A $500 House in Detroit

by Drew Philp

  There was a three-lane road up ahead and I was thinking about making it across, looking for traffic. I screamed at Gratiot to go faster.

  I made it across.

  He did not.

  He’d stopped, standing in the middle of the road facing off with the four dogs. He snarled and whipped the chain. The other dogs had grouped together like a pack of wolves, circling him. I was going to watch Gratiot get killed.

  I had nothing to fight with. I looked around, no sticks, nothing to throw.

  “Gratiot!”

  I was unprepared and was going to watch my dog die because of it.

  “Gratiot!”

  Still no traffic. I dumped the bike and went in, visions of my forearms ripped apart by dog teeth. I’m not going to let him die.

  I made myself as big as I could and stopped yelling for my dog, started yelling at the others.

  “You best back the fuck up!” Gratiot was going to be hamstrung by the chain for the fight.

  The brown-and-white pit bull was closest and barking at me now. I made it to the chain. I yanked on it, trying to get some slack so I could brain one of the dogs. The pit bull leaped, but it was a feint. The other dogs howled.

  I dragged Gratiot across the road and the street dogs stayed on the other side.

  They didn’t pursue. When Gratiot and I made it a block away I got on the bike and we rode home, the injection of adrenaline draining slowly from my body. I could hear the street dogs bay in the distance.

  When we entered the safety of my fence I sat on the porch and tried to wring the last of the sour adrenaline from my body. I grabbed Gratiot about the chest and dug my fingers into the fur of his shoulders. He licked my ear and squirmed. There was no question which Detroit we had chosen to live in, and I was doubting, after what I’d seen, that that choice could be undone. The only way out was through.

  CHAPTER 11

  * * *

  The Years Roll By

  Digging out the old foundation

  Just after I got the roof on without incurring any debt, Detroit went bankrupt. Then it became unbankrupt.

  It was funny, while we declared the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history, there was an unmistakable feeling that money was pouring into the city. There seemed to be plenty of cash around, just none of it in the right place.

  The rock-hard hard-on of all spurious subsidies screwing taxpayers was announced just a week after Detroit declared. The city and state gave hundreds of millions of dollars to the billionaire Mike Ilitch to build a new hockey arena. Detroit was so bankrupt it could find enough dough to give millions to someone who already had billions.

  The rationale was, of course, employment. This was just a few years after the government granted the Marathon oil refinery, on the west side of Detroit, a $175 million tax break for providing the same silver bullet of progress: jobs.

  It created fifteen.

  That’s more than $11.5 million per job.

  And this after supporting a new jail, half-built downtown, nicknamed the “fail jail,” which had been halted midway because of cost overruns. Numerous people involved with the project have been indicted and civil lawsuits abound. It was costing the county almost $1.2 million per month just in storage and interest fees.

  To give you an idea of our priorities, Michigan spends more money on prisons than on higher education.

  Aside from all the talk and increased attention from the national media, the bankruptcy didn’t seem to change life all that much for the average Detroiter—unless you were on a pension. What did make things different was emergency financial management, a fancy way of saying state takeover of city government. Detroit’s bankruptcy was shepherded through the courts by an emergency financial manager, appointed by Michigan’s governor, Rick Snyder. In the last election Detroit voted more than 90 percent for the party opposite the governor’s.

  As with the other EFMs, Detroit’s Kevin Orr had near dictatorial powers to make unilateral decisions, break union contracts, and—this is key—pension obligations. Every elected official in Detroit was stripped of their power, and Orr would be the sole individual deciding Detroit’s governmental future. EFMs had already been appointed in almost every other majority-black city in the state, and when Detroit came under emergency management, more than half of the state’s African Americans had been disenfranchised on the local level.

  This is worth repeating. Half of the black people in Michigan had lost the right to vote for their local leaders. It was a stunning coup against democracy. The governor and legislature could determine a city was under “financial emergency” and install a bureaucrat answering not to the residents but to the party. It just so happened that nearly every single one of these cities was majority black. It also just so happened that the state owed Detroit millions in promised “revenue sharing” dollars that were never paid, distinctly contributing to the emergency.

  To put this in the simplest terms, I, the person writing this book, had my democracy taken from me.

  During the war against the Nazis, Detroit was nicknamed “The Arsenal of Democracy,” on account of the auto factories that had been retooled to make the bombing planes and tanks that won the war against fascism. Now it was a cruel joke.

  Citizens, of course, tried to fight it. When there began to be rumblings of an EFM in Detroit, the law granting the ability was recalled by a vote of the people, statewide. More than half of Michigan’s voters thought this unconstitutional and unwarranted and struck it down.

  The governor then rammed a new bill through the legislature with some marginal changes and attached a financial appropriations rider. This ensured voters of the state wouldn’t be able to vote on the issue again, as our state constitution prohibits popular votes on laws with attached dollar figures.

  The NAACP filed a lawsuit against the government, calling the new act an unconstitutional violation of voting rights. The suit was dismissed by the same judge who later presided over Detroit’s bankruptcy.

  This happened while I was paying property and income taxes to the very city I no longer had a say in as a voter. Losing my right to vote for who was to lead my city was a black mark on me as an individual, a free U.S. citizen. I will carry around for the rest of my life the fact that when I was a young man I had my right to vote removed, along with that of all my neighbors. Enough people thought I wasn’t competent to make decisions that would affect me directly. I carry that as a shame not only on myself but on my country.

  If you find this statement hysterical or overblown you might have to realize democracy just isn’t that important to you. What if it was your right to vote?

  The same political class that had brought “democracy” to Iraq had stripped it from Detroit. People in the city began to openly wonder if the folks who had white-flighted themselves now wanted the city back by any means necessary, including those less than democratic. Emergency management was also at the root of the poisoned water in Flint, Detroit’s little brother to the north.

  The era of the EFM in Detroit was when the water shutoffs and evictions started. In order to clean up the books at the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department for possible privatization, the city began shutting off water to tens of thousands of people during the summer of 2014. The move was condemned by the United Nations as a human rights violation, by groups such as the National Nurses Union as a public health issue, and by international clergy as a violation of basic decency.

  Shutoff occurred without warning when a household was $150 overdue or two months late. Activists had been petitioning for an affordability plan for years, and the cost of the plan they came up with, just over $5 million, was about what the city paid a private company to perform the shutoffs.

  The Nestlé Corporation siphons off 150 gallons of water per minute from the Great Lakes aquifers to serve their bottled water operation. Aside from a small permitting fee, they pay the residents of Michigan exactly zero dollars for the privilege to remove our natural resources held in common. In fact,
the state gave them $13 million in tax breaks to locate the plant here. Conveniently, Nestlé’s Michigan spokeswoman, Deborah Muchmore, is married to the governor’s chief of staff, Dennis Muchmore. Could you imagine BP pumping the oil from beneath Saudi Arabia while paying nothing to the owners? Nestlé is now petitioning the state to increase their allowance to 400 gallons a minute, still, of course, for free.

  Water was indiscriminately shut off to pregnant women, elderly people, and those with illnesses. Per Michigan’s laws, children could not be raised in a structure lacking running water. If folks had their water shut off and couldn’t find a place for their kids, the state would take them.

  When all was done, more than 80,000 people had their water turned off, more than a tenth of the city. As reported by Joel Kurth of the Detroit News, DWSD cannot say how many of those people have had their water turned back on. The number of Detroiters still without water is likely in the tens of thousands.

  While residential customers were getting shut off, Detroit refused to go after businesses that were past due. Places like Ford Field, where the Lions play, owed more than $50,000. The Chrysler group, which just received bailouts from the federal government, owed thousands. Amid all this, after having been shut off for years, the grand fountain on Belle Isle was turned back on—the park now leased to the state—the freely flowing water taunting those without it.

  Water bills were also tied to property taxes, contributing to the eviction crisis. Detroit has some of the highest property tax rates in the nation. As people moved out, the solution to declining revenues was to raise taxes on the people who stayed. Coupled with being one of the poorest cities in the United States, this was disastrous. We were paying for nearly nonexistent services, yet paying the most for them. All those people who had left for the suburbs and were now paying taxes outside the city had left Detroit crippled.

  After losing tens of thousands of homes to mortgage foreclosure, the crisis then reached the tax-foreclosure phase. The Atlantic estimated one-fifth of Detroit’s population could lose their homes in this manner. That’s more than 100,000 people, the population of Buffalo, New York. Imagine one in five people in your city losing their homes. It’s a crisis of refugee proportions.

  The foreclosures opened the door for speculation. After bleeding the city dry, people from the suburbs and all over the world began to buy up blocks of homes at rock-bottom prices and letting them sit, uncared for and dangerous. Michigan Radio has estimated that at least 20 percent of Detroit land is now owned by speculators. The vast majority of those structures rot.

  Like the red abandoned house next to me, owned by an LLC. While whoever owned it waited for his payday, I kept boarding the place up every time it got broken into. I mowed the lawn once a week. I even put gutters on it to keep the rainfall from ruining my foundation. All of which were technically illegal. Anytime I stepped on the property or went into the house I could be arrested. If this notion seems silly, remember that Norman was taken to jail earlier in this story for doing just that.

  Meanwhile, Detroit’s march toward progress included the city’s public schools, which have been under emergency management all but three years since 1999. In a gobsmacking bit of irony, the school district’s debt under emergency management had ballooned, and DPS was out of money to pay teachers. The succession of emergency managers had failed even by their own standard, money. The debt increased. The curious thing was that nearly all that debt was owed to the state, as if they were trying to make the schools and the city financially unstable. When public institutions and commons are on the skids, it’s much easier to privatize them and put more money in the pockets of your friends, and in some cases the corporations their wives helm.

  During Detroit’s orgy of “restructuring” there was apocalyptic talk about selling the prized public art in the Detroit Institute of Arts as bankruptcy payment, of chiseling out the same Detroit industry murals that Cecilia and I had stood before. They went so far as to have Christie’s appraise the value of its major works.

  This was just a ruse to scare the state’s more liberal citizens into accepting a bargain. The governor’s political bread was buttered by some of the major donors to the museum, including the DeVos clan, and there was no way, in an election year, he was going to sell the art they had donated. By holding an axe over the art it was easier to cut pensions when choices needed to be made.

  And that they were. The pensioners got screwed, of course, but folks didn’t really expect anything different. Pensioners took a reduction in their monthly checks, cost-of-living adjustments, and health care from what they were promised during their decades of work for the city. The average pensioner was making $19,000 a year. Keep in mind they just gave—not a tax break, a handout—more than $250 million to a billionaire to build a new hockey stadium.

  Now tell me again who the welfare queens are?

  The deal was part of a “grand bargain,” struck among the city, the state, and private entities. The pensioners would take smaller cuts than originally proposed—another axe above a red herring—and none of the art would be sold. It was nearly a billion dollars in private and state money. Why there was that much cash available but not in the right place is a mystery.

  Just four years before, the federal government bailed out Detroit’s auto industry, to the tune of about $85 billion, similar to the plan they had constructed for the banks that were “too big to fail.” Two of the Big Three filed for bankruptcy, and all three needed emergency loans. There was no bailout for the people of my city.

  In the corporate media the bankruptcy had been discussed as “paving the way” for Detroit’s “renaissance.” And there was a renaissance of sorts, but thanks to research from the Wayne State graduate student Alex B. Hill, the revival was clearly less than equal.

  In a widely covered paper entitled “Detroit: Black Problems, White Solutions,” Hill confirmed a suspicion of many in the city. He calculated the racial makeup of a wide variety of start-ups, incubators, government organizations, universities, NGOs, and “who is accepted to [the] fellowships and the various programs and organizations working to revitalize Detroit.” What he found is that in a city more than 80 percent black almost 70 percent of those leading the regeneration were white.

  Is this how we run the “comeback city”?

  In the words of Mikel Ellcessor, co-creator of NPR’s Radiolab, Detroit’s rebound is “an immoral, cosmetic sham.”

  Consider the political cronyism, the corporate theft, the poisoned water in Flint—and most especially—our loss of democracy, a dry run for the rest of the nation. Welcome to Detroit.

  * * *

  I dug out the foundation over a week in May with a shovel and mattocks, four and a half feet deep and eleven feet long through clay. There were parts of me that relished the work as I had digging that first hole at Will’s for the pond, others that wondered if my labor was for naught. Over five trips I picked up the cinder blocks from the masonry yard in the neighborhood, the leaf springs in my old truck sagging like a tired mule. I set 110 forty-pound blocks in the basement and seventeen bags of mortar in the shed for when my family would come to lay them.

  Garrett took a day off work to help me bust out the foundation with sledgehammers. He had just fixed his own recently purchased place on Forestdale with windows, electricity, insulation, and plumbing, and was moving in as soon as the drywall was complete. We carried the bricks out in milk crates, and stacked them in the yard.

  On the Friday before Memorial Day, my father, uncle, and a cousin drove down early to lay the new block. My grandfather had become too frail to do much, and although he wanted to help and probably could have, my dad and the rest of us forced him to rest. While my uncle and I spread the mortar and leveled the block, my dad mixed and hauled with my cousin. We got the new wall laid in a day. It marked the end of the major construction, and barring anything unforeseen, everything else was cosmetic.

  My grandfather did participate in his own way. He made me an hei
rloom toolbox, exactly the same as he had made for himself as a young man, and as he made for my father when he was about my age. The toolbox is oak, and my grandfather turned the brass knobs himself.

  The rest of the house came a little at a time, but always progressing, my home stable and no longer the focus of my working and thinking life. It did what it was designed to do: keep the elements out, keep me safe and warm. In this I had succeeded.

  What I had failed to keep out was uncertainty. With the changes in the city, both my neighbors and I now had to worry about being displaced, not just by fire or crime but by the billionaires. The bankruptcy marked the first shots in the battle for Detroit’s soul. On one side stood the old methods of cold economics and scale, and on the other a grassroots movement of education, community, and compassion. We were going to have to pit our humanity against their money, and the fate of Detroit was now a microcosm of what was happening to the country at large. The building of my house was but one soldier, and I was determined to fight until the end.

  I finished the rest of the windows and the second bathroom, and started one of the guest bedrooms. Little conveniences such as more kitchen cabinets or a new closet for the vacuum were revelations. The front porch came along, slowly, but I was finally able to sit on its sturdy haunches and wave at the neighbors walking by. I was a long way from no heat and keeping my dishes in a milk crate.

  I even had time to begin to help others and pay back some of what I owed. I was happy to oblige when Paul asked for a hand with the plumbing on the Boggs School. Teachers, administrators, and parents ran around inside, painting rooms in bright colors, stocking the library, and making posters of revolutionary heroes like Rosa Parks and Cesar Chavez. As Paul and I worked they installed a new playground directly in view of my front porch and the stairs my grandfather had made. I was hoping I would be able to hear the children playing at recess, their innocent shouts and cries of joy a reminder of what I was fighting for. The building, abandoned for years, was now a school.