A $500 House in Detroit

by Drew Philp

  The next guy who visited was a former addict running a drug rehabilitation clinic. He also wanted to turn the entire neighborhood into a nonprofit urban farm. Horses, pigs, vegetables, processing plants for jams and sausage, huge indoor hydroponics, and tanks of tilapia for fish farming. His ideas were enormous, although he had no money. He did have some city government and, soon, foundation support, though.

  I was slightly more interested in the latter idea—he said he would be hiring residents from the neighborhood and citizens returning from prison—but the neighborhood seemed to hate it, maybe because some of the ideas had already been worked out with the previous guy and intentions had been articulated, but the reaction was immediate and swift, particularly from Farmer Paul.

  As the debate droned on inside the YES FARM, Jake and I sat on the front stoop and he told me a story, which he had experienced just a few days prior:

  Paul and a small crew, which included Jake, had been working all day trimming trees, which was the power company’s job. Workers for the for-profit showed up in the afternoon on an unrelated matter and told Paul he was in their way. Paul ignored them, and kept doing what he’d been doing all day. When they demanded Paul move, he became upset, put down his chain saw, and pointed at his chest.

  “I’m the one who has been taking care of this neighborhood for twenty years. Me. You guys haven’t been around. You’ve done nothing but watch this place deteriorate while raising our rates. Now you want me to stop doing what you guys should be doing anyway?”

  The power company guy started to jaw at Paul and they squared up with each other. Paul put up his dukes. The electrician had his fists up, too. Jake was watching in horror, thinking he was going to have to back Paul up in a fistfight with the electric utility.

  Just as they were about to come to blows Paul said something brilliant.

  “You sure you want to lose your job over this?”

  It defused the whole situation. Paul was never about to knock the guy out, but he couldn’t punk out either. This was his ’hood and he was one of the few who took care of it. He gave the guy an out—his job—and brought it just to the brink to drive his point home. Everyone’s honor remained intact. Paul and his crew went back to what they were doing.

  I could see a bit of that Paul through the YES FARM door in this meeting. He was sitting in one of the pews nearly shaking with indignation, a righteous anger.

  “What makes you think you can just come in here, never having farmed or grown anything, and take over what we’ve been doing for decades? I remember this with the fight over the Poletown plant. They said it would be good for us, and what did it do but tear down the neighborhood. I remember . . . ”

  Everyone seemed to have these massive plans that required a ton of outside money. Nobody wanted to start small and scale up, prove themselves and their ideas to the neighborhood. They wanted to be the biggest, immediately.

  And what would happen if they failed? We would be stuck with the mess, just like that incinerator protest junk. And this time not just the trash. What if, once they had gotten everything cleared, moved the people out of the way, and demolished their houses, their plans failed? What if they couldn’t make farming profitable in the neighborhood? That would leave a nice open space for something large that might not be pleasant to live by or provide any jobs for the locals. Maybe a trucking depot or a waste facility. It had happened before.

  That wasn’t the end of the fight over the third round of urban renewal in Poletown. It would continue over the next seven years, and the man who had come to our meeting today would take his plea to the larger Poletown neighborhood and ultimately the city. The meetings at the YES FARM were but scale models for what was going on in Detroit at large, the first inklings of projects attempting to steer the city away from humane and transformational social change to opportunities to make money.

  * * *

  The electricity was the last to go in the house because wiring was the most likely to get stolen and scrapped. Copper was one of the most valuable metals at the scrap yard, and I was worried someone would break in and rip the wires from the wall before they ever got used. I did need to get a head start, though. I figured I could add one run of outlets as long as I had fully installed, insulated, and Sheetrocked the walls so the scrappers would have to at least dig through that. I also needed to install the electrical box and main wiring so I could pass my inspection, a process that could take some time.

  After some study, I put the electrical box in the basement with my friend from college who had just moved into the city. We snaked a baby-arm-thick main line from the box to a peckerhead outside, a hookup point for the power company. My buddy was a huge help, but it was a strange partnership. We had been best friends, and likely would be forever, but I had already changed quite a bit from college. He was working for one of the automotive consulting companies and making about eighty grand a year, right out of school. I had the feeling that if I had met him now I wouldn’t have given him a second look, maybe despised him even. We’re good-enough friends that I could tell him so, and he agreed. He disliked his job, too, and was working toward something else; what, he wasn’t sure. He had taken the path expected of him and found it meaningless and empty.

  What can I say? Even though for the moment he was a corporate shill, I loved the guy. We’d been through a lot together. This was also complicating my urban self-righteousness, but I had too much work to accomplish to fully parse it. My deadline was less than two weeks away and I needed all the help I could get. I was spending ten-, twelve-, fourteen-hour days banging on the house.

  It was crucial that the utilities feeding the rooms above my initial three go in before I finished the walls downstairs. Both wiring and ducts had to be run before I put up drywall and enclosed everything. These appliances wouldn’t be hooked up possibly for years, and spending the money and time running them while trying to get my three little rooms ready for the winter was an exercise in delayed gratification.

  “Ah, shit!”

  Water was spraying me in the face. It dripped down my shirt and soaked my sweater. As I was cutting a duct into the floor of the bathroom with a saber saw, I had hit a pipe. The water was getting all over the drywall, which would now need to be cut out and redone. I rushed downstairs and turned the valve off.

  “God damn it!” I clomped back upstairs to dry off and settle. There was a mop bucket in the hallway and I kicked it in frustration. I screamed, a deep primal bellow. Get it all out. One nice thing about not having neighbors is you can yell as much as you want without startling anyone. I screamed again for good measure. I was going mad. There was so much to do and I was so tired, and I was so broke and Things Just Needed to Fucking Work. I picked the bucket up and threw it down again.

  “Settle down, Drew. Settle down,” I told myself as I paced the hallway. I breathed, and went back downstairs to patch the pipe and get back to installing the duct.

  After I had gotten home to Forestdale that night, my next-door neighbor came over and needed to talk. We took Gratiot on a walk in the Back 40. He still only weighed twenty pounds, and wore a little harness because he could slip out of a collar. He was to be neutered the next day and couldn’t have any food until after the operation. He would be in the hospital overnight, so I wanted to give him a little bit of freedom before what was sure to be an awful experience.

  My neighbor and I walked him on the leash until we all got to the 40, then let him run free as we walked in a circle, talking. He had just broken up with his girlfriend, who also lived on the block, and wanted to vent his pain.

  “I don’t know, I just don’t know what to do.” My neighbor did most of the talking as I listened. “I know the sound of her car. I can tell when she’s leaving and coming—”

  “Where’s Gratiot?”

  “What, the dog?”

  “Gratiot!” I called. “Gratiot!” I’d had him for just a few months, and technically he shouldn’t have been walking outside as he hadn’t finished his
course of parvovirus shots yet. I just didn’t feel right keeping him cooped up. “Gratiot!” We rushed around the horse track, searched the garden beds and the underbrush, still no sign of him. I didn’t care any longer about waking up the neighbors.

  “Gratiot!”

  I became more frantic. “Where do you think he went? Gratiot!”

  My heart raced. This was the first time I’d ever lost him. Horrible thoughts piled up in my head. What if someone stole him? What if they’re going to use him as a bait dog? They told me at the pound that dogs like this are stolen and used as bait for dog fighting. I’d heard enough stories of people’s neighbors carrying bloody pit bulls out of trap houses that I believed them. I could imagine him yelping, helpless, torn apart by savage mutts who had themselves been abused, making them mean and heartless, a circle of violence that encompassed those who had forced the dogs to fight in the first place. What about that guy pushing the shopping cart down the street? Maybe he took him. I’ll kill that son of a bitch if I have to. “Gratiot!”

  “Will you stay back here while I look for him on the street? Maybe he got out.” My neighbor stayed in the garden calling for my dog. I felt a tiny bit how a mother must feel when temporarily missing her baby, a feeling I’d never experienced. I’d never cared for anything like I loved that dog.

  I walked out of the alley into the street, increasingly frantic. “Gratiot!”

  I still had his little leash in my hand.

  “Gratiot!”

  A purple car was headed the wrong way down Forestdale, a one-way street. It was going fast, too, so I eyeballed the driver, giving him the ’hood look, like, What do you think you’re doing? The car turned in my direction and screeched to a halt just past me. It slammed into reverse and all of a sudden I was blinded.

  “What kind of crack you smoke, motherfucker?”

  I had four flashlights in my eyes and three guns, point-blank, in my face. I threw up my hands. I thought I was being robbed. Someone wearing black leather gloves grabbed me from behind in a bear hug and threw me on the hood of the car.

  “I said what kind of crack do you smoke, white boy?”

  He had his hand on my head, pushing it into the warm hood. I could feel his wedding ring on my skull. He kicked my legs apart and I could see one of the cops pointing his pistol at my face. He was wearing street clothes but had a badge dangling from one of those chains that look like they are attached to cheap lights in a basement. The car was unmarked. I don’t remember if he was wearing a bulletproof vest or not, but he looked like a soldier, all straps and pockets. I guessed the other two were behind me. The cop holding me grabbed my balls, from behind.

  “You have a job?”

  “I’m a cook.”

  “Come on, all cooks smoke dope.” He began to prod my clothes.

  “You have any needles?” The cop holding my head down began to frisk me. He put everything on the hood of the car. He stood me back up straight and put his arms around my chest, feeling for weapons or whatever. One of the other officers grabbed my wallet and started going through it. “What are you doing in this neighborhood?”

  I’d like to say I told him to fuck off, calmly explained that he was violating my Fourth Amendment right to due process and would not stand for this grave injustice. Or I had a girlfriend who was a lawyer for the ACLU and I would have their badge numbers. That I would put this all over the news and I would have their jobs or at least their apologies.

  “I live here,” I said meekly. I was shaking. You don’t say those kinds of things when you have three guns pointed at you.

  “What’s your address?”

  “Ah, I don’t remember. I live right around the corner, over there.” I couldn’t even remember my address, let alone protest.

  Another cop across the street had a black kid over the hood of another unmarked car. I guessed it probably wasn’t his first time in a stop-and-frisk. This was way before anyone talked about it in New York. This was also just weeks after the police department killed an eleven-year-old girl, Aiyana Jones, coincidentally the niece of some of my new neighbors.1

  I was aware of this as they held their guns to my face. If just one of those fingers slipped, or one of those guys got nervous, just one mistake, I would be lying in a pool of my own blood. If I said anything wrong I would be lying in a pool of my own blood. If I made a sudden movement I would be lying in a pool of my own blood. They would claim I attacked them. There were no witnesses.

  “You don’t remember your own address, motherfucker.”

  “It’s right over there.”

  “Do you have a job?”

  “I told you I’m a chef.”

  “Oh, come on. All chefs smoke crack.”

  “Dude.”

  The cop’s thick, hairy Popeye arms remained around my chest as the others looked through my stuff, my hands still in the air, rib cage heaving.

  “Calm down, now. Calm down,” the cop holding me said. “It’s cool. Slow down.”

  They put my stuff back on the hood and the cop let me go. The one with my wallet saw my address on my ID and nodded at the guy with his arms around me.

  “What are you doing out here tonight?”

  “I’m looking for my dog. He’s lost and just a puppy.”

  “What does he look like and what’s his name?”

  I told him, and he relayed the info to the other guys.

  “We’ll keep an eye out for him. We’re looking for someone who’s been doing some armed robberies around here. Do you know who that is? He’s a black male.”

  First of all, I hardly fit that description. Second, they were just rolling around the neighborhood stopping every black male, and apparently anyone else they saw, in a process that felt like armed robbery itself. I knew who had been robbed: it was Jennie, Molly’s roommate, coming home from a gig late one night. They had a gun and she screamed. A bunch of guys on the block had come outside to see what was going on and Norman got punched in the face and had to get stitches. One of the neighbor boys had his tennis shoes stolen on a separate occasion. They never found the guys who did it. This wasn’t a particularly effective way of policing, to say the least.

  “What? No,” I replied.

  The guns shot up once again. My neighbor was coming down the street, the weapons now pointed at him. He put his hands in the air and walked toward us.

  “He’s helping me look for the dog,” I said.

  They took his ID. I went off looking for Gratiot, muttering about how fucked up all this was.

  As the cops got back in the car, the blond one with the crew cut who had just got done grabbing my junk said, “Have a nice night.” They roared off.

  “What the fuck, man, what the fuck?” My neighbor hadn’t seen what had happened.

  “I got to find fucking Gratiot.” I walked back to my house still holding his tiny leash. I saw Emily and Eric sitting on the porch next door.

  “Are you okay?” Emily asked. “What just happened?”

  “Have you seen Gratiot?”

  “Yeah, we saw him sniffing around your gate so we put him back inside. I gave him a bowl of food.”

  Consider for a moment. There are only three times I have ever had guns pointed at me point-blank. (I’ve been lucky.) Those three times have not been by “thugs” or “gangsters.” All three have been by police officers. I knew, personally now, the mistrust of the police by people who live in places like East Detroit and Baltimore and Ferguson, how at worst they can act as just another gang themselves. Coupled with the hopelessness of rehabilitation in the American prison system, this is why I refuse to call the cops. That was just a little taste of what black and brown and red folks deal with every day.

  * * *

  The weather began to get cold again, both my goal and deadline inching closer. I still needed to have so much more done. Forever, more and more. Electricity, ducts, insulation, everything. I wasn’t working on specific projects anymore, but whatever loose ends needed to be tied up, bouncing from
one trade to another.

  I got a cut that should have required stitches from a piece of sheet metal. My finger slipped, jamming my thumb into the end of some nice, sharp galvanized steel.

  Sleeeept—

  A clean slice.

  I could see all the layers of skin right to the muscle. I superglued it, like a dog wound.

  The neighborhood was scaring me, too. Shadowy dudes, maybe a dozen or so, played dice in the streets a few blocks south. The streetlights were gone and so were all the porch lights on the abandoned houses. I was working past dark out of need now, and finding out what the neighborhood was actually like after the sun set. The abandoned red house next to mine was empty and cold and terrifying. Anything could be happening behind those dark hollow eyes that were windows. Rats, crack, rape, murder. If it burned, mine would, too. I could see my breath again.

  Wake up. Up and down the ladder. Back and forth between the house and Paul’s garage for tools. Try to get the electrical up to spec before inspection. Finish the installation of the box and make sure I don’t screw it up and kill myself. How many days do I have left? Bolt the wires into the box. Screw in the wires before I have to do it when it’s hooked up to the power. One false move and poof. I was exhausted. Fourteen-hour day. Thirteen-hour day. Fifteen-hour day. Windows, insulation, electricity, it was all the same, it blends together and in the end it’s just work.

  Move-in was in less than a week. I’d never been this broke and tired ever, and I hope it never happens again. My mind was cloudy. I could focus on one thing but not the big picture. What day is it again? Tuesday? I felt old and rusty, like my truck, surprised at what was holding me together. My credit card was maxed out. I didn’t have a dollar to my name. Most of my words were curses, the only thing ready at the lips. I was hungry and cold, mentally, physically, and emotionally tired. So much needed to get done before I could live in the Queen Anne. Everything seemed like it was happening at once.