Detroit City Is the Place to Be: The Afterlife of an American Metropolis

by Mark Binelli

  Continuing the tour, Covington pointed out a couple of hoop houses (homemade greenhouses constructed out of PVC piping and plastic sheets) and some raised “lasagna beds” (organic gardening plots layered with sheets of compost), which resembled fresh graves. One of his friends, a barber, had been setting aside bags of hair, good for keeping away rabbits, and in an ambiguous spirit of city-suburb cooperation, a riding club in Grosse Pointe had been donating horse manure. I asked if people in the neighborhood had been excited by the garden. He smiled faintly and said, “Noooooo. Workdays are Monday and Thursday, and we can’t get anybody out here. We had three people say they wanted to plant things, but it ended up just being me, my mother, and my wife.” He was holding a shovel, and when we stopped walking, he leaned forward on the handle, chin thrust out, in that classic pose they must teach you at farmers’ school. “I guess our trade-off for not getting a lot of help is they don’t tear it up, either. I’ll take that over the help. We have our guards, too. I’ll get a call at two in the morning: ‘Hey, Mark—some guy out here taking dirt!’ We’ve only had one real incident. Someone took a few small rose bushes in the spring. A lot of people just don’t understand the concept of a community garden. They’ll come at eleven at night, think they have to sneak in. I planted pumpkins and people started picking them in August. Who picks a pumpkin in August? It’s kind of hard to kill off a pumpkin plant. They did it. My plan was for kids to pick them.”

  As we spoke, a guy drove by and honked at us. Covington lifted one of his giant hands and said, “Hey, Mario,” even though there was no way the guy would be able to hear him. There hadn’t been any other signs of life, apart from a teenager in a hoodie who’d marched sullenly through the garden, cutting over to Gratiot. “That kid?” Covington had said. “They break into people’s houses. Can’t call the police. They won’t do nothing. It’s been like this for so long, it seems normal.” Covington said if someone’s car was stolen, you didn’t call the cops; you drove around in a friend’s car looking for it. People came into the neighborhood at night and illegally dumped trash in the empty lots and behind the liquor store. He’d found a bunch of mail from St. Clair Shores.

  “With urban agriculture, there’d be less dope houses,” Covington said. Thinking for a moment, he went on, “Maybe there would be more meth labs, because it would be more rural. But less crime. What you gonna do, steal chickens? You pull up one of my collard plants, okay, I’ll plant another one. It’s not a TV.”

  * * *

  There was something unassailably wonderful about the urban farming movement, especially in Detroit, with its extra little raspberry directed at Henry Ford, whose absolute detestation of farmwork had driven him from then-rural Dearborn to the city and played no small role in motivating his wholesale reinvention of the American way of life.3 A study at Michigan State University determined that the city of Detroit alone owned nearly five thousand acres of vacant land, spread over forty-four thousand parcels, which, if cultivated, could provide over 75 percent of fresh vegetables and 40 percent of nontropical fresh fruits for all Detroit residents. The researchers described this as a conservative estimate; certain dreamers, such as the nonagenarian activist Grace Lee Boggs and the investigative journalist Mark Dowie, have argued that Detroit, with the proper infrastructural investments, had enough unused land to become the first entirely self-sustainable city in the world, food-security-wise—in other words, the only city on the planet producing all of its food within its own borders.

  This experiment was already being tested on the ground, by community gardeners like Covington; by farmers like Rich Wieske, whose Green Toe Gardens produced three thousand pounds of honey from more than sixty inner-city beehives, and Greg Willerer, whose Brother Nature Produce stretched across an acre of property in North Corktown, producing two hundred pounds of salad greens a week, along with produce for the twenty-seven families who took part in his farming co-operative; at places like the Catherine Ferguson Academy, a high school for pregnant teenagers where all the students were required to work on the campus farm.

  Still, among the visions of Detroit’s future, urban agriculture was not exactly the most practical. As genuinely inspirational as stories like Covington’s might be, most Detroiters showed limited interest in turning to subsistence farming. But the notion of a pastoral, premodern salvation for Detroit had an appeal that far exceeded its plausibility, fitting, as it did, the world’s Mad Max fantasies of the city as a place where the vestiges of humanity might build makeshift lives for themselves out of the wreckage of modern society.

  A rival model for greening the city was also emerging. Perceived as corporatist (and therefore likely villainous) by activists of a more community-based bent, Hantz Farms was the brainchild of John Hantz, who had made millions in the financial services industry; Hantz had announced his intention to save Detroit, or at least perform some serious landscaping, by creating the world’s largest urban farm in the city limits. Hantz’s spokesperson was Matt Allen, who had been a press secretary during the Kwame Kilpatrick administration. In the midst of defending the mayor’s misbehavior, Allen had managed to out-disgrace his boss and get himself ousted from his own job first, after police officers showed up at his home to break up a violent domestic dispute involving Allen’s drunkenly grabbing his wife by the neck and smashing her head through a bathroom window.

  In person, Allen seemed like a mild-mannered guy. He was reedy and sharp-featured, with thin-framed glasses and a manner of speaking at once highly excitable and curiously wholesome. Several times he mentioned going to church, and he would occasionally refer to himself in the third person, saying things like, “There have been experts working on urban farming issues for years. Matt Allen has only been doing this for eighteen months.” Of his boss, he told me, “John’s the berries!” As Allen drove me around one of the proposed sites of Hantz’s farm—a depopulated neighborhood near my apartment—he explained how Hantz’s initially vague idea about “doing something with all of this land,” perhaps merely cultivating miniature forest, had expanded into a wild plan to make Detroit “a model for sustainability.” Ex-convicts and recovering addicts would be hired to work the farm; where the soil had been found too contaminated for vegetables, Hantz proposed planting Christmas or fruit trees, eventually promoting farm-tourism with attractions such as equestrian trails, pumpkin patches, and a cider mill.

  Allen stopped his car at a crossroads so desolate we might have been in Romeo, the rural Michigan community where Hantz had grown up. “Most of these neighborhoods, you can’t even call them neighborhoods anymore—they’re ‘areas,’” Allen said. “Okay, count these houses with me. One, two, three, four. Five over here. Six, seven over there. That’s ten blocks, seven structures. Two of them definitely vacant. Look! Over there. That’s literally a tar-roofed shack.” A couple of men stared at us from their front porch. “We’ve just gone fourteen blocks and we could not count fifteen structures. I can’t make this up.”

  One of the stickier issues when it came to large-scale use of vacant land in Detroit was the near unfeasibility, short of a savage eminent-domain fight, of assembling the scattered lots into anything sizable and contiguous. Smaller cooperative farming operations, long established in the city, also feared the scope of Hantz’s project, describing it as a land grab, one that would only produce low-paying manual jobs. Malik Yakini of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network raised the specter of a “corporate takeover” of what’s historically been a grassroots movement, adding, “At this point the key players with [Hantz] seem to be all white men in a city that’s at least 82 percent black.” (When I brought up Hantz Farms to Des Cooper, she was even more dismissive, asking, “You mean the plantation?”) The very size of Hantz’s operation also prompted concerns about pollution and water usage.

  Allen pointed out that Hantz had lived in the city of Detroit for over twenty years and also possessed a far from superficial knowledge of the world of agriculture, his father having sold farming equ
ipment in Romeo. They hoped to launch Hantz Farms with a twenty-five-acre starter site, ultimately expanding the operation into larger pod farms. “In our wildest dreams, we could see five thousand acres,” Allen said. “And even that would only be one-tenth of the available land in the city! If we fail, unlike an empty skyscraper or a half-built stadium, you get the land back, in better shape than we got it. People say, ‘He’s gonna make a lot of money.’ That’s a faulty premise.”

  I expected Allen to point out the great inefficiency of land speculation via mass-scale urban farming for a fabulously wealthy individual like Hantz. Instead, he went on, “The premise of a land grab assumes the housing market has even bottomed out.”

  In the end, however, the critics’ fears proved unfounded. The project, in spite of all the hype, remained stalled for years, until the Bing administration finally allowed Hantz to plant a starter orchard on (but not actively farm) five acres of land.

  * * *

  The frontier’s endless horizon has always proved attractive to those with the facility for conjuring utopian mirages. The logical conclusion to such thinking is something I like to call the Dystopian Happy Ending. You’ve seen this one before: after humankind finds itself close to eradicated by, well, take your pick (lab-produced plague, doomsday weapon, supercomputer, band of highly intelligent apes), the hardy survivors manage to come together and restart civilization, only this time (the hopeful implication goes) we learn from our ruinous missteps and finally get it right. In this vein, the waning of the auto industry might create short-term pain for out-of-work employees, but why mourn the end of Detroit’s hideously polluting industrial history, the deadening repetition of the assembly line, the inherently exploitative tethering of the proletariat to a giant, soulless corporation like General Motors or Ford? In the same way that the microsocieties formed at Zuccotti Park and other Occupy encampments in 2011 provided, for the simpatico, an exhilarating glimpse of freedom, postindustrial Detroit could be an unintentional experiment in stateless living, allowing for devolution of power to the grass roots.

  The sharp cultural critic Rebecca Solnit famously embraced this view in a Harper’s essay titled “Detroit Arcadia.” While acknowledging that it is “unfair, or at least deeply ironic, that black people in Detroit are being forced to undertake an experiment in utopian post-urbanism that appears to be uncomfortably similar to the sharecropping past their parents and grandparents sought to escape,” Solnit ends the essay in mawkish celebration of the city as an antidote to privileged liberals with their “free-range chickens and Priuses.” The future, she writes, “isn’t going to be invented by people who are happily surrendering selective bits and pieces of environmentally unsound privilege. It’s going to be made by those who had all that taken away from them or never had it in the first place.” To Solnit, the “most extreme and long-term hope” offered by Detroit is that “we can reclaim what we paved over and poisoned, that nature will not punish us, that it will welcome us home.”

  Solnit presumably wrote these sentences back home in San Francisco. But there are Detroiters who share her viewpoint, or versions of it, from the young white anarchists living collectively in a pair of rambling Victorian mansions on Trumbull Street (dubbed the Trumbullplex) to the black residents of the east side neighborhood known as the Hope District who planted fruit trees in vacant lots, constructed prayer circles, and sold local goods at an open-air market called Little Egypt. A sign in the Hope District proclaims, “1967 is Detroit’s 1776.”

  The local hub of such neighborhood-level leftist utopianism has long been the Boggs Center for Social Progress, headed by the aforementioned Grace Lee Boggs. After graduating from Yale with a philosophy degree, Boggs, who is Chinese American, became involved in the civil rights movement. In 1953 she married James Boggs, a Detroit autoworker and labor activist whose books included The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker’s Notebook, and for the next forty years, until James Boggs’s death in 1993, the couple agitated together for radical social change. Though enfeebled by age—tiny, and mostly confined to a wheelchair, with a boyish mop of white hair and an air of wizened impishness—Grace Lee Boggs has rallied to the moment. She contends that the ongoing crisis of Detroit has created room for the “kind of community that was not possible during the years where there were lots of jobs and the industry was expanding,” and that Detroit’s collapse is an opportunity to foster “a whole new way of looking at life in the future.”

  One morning, I met up with a group from the Boggs Center who were taking a driving tour of Detroit meant to showcase the sorts of granular DIY projects applauded by Grace Boggs in her vision of the new Detroit. The tour had been laid on for Mark Rudd of the Weather Underground, in town to promote a book, and was conducted by Rich Feldman, an avuncular, genially distracted Brooklynite who’d moved to the area in the late 1960s to attend the University of Michigan and then stuck around to work as a community and labor activist.

  I met the group in front of the ruins of the old Packard automotive plant. Feldman suggested that I leave my car on a nearby residential street, so I followed him down a leafy block, parking in front of a rundown home. There were no signs of any people. Abandoning my rental car struck me as a potentially irresponsible act, but Feldman seemed to think it would be fine, so I reluctantly climbed into his ride, in my mind cursing the trusting, pigheadedly naive neo-Marxists, or whatever they were, and in fact remaining vaguely preoccupied for the duration of the tour with the certitude that my vehicle was being vandalized or stolen.

  In the car, Feldman and Mark Rudd sat up front. I squeezed into the back with a local college professor and Feldman’s son Micah, who had a cognitive learning disability but was attending college and had become a disability-rights activist. Rudd was a hulking, excitable presence, corpulent and white-bearded, with a generous, toothy grin. He wore a corduroy shirt jacket over white pants, and at one point, mentioning how he’d been his wife’s “project,” he gestured to his outfit as evidence that she’d reformed him. I wondered what sorts of clothes he used to wear before his wife came along.

  Feldman, a scattered but entertaining tour guide, wore a padded blue union vest and spoke with a slight Brooklyn inflection. I knew that he’d begun working at the Ford Rouge plant after graduation as a political act, in hopes of spreading a radical doctrine to the working class. “Back then, my friends were going to work for car factories the same way people went to work for the Obama campaign in 2008,” Feldman had told me earlier. “I was there because I thought we could make a revolution. I still call someone to change a lightbulb! I came in romanticizing what workers would be like. But the old-timers from the South all hated me. The plant was where people got their paycheck. I started off painting underbodies, myself. The trucks would come out of an oven. They didn’t dip them in rustproofing, because that would have been a capital investment. I painted the underbody with scrap paint, whatever was left over. I’d be standing near a hot oven all day, with paint from the spray gun dripping in my eyes. I’d come out a different color every night. Eventually they moved me to the trim shop. I’d try to get a job that didn’t involve small parts, because I’d drop them.”

  We drove by General Motors’ Detroit/Hamtramck assembly plant, one of the few auto factories still operating within Detroit’s city limits, though Feldman wasn’t there to celebrate that fact: he meant to point out the contentious history of the place, how eminent domain had been used to destroy a thriving immigrant neighborhood called Poletown. Then we stopped by a twenty-four-lot farm operated by a Capuchin monastery. They also raised bees and made their own honey. After that, we made our way to perhaps the most visible and enduring symbol of Detroit’s DIY positivity, the Heidelberg Project, the artist Tyree Guyton’s beloved outdoor art installation, which had spread over several residential blocks surrounding the house on Heidelberg Street where he’d grown up.

  Guyton had studied at Detroit’s Center for Creative Studies after serving in the army during Vietnam, but his en
dlessly morphing project had always reminded me of the mad folk art environments I’d seen in the South by untrained artists like Howard Finster. In the eighties, as Guyton watched his neighborhood violently rended by poverty and the drug trade, he began painting bright polka dots on vacant houses on the block. He also decorated the sidewalks with totemic faces and erected plywood sculptures of taxi cabs in empty lots and covered an entire two-story home with stuffed animals4 and built all manner of other sculptural pieces using old tires, part of a bus, bicycles, rusty oil drums, telephones, decapitated doll’s heads, shopping carts, a men’s room door, broken televisions, football helmets, Camel cigarette signs, vacuum cleaners, and discarded ballet shoes, among other things. The city government loathed the Heidelberg Project for many years. (Two different mayors, Young and Archer, ordered sections of the artwork demolished.) But since then, everyone has pretty much left Guyton alone. I had tried to set up an interview with him but his wife informed me that he would need to be financially compensated for his time, as so many requests from journalists and documentary film crews had been submitted.

  In many ways, the Heidelberg Project is the ultimate manifestation of a Boggsian vision of Detroit’s future—a working-class African American artist, through a stubborn, solitary act of imagination, crafting a better world out of his blighted surroundings. Heidelberg Street, once left for dead, has become a regular stop for tourists from all over the world, and you never hear about anyone being robbed or hassled or about Guyton’s artwork being stolen or vandalized, the city’s own efforts at destruction notwithstanding.

  Just as we parked, Guyton himself, who no longer lived on the block, happened to be pulling up in his Ford pickup truck. Feldman knew Guyton, and they greeted each other warmly. Guyton was drinking a fruit smoothie he’d made at home, sipping it through a straw from a plastic cup. He had a short, military-style haircut, almost entirely shaved in back, and wore jeans and Timberland boots and a blue University of Detroit Titans sweatshirt.