A $500 House in Detroit

by Drew Philp

  * * *

  The time had finally come for Will to move out of the house he loved and was forced to sell. The school had given him a date. But since he was poor, there wasn’t the money for sentimentality. We were taking everything we could, cannibalizing the structure that was due to be torn down. I stood on top of a ladder with a circular saw, cutting off clapboard. It was snowing lightly.

  “People are probably wondering what the hell I’m doing over here,” Will said, as I cut the siding off his house.

  “It’s always kind of been like that, huh?”

  Inside was sad-looking and bare. Things were strewn on the floor and his hard work had been undone. The art, the trinkets, and the wind-up music box with the broken note were gone. The house, once pulsing with life, was dead. It was now just a thing, a couple of boards nailed together.

  Will was busy unscrewing cast-iron heating grates from the ceiling. All the birdhouses he had made were gone. The couch he sat on with his dog, Meatballs, was gone. All the instruments, the radio, gone. He was taking everything, the window weights, flooring, two-by-fours, sinks, light fixtures, scrapping out his own house.

  “So this is it.”

  He looked down at me from the ladder.

  “Yep.”

  We drove the chicken coop and piano to my old house on Forestdale, where Will was moving temporarily. He was trying to purchase a new place in the same yearly auction at which I’d purchased mine. He had found a house near Forestdale and it was in much better shape than his previous one, at least when he had started, but there was no junk forest behind it, no railroad trench in which to walk endlessly.

  I asked him to call me when they tore down the house, and he demurred. I figured he wanted to be alone.

  I knew this could happen to me, too, as did all of my neighbors. If someone rich enough or the corrupt city or state government wanted the land badly enough, they could find ways to push us out. If the land couldn’t be had through attrition there were means to get people to leave. They had done it for an auto factory and a freeway. Why not a shopping mall?

  The rich men always called it progress, but it was their progress. It never seemed to benefit anyone except them. Building my house and my community had given my life meaning. Shopping malls didn’t.

  Will came over one afternoon a few weeks later. He had caught the demolition crew just as they had begun to knock it down, and was there with his camera. He had taken pictures as fast as he could, and had made a kind of digital flipbook. We sat on my couch and he showed me.

  On the screen his house was recognizable enough, shot from straight ahead. The dirty backhoe loomed on the right side. Someone from the left squirted the house with a firehose to keep down the dust. The backhoe hit the roof first. It had a great jaw, and after creating the first violent hole it began to chew at the house, knocking, churning, biting, grabbing. A raccoon scurried out, just as it had at my place when I was boarding it up. The backhoe, narrowly missing the animal, spat pieces of Will’s dream out onto the ground, tearing away at a fantasy that was real, if just for a moment.

  Will held the button on the flipbook and his house slowly became a pile of rubble. The great jaw on the backhoe became a fist, and smashed its bones into tiny pieces, boom, boom, boom, crushing it into nothing.

  “This is the part where they pound it into the ground,” Will said.

  There’s always something lost in the name of progress. In this case it was one man’s home, a little dream. The danger is that in our relentless chase of progress we’re erasing ideas and ways of living that we can never get back. Ideas and ways of living we may need to heal our earth and our ailing society. It’s never the rich who have their homes torn down. The question to ask yourself is “By what—and whose—measure do we gauge progress?”

  “This is the part where they pound it into the ground,” Will repeated, holding the button on the screen. His home was now a pile of rubble and the photographs ended.

  * * *

  I made my kitchen counters out of century-old maple floors, rock hard and pried from an abandoned soda pop factory by a neighbor. I plucked my kitchen cabinets from a school that was being demolished. Aside from the cabinets, made from old-growth oak, strewn about the school were beakers and other science equipment, books splayed open like dead birds, desks, marble slabs dividing bathroom stalls, granite tables, chalkboards that still contained notes. It looked like some catastrophic event had stricken the nation, nuclear war perhaps, and the teachers and students had fled at a moment’s notice. They say the functional illiteracy rate in Detroit is nearly 50 percent.

  As I wandered around the school in my overalls, the backhoe was already pushing the other end of the building into the ground. I was able to scavenge at all because a friend had made a deal with the demolition company. We had one day to get out everything we could.

  The school had been built just after the turn of the century. Walking through its quiet shadowed halls, I pried trim off the walls and unscrewed hooks from closets. Suburban flight had also left Detroit with dismal, almost criminal public schools. The Detroit metro area has some of the most school districts per capita in the nation, not to mention some of the most racially segregated schools, and one result was fewer students in Detroit and less money for them. We’d reinvented the school bus wheel over and over in the metro area—along with administration, infrastructure, and, significantly, busing costs.

  An often overlooked turning point in the educational and democratic history of the United States occurred in Detroit in 1971. The local courts ruled that the schools in the metro area as a whole were unlawfully segregated for the same reasons blacks and others were kept from the suburbs. More than two-thirds of the students in the Detroit public schools at the time were black, the opposite of the surrounding ’burbs.

  A district judge ruled that busing of students across district lines was to take place to reduce segregation. Students residing in Detroit would be able to attend the well-funded schools in Oakland County, for example, and an increase in suburban students in Detroit would help ensure the fruits of the public wealth that left the city in the second great migration would be distributed evenly, at least in school.

  A crusade against the decision was made by white suburban parents. The campaign included arson, violence, and terror, the KKK notably bombing ten school buses rather than have them transport integrated students.

  This decision was reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court in Milliken v. Bradley in 1974. The justification was that segregation wasn’t a stated policy of the school districts—although the court found that the schools were, in fact, segregated. Because this segregation wasn’t explicit, they ruled, it therefore wasn’t deliberate. They ruled that school systems and district lines could not be responsible for school segregation, and busing was outlawed. This had an effect not only in Detroit, but around the country.

  The schools in America today are more segregated than when Martin Luther King, Jr., was murdered. Detroit’s schools are now often considered the worst in the nation. At the beginning of the ’60s they were often said to be the best. Separate has always meant unequal.

  It also apparently meant that beautiful buildings like this got pushed into the ground, too. I stopped at the leaded glass on the stairway to look across the courtyard and watch the cruel yellow arm of the backhoe eat into the school and place tens of thousands of dollars, just in oak and marble, into a Dumpster.

  The same bitter principle was at work all over the city. Somehow blight was always blamed on Detroiters rather than those who had quite literally abandoned the city, leaving a mess.

  The three cabinets in my kitchen were just about all the physical memory of what was once a school that had educated thousands.

  Despite it all, my life would get better, in a concrete way, each day. I was on my way to building the world I wanted to live in, one made largely from pieces cast off as junk. I added rescued cabinets, my dishes stayed cleaner. I added a secondhand window, I got mo
re sunlight. I painted a wall, hung a photo, and the house became cheerier.

  That first winter was cold and miserable, but it, too, served a purpose. It reminded me that every nail I struck was a strike for me—not for a bank, not for a landlord. Every screw I drove was for my own purpose, not to make investors rich with usury. Every bolt tightened was bringing closer the edges of the world I had imagined for myself. Everything I created would stay in my own orbit, satellites of the world in which I wished to live.

  What I learned that first winter was that my goal wasn’t to build a house. It was to transform myself by building a house. Houses could be torn down, memories and ideas couldn’t. It wasn’t always pretty, but it was under way. What living in Detroit had taught me was that the goal wasn’t to build a new city. It was to transform ourselves by building a new city.

  It also taught me I needed a gun. My father picked it up for me at a massive hunting store near my childhood home, a 12-gauge Mossberg 500 pump-action shotgun with interchangeable barrels, both cold black steel atop a walnut stock. It had been built for a single, sole purpose: killing things. In a way it was beautiful, and that beauty arose from its savageness. I spent a firm, rainy afternoon building a special shelf for it in my bedroom closet so I could grab it at a moment’s notice. It would remain loaded, the ka-chink of the racking mechanism all that remained between innocence and death with the squeeze of a brass trigger. I keep it loaded with four rounds of double-aught buckshot followed by a single lead slug as big around as a nickel. I considered loading it with salt instead of lead, but I knew if I ever had to remove it from its shelf it was all or nothing.

  Hopefully I wouldn’t have to.

  CHAPTER 8

  * * *

  A Chimney to the Sky

  Friendships grow alongside vegetables in Detroit gardens

  Spring had returned as it always does, the bright, generous whirling of the sun and the rain playing a symphony on the green things of the earth. The slate-gray skies of winter had been banished, and the sounds of the birds and insects were back with the month of May. After another winter nearly without heat, the first yellow-warm day had the effect on the mind that taking a shower after a long time in the woods has on the body. It was time to do my own encouraging of the green things of the earth and plant a garden. I loaded my hoe and rake into the red wheelbarrow and stepped outside into the neighborhood.

  My big project for the summer was the chimney. It was also time to meet the neighbors, but I was feeling less sure about that. Part of the reason the winter had been so tough was because I was still trying to find my place in everything. Constitutionally shy, I needed to force myself to meet the people who lived around me, to not slip in and out of my house. I needed to slowly and respectfully add my voice to the chorus of what was an already functioning community. I figured my best bet was with a garden.

  I had started the soil the year before from leaves I had collected, spent brewing grains from the bar I frequented, and compost from Forestdale. I had piled it in square layers like lasagna in the center of my lots and bordered the bed with logs I had accumulated clearing my backyard. Out in the open I felt self-conscious in front of my new neighbors, unprotected by the walls of my house.

  I grabbed the hoe and began turning the soil, a white guy in the middle of Detroit with my feet in the dirt, breaking up big loamy chunks that had compressed like diamonds over the winter. I hoed until my back and arms had beaded with sweat and the muscles felt loose and warm. I folded my hands over the handle in repose and saw Mrs. Terry, the neighbor from behind me, beckoning. I also saw a thunderstorm brewing.

  I walked over to chat with Mrs. Terry for a moment, and she casually invited me to a Mother’s Day party they would be throwing in their yard. I kept an eye on the storm. I figured she was just being friendly and didn’t really want me to show up, but I said something affirmative. I could see the front pushing against the clear blue of the day, the sky divided in two.

  I thanked her, feeling a bit better about my place in the neighborhood, but told her I needed to get the crops in before it rained. I had seen the news earlier but only just remembered this had been in the forecast, the bounty of the day encouraging my forgetting. The thunder was here whether I liked it or not, and I was going to have to work fast if I wanted to get everything in the ground. I wasn’t sure I would. I waved goodbye to Mrs. Terry and went back to hoeing with increased vigor.

  I worked quickly. Gardens had become the metaphor for what Detroit could be; the cold steel, captured explosions, and CO2 of automobiles were the past whether we liked it or not. Gardens represented life: growing, spreading, healing, vegetables and fruit working in harmony, a community in the dirt but never dirty. At least it represented what I wanted the new Detroit to be. The wooden handle of the hoe, smoothed by years of work, felt easy in my hands, like I might beat the storm.

  Like so much else, the U.S. food system has failed Detroit spectacularly. Much of the city is considered a “food desert,” where access to fresh fruits and vegetables is nearly nonexistent due to transportation and economic challenges. It’s no secret that poverty and extra weight overlap in complicated ways. Detroit is often the most obese city in the nation from year to year. A neighbor I recognized drove by. I waved. He gave me a nod.

  When the row had been hoed, I dropped to my knees with an open package of mustard green seeds. The storm was growing closer. I drilled holes in the soil with my forefinger for the fetal greens, measuring the spacing with a yardstick.

  Urban gardens are great for teaching people about food and cooking. In urban areas people are largely divorced from how food is produced, and a growing culture of ecological husbandry and knowledge not only helps people make better choices but also make better use of their choices. Knowledge about growing food leads to knowledge about cooking food, which leads to knowledge about personal health.

  Drill the holes, drop in the seeds, move the stick. Don’t go too fast or you’ll mess up.

  But gardens in Detroit didn’t just begin as a healthy alternative to the junk sold at liquor stores. It was a way to meet your neighbors, brighten the neighborhood, and reclaim abandoned land for the community. Gardens in Detroit grew relationships alongside vegetables. This was the point, and this was why I was outside with my knees in the dirt. Getting outside leads to meeting the neighbors, which leads to community groups, which leads to safer streets and cleaner lots, which leads to self-sufficiency and healthy communities. As Grace Lee Boggs once wrote, “Building community is to the collective as spiritual practice is to the individual.”

  I moved on to carefully dislodging purple cabbages from the plastic cups in which they’d spent the first part of their lives. I buried them in the soil, patting each root structure, with faith that they would grow.

  Detroit has the space, infrastructure, and knowledge to grow much of the food we need for the city, inside the city itself. Keep Growing Detroit, the nonprofit that supplied me with these transplants, has estimated there are already at least twenty thousand urban farmers and gardeners in the city. There are an estimated forty square miles of vacant land in Detroit, enough to fit San Francisco inside just what’s been abandoned. Michael Hamm of Michigan State University calculated Detroit could grow three-quarters of its vegetables and more than half its fruit right here.

  Stick in a plant, cover it with soil. There is little in an acorn to suggest it will become an oak tree.

  What would it do to Detroit if, instead of subsidizing casinos and sports stadiums, we used that money to plant thousands of fruit trees around the city free for anyone to eat from?

  Stick in a plant, cover it with soil.

  What if they used that money to subsidize the building of windmills, solar panels, and geothermal heat and installed it in the city itself?

  Stick in a plant, cover it with soil.

  If instead of demolishing houses outright they surgically dismantled them using the materials to build more housing stock?

  Stick in
a plant, cover it with soil.

  Both the temperature and the atmospheric pressure had dropped and I could feel the electricity in the air. The dog began to sniff, his hackles like a porcupine. The wind picking up, blowing his fur in beautiful whorls, propelling the neighborhood trash like tumbleweeds. I was so lost in the approaching storm and the work that I also lost my fear and self-consciousness in the neighborhood. I uncovered an earthworm and used a precious few moments before the rain to study it.

  Urban farming and ideas like this begin to remove Detroit and cities like it from dependence on the global oil system and reliance on nonrenewable resources. Biking tomatoes down the street uses a whole lot less gasoline than trucking them in from Mexico.

  I began planting peas.

  This makes gardens dangerous. They are the zygote of an idea that can spread and grow and multiply into a worldview. They can take us from “theirs” to “ours.” They can take us from an abandoned plot of land owned by a bank to a garden owned in community. From a foreclosed home to housing for the needy. From city blocks left for dead to communities without consumers.

  Gardens are dangerous to those sixty-two men who control the natural resources of our planet and own half the world. They rely on our dependence. Gardens are dangerous to the politicians who support them. They also rely on our dependence. Gardens are dangerous to the idea that consumption and stasis are the only ways to live.

  The last to go in was the squash. I gently placed them in the dirt, careful not to break their delicate tendrils. The storm was upon us.

  Gardens are dangerous because urban farms and gardens are but one example, and like a mathematical theorem we can apply the principle of self-sufficiency to the other necessities of life: geothermal heat, electricity from the wind and sun, mass transit.

  The first drum of thunder. The rain had begun. It was wetting my T-shirt and the dog began to howl. Six more plants to get in the ground. Maybe I’d make it.