

  You might think a furnace would be more important than warm water, but that’s not usually the case. The furnace takes longer to set up and the ducts are more difficult to route than plumbing—that only needs to go to the kitchen and bathroom. Cold air can be overcome in more ways than cold water. Every time you want to wash your hands, every time you want to take a shower, every time you need to wash dishes, clean out a cut, shave . . . even with a furnace it was cold anyway, as setting the thermostat to something civilized, like 55 degrees, in a house that was barely more than a construction site was unaffordable. Already being cold and sticking your hands in cold water each morning was a recipe for not only misery but sickness.

  My dad and I started on the plumbing that weekend. I’d done some pipe fitting before but wasn’t sure what to do about Detroit-specific problems like someone stealing your water meter and leaving nothing but a hacked-off pipe. On Farmer Paul’s advice I got a compression fitting from Atlas Plumbing, down the street.

  It was an old-school place, with a counter where men would wait on you and knew what they were talking about, one of the last businesses in the neighborhood, a decade-long holdout when just about everything around them had gone to hell. They were real plumbers, and could help come up with solutions for any problem. Customers hung out in the shop, drinking coffee and shooting the shit with the employees.

  Everyone around was willing to share their knowledge with an urchin like me. Along with other holdouts in the neighborhood, guys like these were the backbone of the city. They may have felt they needed to move themselves and their families to the suburbs for one reason or another, but never moved their business. They retained an institutional knowledge about the neighborhood and city that was invaluable. I looked forward to going in there and never got plumbing supplies anywhere else.

  Other materials were a different story. I despised places like Walmart for what they had done to small businesses and downtowns across the country, and American manufacturing in general. That stuff is so cheap because it’s made for cents an hour. But try as I could to shop local, I still bought things at the big-box hardware stores—the Walmarts of lumber—that had been putting local places and their knowledge out of business for years. It wasn’t just good jobs that were lost—after the big guys came in and priced out the family places, many of those employees were forced to get jobs at their corporate competitors, often for a lower wage—also lost was the camaraderie, knowledge, and community that the old places fostered.

  A lot of the time, too, those family places cared about the products they sold, not just in terms of quality but ethically. They were less likely to sell you a cheap Chinese piece of junk, not just because their name rested on it functioning properly, but because they intrinsically understood that their jobs and wages were tied with those of the guys in the factory in Wisconsin pumping out fittings. It was a losing proposition. We’d already lost most of the mining of the raw materials to the folks in South America and Africa now fighting the same fight we did in the ’30s for a living wage. For one person to escape ethically unscathed from the additional cost in environmental degradation by these operations seemed impossible.

  In our current world something like bottle recycling was, at best, an example of what we could hope to achieve. Throwing my can in the recycling bin or reusing some wood from an abandoned house was nothing compared with lumber companies clear-cutting rain forests or mining interests dumping millions of gallons of tainted waste into rivers. It would take wholesale societal awakening and change to interrupt this. Try as I might to be pure, I was complicit in the system. I was trying to be better but nevertheless made choices of expediency versus ethics.

  When you turn on your faucet, or flush the toilet or take a shower, it is almost certain that that clean, fresh water is brought to you by materials manufactured or mined by someone in a bondage so great it would be illegal in America or Europe, by a process that is rapidly killing the very planet that we will leave for our children. We have slavery running through the walls of our homes and stitched into the fabric of our clothes. As a people we need to think about this.

  The massive wealth inequality that this consumerist style of living creates might be all right if astronomical sums of money bought just the finer things in life. But it also buys political influence, the kind that encourages clear-cutting forests and demolishing houses instead of recycling wood, the kind that says American companies mining copper in foreign lands don’t have to abide by the laws of labor or decency, that products like piping for a house can be made by near slaves and we should all look the other way because it’s cheap. I was no better. I bought my plumbing from Atlas, but the plastic PEX pipes I placed in my home were likely made by people making less than a dollar a day, the raw material for the fittings mined in a process scarring the earth.

  Working with my father, I crimped these pipes together with brass fittings and copper rings. From the fitting at the lead pipe I split the line in two, one to go in a loop toward the hot water heater I hadn’t yet purchased, the other to a manifold that would divide the water throughout the house, leaving space to add on the second bathroom, a hose bib for the garden, and a washing machine. At this time I was plumbing only the downstairs bathroom and the kitchen. We hung the pipes along the joists in the basement and shot them up through the floor to the sink I’d gotten from the bar, and up through the bathroom to service the shower and the toilet I had placed contrary to what my grandfather had suggested.

  Because half of the bathroom was over a crawl space—the room was likely added on to the house during the advent of indoor plumbing—I threaded the pipes for the sink through the curb of the shower. They would be less likely to freeze going through the heated space of the house. I did, however, place the shower trap down there, unheated.

  We connected valves to each stub-out upstairs, and from the valves stainless-steel supply lines to each of the faucets and the toilet. I had purchased what was just about the cheapest nickel-plated showerhead and manifold from Atlas and installed this in the shower basin, sweating a copper jumper between the two. Molly was coming by in a few days to pour a concrete shower pan, a job that would have cost hundreds of dollars but she was doing for free because “you�
��re a friend.” I wouldn’t be able to test the shower until that was in, but I could see if water flowed from the rest.

  “Do you want to check these fittings with the gauge again?” my father asked. He was casually checking some of the crimpings with a go/no-go gauge, a tool that measured the near-microscopic tolerances on things like machine parts and fittings such as these.

  “Nah, I think we’re fine. I’m pretty sure I got them all.”

  All that was left to do was test it. A plumber had lent me a water key, a long piece of rebar with a T-handle on one end and a fork at the other that fit the valve buried in my front yard leading to the street. I found the valve cover buried under sod, opened it with a wrench, and inserted the slender key. The water arrived at my house through a series of enormous pipes installed before my grandparents were born, much of it lead, now often switched to copper. This valve was the last and only thing holding back the massive water pressure from the municipal system. If something went wrong, if the valve was broken, the water line cut, I was screwed. If water didn’t come out when I turned this handle, it was going to be a costly and time-consuming process. I called to my father standing inside to see if he was ready. This was it.

  “Yep.”

  I turned the key. I could hear my father yell from inside.

  “Hey! Hey! Shut it off! Shut it off!”

  I turned it back, rushing into the house and leaving the key sticking out of the hole in the front yard. My father was soaking wet in the basement and glaring at me with a smile on his face, a specialty of his. We had forgotten to crimp one of the rings near the main line and the pressure had blown the pipe off, drenching my father, who was standing in front of it. As he wiped the water from his face with one hand, he held out the pair of crimpers with the other, looking at me as if to say, “Should have listened to your old man.”

  “Well, at least we know it works!” I said.

  My dad shook my hand and congratulated me, his faux scowl breaking. “Andrew Man!” he roared, raising his hand for a high five and calling me by one of the nicknames he used when we worked together when I was a kid. “Okay. Let’s take a look at these fittings and try this again, Buckwheat.”

  I recrimped the ring and checked the others. All good. For good measure, my dad closed the valve in the basement, nearest the main line, the one that could turn the whole house on and off from the inside. Now that we knew it worked, I’d be able to turn the water on at the street and from downstairs my dad could ease the valve open for any surprises.

  I went outside and turned the key again, listening for my pops. All good. I went back inside and he called, “All ready?”—the signal to open the valve.

  “All ready.”

  From upstairs I heard him squeak the spigot open and then a whooshing noise. Crystal-clean water from the Great Lakes rushed into the treatment plant, through miles of pipe beneath the streets of Detroit, into the spur traversing my front yard, then up through the manifold splitting it through the house. The water had made a journey of thousands of miles and years to be trapped in little plastic tubes running to my faucet. In principal it was a rather simple system—just cylinders to carry water around—but in practice it spanned the globe and the weather and thousands of years, from the copper miner in Peru, to the Roman aqueduct engineer, to the Chinese workers making plastic pipes, to the miracle of evaporation, climate change, and the Ice Age, to the cup I held in my hand as my father, smiling, watched me draw from my brand-new old kitchen sink the first water that had run through my house in a decade. I held the glass up to the light, then tipped it toward my father. I drank.

  * * *

  The back door was finished and all I needed was the glass. I had stripped everything down to the raw wood, and had recoated it in polyurethane, leaving a pleasant wheat color. I had made the door jamb new and the Kemps had given me a steel-barred security door I’d found in the garage behind the Forestdale house. Without some serious power tools or a skilled locksmith it was going to be nearly impossible to get through that door.

  I had also created a small back porch, with a set of stairs. The porch was easy enough, but cutting the stringers for the stairs was difficult, as it involved some complicated math with a number of variables. This set of stairs was by no means intricate, but I wanted to do it right and have the treads sit directly on the stringers, not cheat and use ledge blocks. After failing to find a satisfactory lesson on the Internet, I called my grandfather, who walked me through the process, step by step over the phone, until I had a template I could work from. His lesson was sound and they worked beautifully, solid and without a squeak.

  Just as soon as I purchased and installed the glass, the door could go in and the rear entrance would be almost normal. The house would start to feel more like a real dwelling and less like a construction zone. Someone on Forestdale suggested a glass shop in the suburbs. I still hated going to the ’burbs and went only when absolutely necessary.

  Although Detroit is 83 percent black, the suburbs are about the inverse. We speak of only one great migration in the twentieth century, that of blacks leaving the Jim Crow South and sharecropping, to escape overt racism and lynching for factory jobs in the north. But really there were two, the second was whites moving to the suburbs to escape those same people looking for freedom. They were aided by all levels of government, subsidizing transportation, home loans, and infrastructure, making the building of the American suburban lifestyle likely the largest welfare project of the twentieth century.

  Of course, I took the freeway to get the glass. Unbounded by any natural barriers, housing could expand west, south, and north as far as people could still commute into the city to work. Already having established itself as the motor capital of the world, we invested almost exclusively in freeways. They were great for getting people places, if you could afford a car, which 26 percent of Detroiters can’t, but they also ensured that public transportation such as subways were the prerogative of other cities. There is almost no public transportation in Detroit aside from some dangerous and late buses that people avoid if possible. Metro Detroit has tried twenty-eight times to come up with a regional transit plan, but it’s been stymied just as many by suburban politicians and residents who want things to remain exactly as they are.

  I got off the freeway and followed my handwritten directions to the shop, a quaint little family place. The people inside were kind and genuinely wanted to help. There are those in Metro Detroit who have sworn off any and all dealings with the city, thinking nothing good can come of Detroit whatsoever, and there are those who have been caught up in the whirlwind of history, frustrated with how things turned out but at a loss for what to do, less Judas and more Pilate. The people who owned the glass shop were the latter. When I told them what I was doing with the $500 house I’d bought, like everyone else they laughed, and they ordered the glass for me at cost, the owner sighing and saying, “I don’t need to make any money off this one.”

  It was people like these, when seen as individuals and not faceless masses of SUV-driving automatons, who would crack my self-righteous facade and instinctual disgust at the suburbs. It forced me to see that the reasons people left Detroit were maybe more complicated than I’d thought, and demonizing them wasn’t as easy as I wanted it to be. Hell, I might have left myself, if my silly love affair with Cecilia had worked out.

  Meanwhile, I was running against the clock. I installed the glass and then the door, but even with it in I had so many things to get through before I could even think about living there. The race was on. With the door began the fight against the cold, my weapons caulk and insulation and weather-stripping. I needed to install the metal chimney pipe I’d bought to get through the first year or two, organize what I’d left undone from the initial cleanup, and begin the entire process of installing electricity. This was all running me down. Work at the restaurant, work on the house, shower, sleep, repeat ad infinitum. Days were running into one another and I was developing permanent dark circles und
er my eyes. At twenty-four, my hair was beginning to silver.

  Compounding this was that the city was changing, already. It seemed to happen gradually but perceptibly: people were interested in Detroit again, if just a trickle. One apple ain’t a bushel, and it’s sure not a truckload, but when you’re starving it’s noticeable. One of my best friends from college called, asking me to help find him a place in the city. He was from the suburbs, and lived there currently, one of the few people who hadn’t moved out of the state after college. When I initially asked him why he didn’t move to Detroit in the first place, he gave me one of the only honest answers I’d heard:

  “Because I’m too much of a pussy,” he said. He was now on the phone saying, “Well, you haven’t been murdered yet.”

  Lots of experts began to move in temporarily as well. Kids with Ivy League educations would come stay a year or two, and the decisions they made would have an outsize impact in an undereducated city. Many would move on to bigger and better things and would not be around to see the consequences of those actions. It had begun to look as though people from outside Detroit were examining the city as if it were a child’s chemistry set. We were now under a microscope.

  The people who hadn’t left were understandably wary. After a half century of urban renewal, debacles like the freeway and the Poletown plant that never really seemed to benefit Detroiters, people were skeptical when new, vast project ideas began to sprout; many, we were told, designed just for our benefit.

  There were a lot of community meetings around that time, both on the block and citywide. The sense was that the reckoning had come, from all sides, and we had to make some principled decisions about our future. Businessmen and nonprofits started to visit us on Forestdale, looking for support. These meetings were held in the YES FARM.

  One investor was a wealthy banker who wanted to turn the neighborhood into a farm, as if people like Paul who’d lived there for decades weren’t working on that already. But he didn’t want to support what was already going on, rather, to come in and start something with his name on it. In the end many figured he just wanted to piggyback on the down-home feeling of urban farming, and his project was a land grab. To get the okay from the city council he needed Paul driving the tractor behind his limousine.