by Drew Philp
Underscoring this shift was the fruition of dozens of community meetings held by the mayor and supported by foundations. The proposal they had come up with was called the Detroit Future City Plan. Many were immediately skeptical when the diagnosis mentioned race only in passing, given that the metro area is the most segregated and gentrification was knocking at the door. We became increasingly concerned when we learned that the plan called for some neighborhoods to be completely transformed, not into beautiful communities for the residents who already lived there but for such projects as water retention ponds and “green infrastructure.” Some of the neighborhoods would be intentionally let go to seed, city services would be diminished or removed, and residents would be on their own.
This dynamic was playing out in Poletown through the developer who had come to Forestdale with plans for the giant urban farm. Supported by foundation money—gathered from some of the same institutions that had financed the Detroit Future City Plan—the developer had just purchased an industrial building in the neighborhood for fish farming and hydroponics. He was now petitioning the city to donate an enormous patch of land right up the street from my house, saying it would be the “largest urban farm in the U.S.” Although the development wasn’t yet at my doorstep, future plans for expansion would envelop my home.
Detroit’s billionaires began to flex their greenback muscles, too. There were rumors that Mike Ilitch, the owner of the Detroit Red Wings, Little Caesars, and the baseball team and stadium (the latter heavily subsidized by the city and state), was attempting to build a new hockey arena, partially with taxpayers’ money.
Dan Gilbert, owner of Quicken Loans, Rock Financial, the Cleveland Cavaliers, and more than sixty skyscrapers downtown, went on a buying spree. He had made his money originating mortgages. Gilbert says he is so prosperous because he didn’t sell junk during the collapse. It’s difficult to tell for sure how much he contributed to Detroit’s mortgage crisis, because Quicken is largely just an originator of mortgages, and the loans were almost immediately chopped up and sold in complex financial practices that can’t easily be traced.
Quicken is being sued by the U.S. Justice Department for mortgage fraud. Gilbert just lost a labor lawsuit. One of his real estate companies also emptied two downtown buildings full of people: one was a longtime artists collective, the other was full of the elderly. In a widely panned video discussing the new market-rate and fashionable apartment building, energetic white participants said, “This is our time.”
Some of us began to wonder whose time it really was. The thing that made Detroit so special was that as we built the city once again, this time we had the opportunity to fix some of the mistakes of the past—racial segregation, power imbalance that came with wealth inequality, displacement as the city grew—and many began to wonder if this wasn’t just a naïve dream, that Detroit would be built back as a mirror of the current America and the former Detroit. It wasn’t just whites moving back to the city, segregation was moving back to Detroit as well.
The sickness of dissonance was upon me again. The ripping feeling I’d had when moving between tony Ann Arbor and the dirty streets of Detroit was back, and I no longer had to leave the city to experience it. Work at the prison and life in the neighborhood were old Detroit. The job at the restaurant and the soccer pitch were another. Again, I had my feet in both worlds and was attempting to make sense of it all.
At the moment, I still needed to get my roof on. Summer passed into fall. The mornings were once again cold, but tempered by a blur of work. Five days a week at the prison, two at the restaurant, repeat. Prison, restaurant, repeat.
I redoubled my efforts to get the roof on. I worked every single day, seven days a week, for months.
I took bottles back to the store. I’d eat rice and beans at home for lunch. My clothing became threadbare. I gave up beer, never went to the movies, rode my bike instead of taking the truck, waited until Thanksgiving to turn on the heat. Everything I could do to save money. I called the roofing contractor and he generously agreed to do the job in late winter at a cheaper rate than normal, to “keep his crew working” in the off-season.
I had a week off for midwinter break from teaching at the prison. Again I needed a deadline and this would be the time. In addition to having the money ready I needed to be able to work with the crew, taking care of things that could only be done in concert with the tear-off, such as repairing a vent pipe, adding a skylight from the salvage place, and getting as much wayward trash into the Dumpster as possible now that I could no longer take it to the incinerator without being charged. I turned down the temperature on the water heater. I left the restaurant last each weekend, working the longest shifts. I sold valuables, like the cap on my truck. I lined up small loans from my friends in case I wouldn’t have enough.
Almost there, bank balance rising.
Work, sleep, eat. Work sleep eat. Worksleepeat. Worksleepeat.
Finally.
And then I found that my basement had flooded. The house had smelled funky for a few days, but I couldn’t quite place it. One day after work I decided to check the basement, and it was ankle-deep in shitwater. I called my neighbor Woods, and he came over with a drain snake.
He explained that tree roots from my yard had grown into my sewer line, waste and water being the perfect plant food. Toilet tissue or something or other had then become caught in the tangle of roots and each time I’d flushed or taken a shower it had backflowed up the drains in the basement floor. I borrowed a pump and started getting some of the water into the yard, while Woods, teetering on chunks of two-by-four, rammed the snake through the main line, under the house and eight feet down in the yard. No drainage. We tried a different head. Nothing.
“So what am I going to have to do if we can’t get this?” I asked him.
“You’ll have to dig it up. I can do it, and I’ll give you a good price because you’re close,” he said.
“How much will that cost?”
“Oh, a couple thousand dollars, probably.”
Welp.
“Shit. Well, I have the money, but it was supposed to go to the roof.”
Finally, Woods and I gave up. The clog just wouldn’t break.
“You better take a look at these foundation walls, too, Drew,” he said. “These are starting to bow pretty good. If you want, we can do this all in one sweep. If I dig out your main line I can get that foundation wall, too, for free.”
Tired, I inspected the walls. They were all moving a bit, but the wall perpendicular to the electrical box was looking haggard. The mortar was crumbling and the bricks bowed a good three inches. I entertained the suggestion. I could take care of this now and start all over on the roof.
“Isn’t there anything else we can try to get this water out of here and buy me some time?”
“You can sister up that wall with some headers and I can call up my buddy who has a bigger snake.”
“Call the man.”
Wait for the new guys. Carry the machine down. Pray the clog breaks.
Clunk.
The sound of water drained as I smoked on the basement stairs. Fifty dollars to Woods, seventy-five to the crew, and the roof was back on the funding list.
“You need to start thinking about that foundation, Drew. Soon,” Woods said before he left.
* * *
On a rainy February morning a Dumpster showed up, as well as a crew of Ukrainians. I had made it, the hard work paying off. In a week there would be no more drips, no more jars of rainwater, no more worry about ruined drywall.
Watching them work was beautiful. They were masters and operated together like a ballet troupe, scraping the roof clean of shingles and floating around the ridge as if it were nothing more than a playground. After removing the shingles they had to cover the old decking—strips of one-by called purlins—with plywood. When I saw them alternating horizontal and vertical pieces like a crocheted quilt, instead of butting them together at the corners, I knew they would do an
excellent job and I was in skilled hands. I bought them lunch the first day because I remembered how generous it was when a homeowner bought me chicken while we were sanding floors.
All the upheaval was driving Gratiot wild. As I stepped onto the back porch, the little guy jumped up on the door to see out the window, throwing the deadbolt latch. I tried to coax him to undo it, but he just stood wagging his tail, as if mocking me. I didn’t have a key hidden outside for fear that someone would find it, and had to borrow a hammer from one of the roofers. I climbed a ladder to the second story and bashed in the plywood covering one of the window openings that hadn’t yet received its glass. While I was up there I noticed something.
On the next block over, in the old brick building once a “settlement house,” but abandoned ever since I’d moved in, stood Farmer Paul. He was carrying a bundle of pipes through the back door. Once I got back inside, I grabbed my keys and headed over.
I knocked on the door and Paul answered in a dirty white work shirt and thick leather gloves.
“Oh, hey, Drew! How goes it!” He seemed excited to see me and removed one of the gloves to shake my hand. “I see they’re coming along on that roof.”
“They’re doing a better job than I ever could. What’s going on here, though?”
“The Boggs School, they’re moving in.”
“Ohhhh.” I’d heard about this school from Paul earlier, and a few years back had even attended a few meetings. They were attempting to establish an institution based on the principles of Grace Lee Boggs, then still holding out a few blocks away. The school would pursue what they called “place-based education,” teaching students to be good citizens as well as lifelong learners by using the assets and challenges within the community itself. Just taking an old unused building and fixing it up was a stunning first lesson. The founders of the school didn’t need to kick anyone out to do it. I was happy they were coming to Poletown, but surprised.
“I thought the school was to be deeper east,” I said.
“No, I think that lease fell through. You’re going to be neighbors.”
I was excited. These were good people.
“Well, I’m kinda booked now, but let me know when you need help. I’ll be happy to pitch in.”
Paul said he wouldn’t hesitate, and I got back to taking five-gallon buckets of dirt from the basement and climbing the mountain of shingles in the Dumpster to be rid of it for good.
The Ukrainian crew worked fast. A job that would have taken my friends and me two or three weeks, at best, they accomplished in four days. Just like that, the roof was finished. They left my yard cleaner than when they started. As Will told me later, once a house has a new roof it’s here to stay.
That year was the rainiest since the Civil War.
With the roof on I could really bang on the place, my eye on the foundation. I added gutters to slow the erosion. The wall next to the electrical box was bowing out like a fat man’s stomach, and the others were groaning as well. It was looking like at least one wall would have to be replaced, but I was naïvely hoping that wasn’t going to be the case. My dad and I blew a couple of holes in the brick above the ground line and added headers and posts beneath the joists to keep the house from sinking if the wall shifted, but I hoped adding gutters would buy me some time. I hung a plumb bob a sixteenth of an inch from the wall, so I could see if and how fast it was moving.
The saving started again. To add windows to the front I was going to buy them to size this time rather than attempt to frame them out. The windows in the front two parlors were mirror images of one another with some nice aesthetic balance, and I wanted to honor that at least in this portion of the house. This would be the facade to the world, the face of the place, so I wanted it to be somewhat uniform. I’d still install them myself, but decided I’d work on something less costly in the meantime.
The first thing I made was another woodshed so I could store two years’ wood. I made the structure from pallets, the same kind I’d used to build my fence, some corrugated tin I’d found in the neighborhood for a roof, and the siding I had cut off Will’s house, completing a kind of circle of reuse.
The shed ended up looking quite nice, if rustic, like a shack in Appalachia. I also needed a well-built honest-to-god shed to store the lawn mower and shovels and such. In addition, I needed to get the piles of material I’d saved from the initial cleanout outside, all the doors, trim, little pieces of wood and tile, pipes and tar paper. With this gone I could move my workshop into the parlor. Adding storage would begin to make this house less of a construction site and more of a home.
In the hours after work I studied a textbook of modern building my father had lying around, and designed a twelve-foot-square shed, a framed box with siding and a shingle roof. If I got stuck on the planning I could call up my grandfather and father for answers on roof pitch or the load capacity of two-by-six joists spaced at sixteen inches on center. Each payday, after siphoning off some of my income for future windows, I went to the lumberyard and bought a few two-by-fours, a couple sheets of plywood or siding, bundles of shingles, nails, and treated lumber. Like the Johnny Cash song, I got it one piece at a time.
My father came up one sunny weekend to help erect it. Everything was going well. I had constructed the foundation and decking before he arrived, cut and assembled the roof rafters, and the walls were coming along nicely, barn-raising style. My father and I knocked them together on the ground and lifted them up by hand, father and son on either end. We’d plumb the wall and move on to the next. We nailed the siding, framed the door opening, and got to sheeting the roof just as the sun was going down.
“So do you want to go to that Tigers game today?” my dad asked. I didn’t, and he knew it. We’d been planning this project for some time, and ever my father’s son, I wanted to finish this up and move the fencing around it. The dog couldn’t be let out without supervision, and I wanted to be shut of this whole task. The baseball game could wait. There would be more.
“I don’t know, Dad. I’d kind of like to stay and get this done.”
“Are you sure? I’ve had these tickets for a while now. I don’t want them to go to waste.”
“Dad,” I said, nailing in another sheet as he was cutting on the ground, “you told me when I was a kid, if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right, and you always finish what you start. I need to finish this.”
“I’m going to the game whether you want to or not. I’ll go by myself if I have to.”
“Well, all right, then! You know how much work I have to do? Look at this place. I need your help. You have no idea how stressed out I am.”
“Do you know what I deal with at work every day?” He pointed to himself. “You know how much bullshit I have to take? I need to have some fun once in a while, too.”
He had recently been appointed the superintendent of the district he had been with for more than thirty years. He could be promoted no higher. He had climbed the ladder of the American dream, from working as a teenager pushing a broom in a machine shop, to a machinist himself, to teaching shop, to being head boss in the school district where he’d worked most of his adult life. He found it lonely and wanting at the top. It was making him sick, the petty indignities of a local politics as fractured and deaf as of those on the national scale.
“That ain’t how you raised me. You taught me to work and work and work, and I’ve been working my life away on this place.” I threw the hammer into the dirt and climbed down from the ladder. “You know how hard I’ve worked here? You know how much I’ve struggled—”
“Listen up, Andrew Man. I’ve been working my whole life to make your teeth straight, give you an education, and keep your ass out of trouble. Don’t tell me about hard work.”
I didn’t have anything to say to that. He had taught me to work, and work I was going to do. I picked up the hammer and got back on the ladder. We worked together in silence.
When we finished the roof there was nothing left to say. He d
rove away as I dug the new holes for the fence.
I had made a mistake. I should have just gone to the ball game with him, instead of getting the work done and feeling like shit anyway. He was having just as hard a time as I was, working with what he had, doing what he thought was right. As with Cecilia, love and duty had once again come into conflict. Again I had made the wrong decision, although this time, it was the opposite one.
I worked on the shed until the sun went down.
* * *
My grandfather had built me a complex set of stairs for the front porch consisting of two pieces that wrapped around a corner. My father and I still hadn’t had a chance to patch things up in person, but there was another ball game, and as a show of good faith all three of us were going, grandfather, father, and son. I made sure I wasn’t working. Soon after shingling the shed roof I drove up to my grandfather’s to retrieve the stairs.
My grandfather’s plans for the porch steps
Their beauty was in their functionality—built in two sections from two-by lumber from the big-box store, they were solid, staid, and functional. But behind the traditional construction was true complexity—these involved compound angles, intricate toe kicks, a setting that was less than square or plumb, and multiple other variables. I thanked my grandfather and asked him if he wanted me to pay him back for the lumber. He laughed.
“Of course not, bucko,” he said. “I’m happy to do it.” He went on to explain all the subtle deficiencies, pointing with the thumb he’d nicked on the table saw at the impurities that no one but he would ever notice and I would soon forget.
