Why I Bought a House in Detroit for $500 by Drew Philip is a book...

Drew has also written about Growing Food in Detroit 

 Planting Seeds on Detroit's Eastside  

click above for article

  Drew Philip & his dog Gratiot

 Drew Philip wrote a book 

You Must Read. 

scroll to end for  excerpt   With permission of the publisher, Scribner. All rights reserved.

As of this post 1/2021 , the book is still timely. Detroit primes you for the post CoVID future.  It is still affordable and creatively open to possibilities.

 Its 2021. The pricey new lofts are 99% full downtown but who needs downtown when McDougall Hunt, Core City and West Village border  or share familiar avenues with   the gentrified* precincts of Hamtramck * see note at end

Victorian era Woodbridge 48210 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodbridge,_Detroit

Woodbridge and Indian Village. Make it safe and walkable like Eastern Market/Dequindre Cut and people will be ready to build the 21st century in a Detroit that is fair and does not charge retirees on Social Security  with $600 million dollars in taxes on buildings that will never produce that value. Tear down what cannot be fixed. Admit that the City wants an average of  70 K for a rehabbed and ready house for a neighborhood that has no goods and services (But Instacart  or Amazon can address some of the deficiencies?)

Lets face it : Drew Philip is not the average person. He is special. As of 2021 the houses start at double what he  paid @2009 , but he still worked a miracle that I want to emulate.  

Now, at $1000 on the  Detroit Land Bank Auction site,  you need $25,000 liquid just to bid. Yet I still peruse the offerings, district by district, carefully noting the zip codes so I can do census research on the neighborhood.  My relatives who own rehab and construction remodeling companies can hook me up... but sinking about 75K into some decimated property in  @6 months to comply with the City rules on restoration of a abandoned property is like pouring Money into a hole and expecting roses to sprout with twenty dollar leaves. Everybody tries  to talk me out of it. 

 

Some points to consider 

Why not pour  money into something  that can be passed on? Why not have a paid for house to live in? Is this not the Goal? Is'nt the American dream roomy enough to have variations on the dream of having a paid for roof over ones head?

 I think we should continue to tear down any wood or shingled houses in Detroit that are not habitable. The new Demolition Czar has gotten better at managing the problem of abandoned and possibly dangerous places for housing. 

Detroit has a typical rustbelt city problem. Approximately 6.2 miles is so industrial that its not habitable. Nobody should live in or near a former  brownfield. One of the ways to remedy the pollution is to  plant.  Detroit has forests or farms to fix the soil , cheaper than having  a considerable amount of polluted dirt hauled away. The dirt haul is expensive- I personally witnessed a Brooklyn Whole Foods move at least 2 stories of practically Superfund level muck - just to show how responsible they were, but Amazon has DEEP pockets. 

It might take a generation for the earth to heal  

but Detroit has more than enough space .

My Story is influenced by Drew Philip's story 

Most of the places I grew up in are gone. Am I sad? No,  I have been away too long perhaps.  I lived in New York and its boroughs from 1985 to 2015. Seen gentrification first hand. Seen my share of ruin. Lived through a couple of recessions luckily with severance pay, or got rehired quickly. That did not happen to people in Detroit, so its easy to see how things fall apart. It not fair.

Example: 

Try living in brownstone Harlem on a street where you are the only person who has a career level job to report to, and you can nod good morning to both the retirees and the gangbangers and buy fresh caught crabs from the retirees on Fridays on the corner.  But in that situation you are acutely aware that the inequity is almost permanent. *see note at end

What if you are in a state of modern grace? 

What if you  make money  blissfully untouched and unbothered - you are a digitally supported  worker who can order in, still collect a paycheck and does not know anybody who has CoVid. If this is you, you must read this book not just as an amuse bouche. Let Drew Make You Think  As Grace Lee Boggs once wrote, and Drew re quoted,

"Building community is to the collective as spiritual practice is to the individual."

 A passage from the book follows- originally posted on buzzfeed.com  Order the book here:

https://www.amazon.com/500-House-Detroit-Rebuilding-Abandoned/dp/1476797994/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=why-i-bought-a-house-in-detroit-for-500&qid=1611354653&sr=8-1

                                                                                                                            

Why I Bought a House in Detroit for  $500  by Drew Philip 
After college, as my friends left Michigan for better opportunities, I was determined to help fix this broken, chaotic city by building my own home in the middle of it. I was 23 years old.  

My first job out of college was working for a construction company in Detroit.“

We're an all-black company and I need a clean-cut white boy,” my boss told me over drinks in a downtown bar when he hired me. "Customers in the suburbs don’t want to hire a black man."

When a service call would come in, we would ask, “Does he sound white or black?” If it was the former, I would bid the job. If the latter, my boss would. Detroit is one of the most segregated metro areas in the nation, and for the first time I was getting what it felt like to be on the other side of that line. In contrast to the abstract verbal yoga students at the University of Michigan would perform when speaking about race, this was refreshing. And terrifying. I couldn’t hide behind fancy words any longer.

I grew up in rural Michigan, 45 minutes away from any freeway. I’m the first male member of my family in three generations never to have worked in front of a lathe, and aside from one uncle, I’m the oldest with all of my fingers intact. The university had given me some grandiose ideas like “true solidarity with the oppressed,” and I figured “the oppressed” lived in Detroit, never mind the patrimony. I thought I was making a sacrifice. I thought moving here was staying home when everyone else was leaving the state. I thought I was going to change the world and had some vague notions of starting a school. I cringe at how naive I was. I first rented an apartment in the city, sight unseen, that didn't have a kitchen sink, so I did my dishes in the bathtub.

Aside from bidding jobs, I spent my days like everyone else: sanding floors in cheap rentals for $8.50 an hour, which got me thinking: I could buy a house and fix it up myself. Not that I was sure how to go about buying, let alone renovating a house. It was just an inexplicit dream, some trick that would keep me from leaving like everyone else, make me a true Detroiter.

Not long after, I went to a Halloween party dressed as an organ grinder. At one point I set my cardboard organ down in a corner to dance, and when I went back to get a beer I'd hidden inside it, sitting next to the organ, all knotted up and looking out of place, was a guy named Will dressed as an organ grinder's monkey. Between his fingers he held a hand-rolled cigarette.

"You want to go outside and have a smoke?"

After the usual pleasantries, him looking nervous and fidgety, me overeager to make friends, I told him I wanted to buy a house on the city's east side.

He answered, "I just did .

__________________________________________________________________________Notes

* Gentrification is not always created by educated white  people who are affluent or creative or both

 Hamtramck:

the gentrification occurred when an ethnic group the Chaldeans left Detroit and moved into Hamtramck with families Most of the creative types left possibly due to a culture clash between conservatives, religious (Catholics who tend to be  Chaldeans and Muslims usually  other Middle-Easterners)  versus  college/post college age artists and musicians.  See Williamsburg Brooklyn for a similar culture clash and gentrification issue.  https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303491304575187942725181712?reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

Harlem :

Younger black people with means replacing older black people who often move  back down South to retire   https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2014/0316/Why-African-Americans-are-moving-back-to-the-South