A $500 House in Detroit

by Drew Philp

  “I hope that’s okay?” he asked earnestly.

  It was my turn to laugh. “They’re wonderful, Grandpa. I love them.”

  Both halves of the stairs wouldn’t fit in my truck, so we decided he would follow me to the house, along with my father, to drop them off. This would be the first time he would see the place I’d spent the better part of my twenties working on. After helping me draft the plans, after giving me his table saw that cut the wood, after patiently answering questions and listening to stories of blood and sweat around the dinner table and over the phone, he would see the real thing. I wasn’t sure I was ready for this.

  He knew about the lack of heat. He knew about the condition of the neighborhood. He knew about the hunger, the toil, the exercise in monotony. He, of course, knew all this firsthand, gaining the knowledge for himself through his long life of building houses and struggle. But I wasn’t sure he knew about my insecurity in wanting to please him, to be able to stand up as a man in front of all the men before me who had built the world around them.

  He would inspect my work with the eye of someone who had been constructing dwellings for more than sixty years, and I was nervous. He seemed nonplussed. It was a simple equation, really: the stairs needed to get there and we both had the time.

  We pulled into the yard and unloaded the steps with my dad. When we arrived, my grandfather seemed ill at ease in the neighborhood but didn’t say anything. He had a jagged energy I’d never felt coming from him before. I could only assume what he thought about the city, as he’d never said much about it. My dad stayed quiet, probably wanting to see how I would handle this on my own. I asked my grandfather if he wanted to see the inside.

  “Is my truck going to be okay here?” he said, scanning the surroundings uncertainly.

  “Yeah, of course. Come this way.”

  I took him up the set of stairs I had made, in the back, the ones he had walked me through on the phone. These were beginner’s stairs, nowhere near as complex as the ones he had created. On the third stair he stopped, my father watching. He bounced once, twice, to see if it had any give or squeak. He looked me in the eye and nodded; it was like kicking the tires on a new car. I opened the door I had made from the one I’d pulled from across the street, throwing the latch on the security bars I had bolted into the framing of my house. He stayed silent and thoughtful.

  My response was to start talking, telling him every little hitch, the number of coats of poly I had put on the door, where I had gotten the beam to lift the house, each window I had encased, the shower, the cabinets, the pocket door, every little bit of trash I’d removed and how hard I worked to afford the roof. I told him about the bathroom I’d done the opposite way to what he’d suggested.

  As with the stairs, I pointed out every little imperfection, each problem I wasn’t able to get right or the places that just hadn’t come together, the window that had been hung a bit too tight and let in a needle of air, the bathroom wall framing that was slightly out of plumb because I was thinking of Cecilia rather than focusing on what I should have been doing, all the little fragilities that nobody would ever notice but me.

  I was rambling and stopped. I waited for him to say something. He slowly walked over to me and put his hand on my shoulder. I imagined lots of these interactions were happening across the city, all the kids who had moved to Detroit and places like it, the nervous parents and grandparents, their children and grandchildren dragging them into the twenty-first century over what they had created, and the reality of the new American dream we were about to inhabit.

  “You did real good, Andrew Man,” he said. “Real good. I’m proud of you.”

  His only suggestion was that the rear door should have opened the other way, against the refrigerator, to save space.

  That afternoon, the Tigers beat the Yankees, 3–2.

  All three of us drove back to my grandfather’s house in his truck, leaving mine at home. After a couple glasses of Irish whiskey and a few games of euchre at the kitchen table, my grandfather went to bed in the house he had built for himself and my grandmother, and at one time my father. My dad and I stayed up a bit later and sat on the deck, overlooking the water, quiet, not talking much, but the lake said more than either of us could. The moon, casting its ghostly glow across the ripples like silk in the wind, and the heavy, churning body soaked up any feelings of ill will. We drank a couple more glasses of Irish washed down with cans of Budweiser, and stacked them on the burnished wood of the deck my grandfather had built.

  * * *

  The windows for the front had been purchased and were waiting in their shrink-wrap for my father to come and help install them. My bedroom upstairs was now finished and the second bathroom was on its way. That very day I had worked stripping the paint off the oak pocket door that hadn’t been stolen. I was tired, but at least I didn’t have to stare at unfinished projects in my new bedroom. The house was progressing nicely. I felt, if not exactly near completion, that this ship would hold water.

  The only large task left was the foundation. The brick stomach had begun to push against the plumb bob and there was no question the wall was going to have to be dug out and redone. The job wouldn’t cost much more than $500, but the labor was going to be intense. Woods had been forced to sell his tractor, so the digging was going to have to be done by hand, by me, with a shovel. I had about a year at most, and if the yard caved into the basement in the meantime the destruction might take the electrical box with it, likely burning down my house.

  I left for work one morning as a film crew set up in the neighborhood. The state had enacted some incentives to draw the film and TV industries, and producers had begun capitalizing not just on the tax breaks but on the same grit and danger people in the neighborhood had been living with for years. Before I left, I stopped and asked one of the PAs what they were shooting, and it was a short-lived television show, a violent program of gore, corruption, and uncertain choices between good and bad.

  The branding and repackaging of Detroit’s grit was growing inescapable. T-shirts reading “Detroit” were ubiquitous. One of the most popular restaurants in the city, a chain newly built in Midtown, began selling what it called “crack fries.” This was in a neighborhood that had previously been one of the hardest hit with the crack epidemic, a neighborhood that just years before had struggled, often to the death, with addiction. The newcomers to the city were making light of the agent that had destroyed so many lives. Some folks wondered aloud if they would be selling genocide bagels or Agent Orange juice.

  In Poletown, some artists with no connection to the neighborhood or anyone in it had supposedly just received $30,000 from a foundation to tear down a house and build a brand-new one in its place. Things like that were becoming more common—just as mass tax evictions were starting. The Atlantic put the number as high as 60,000 properties, nearly one out of every five people in the city.That ugly cinder-block project house across the street from Will’s old place was purchased by a young real estate developer and it was being rented out nightly, offering “the authentic Detroit experience.”

  I went back to my house for a last cup of tea before leaving that morning, and a white lady stopped outside and began walking around in my yard. I watched from my back porch, but I think she didn’t see me, or didn’t want to. Although this was odd, I didn’t think much of it. Probably just some ruin-porn photographer or someone in the film crew. She didn’t stop to speak with me, and I left.

  My neighbor Andi called at lunch.

  “You know there’s a bunch of white people eating lunch in your yard, don’t you?”

  “Uh, no. I did not know that,” I said. “They’re filming some TV show in the neighborhood today, it’s probably just them. It should be all right.” My boss was looking over my shoulder, and I needed to get back to work. “How many of them are there?”

  “I don’t know,” Andi said. “Mrs. Smith just called me, because she didn’t have your number.”

  “I’m sure i
t’s all right. I talked to one of the guys on the crew earlier today. They should be gone soon.”

  But the call itched at me all day, and I left work early.

  When I got home the neighborhood was in upheaval. All the neighbors were on their porches, peering, and some from down the block were in the street. When I got up to my house I found fifteen students with easels stuck into my lawn, painting pictures of the house. I drove onto the grass and asked the first girl with a paintbrush what the hell she was doing. It had nothing to do with the film crew.

  She explained she was in an art class at the university and her teacher had told her it was fine. Her painting of my house was rather complete. She seemed scared and upset, so I asked where the teacher was.

  She pointed to a white woman sitting on my front porch, the one who had been walking around in my yard earlier. She had paint-spattered pants and was surrounded by students.

  I walked over.

  “What seems to be the problem here?” she asked me.

  I was dumbfounded, and speechless for a minute.

  “You’re sitting on my porch, for one. Who told you you could be here, on my lawn? And sitting on my porch? I mean, what the hell?”

  “We didn’t know it was yours, we thought it would be fine.”

  “How did you think this was in any way acceptable?” I was livid. “How would you feel if I came to your house with fifteen dudes from the neighborhood and stood on your lawn with pencils and drew pictures of your house? Would that be okay? Is it because we live in the ’hood, you think it’s all right to just set up shop on my lawn? You’ve obviously been here for a while. Those paintings are pretty far along.”

  “We didn’t know someone lived in this house.” She was becoming animated.

  Two crowds were gathering, the group of students and another of my neighbors who had wandered over when they saw me. One of my neighbors put her hands on my shoulders to calm me down. I walked over to the others to ask what had happened that day. They were furious. I also wanted to make very sure they knew I hadn’t invited these people onto my lawn.

  They told me they had let the woman know, more than once, this was my house, and they were trespassing. Nicely. They began trying to get hold of me when she was rude with them, talking about how she was a professor and they didn’t know anything about art. This had gone on for much of the day.

  I turned back to the teacher. As it turns out she was an artist who had received some success in Detroit years earlier and then left, like everyone else. She was back in town now that Detroit was fashionable.

  “So my neighbors told you that you were trespassing, more than once, and you didn’t listen to them. Why?”

  “You’re full of shit,” she said, then began to insult me. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, you fool. You have no idea what we’re doing here. We’re trying to help you!”

  The two groups of people, my neighbors and the students, started to yell at each other on my lawn, while the artist/teacher called me a liar and insulted my character, intelligence, and social class, while at the same time insisting she was just trying to “help.” She said I should be grateful for her presence.

  “Who asked you to help? Did anyone here? Don’t you see how that’s pretty patronizing?”

  “Fine, we’ll leave. We’ll just pack up and leave.”

  One of my neighbors said something about the paintings they had made and wanted them destroyed. I knew I needed to regain my composure or everything was going to go to hell. I could tell them to leave and never come back, but really, what good would that do? I thought I might be able to act as a bridge between the two groups. This kind of thing was happening more often now, and would continue at a greater rate now that the city was changing and gentrification had begun its march toward a battle. This disconnect was playing out on my lawn in real time. I had to do something.

  “All right, everyone.” I held my hand up to the folks on my lawn. “You guys have been here for hours. I’m going to go inside and get some water, and we’re going to sit here and talk about this, all of us, why this isn’t okay.”

  I figured a conversation might be a good teachable moment, and bring two segments of a new Detroit society together.

  The teacher started in on me again, yelling as I walked into my house to get the drinks and calm Gratiot down; he had nearly chewed through one of the pieces of plywood on the windows trying to get at whoever was sitting on his porch. They had to have heard the dog.

  I got back with the water and got some order.

  “All right, so. Let’s talk to each other. Please, can we state our names, first, at least?”

  “This is bullshit,” the teacher repeated. “I don’t have to do this, you know I taught at Harvard? What we’re doing here isn’t ruin porn, we want to help you.”

  Ruin porn is like blackface in that if it were an isolated incident it would be little more than a tasteless curiosity. But like blackface there is a long history of ruin porn, and none of it has been good for the people who live among those ruins. This is what my neighbors were so upset about. This was an invasion, people who hadn’t ever cared about this place, coming in only to take stuff away with the added insult that they were “helping.”

  “Hold on, nobody said anything about ruin porn—” I said, but everyone started speaking at the same time again.

  I could see it wasn’t going to work. People were too upset and set in their positions for any meaningful conversation. Every time I got started, the artist/teacher would begin insulting me, and talking about where she taught, and there was nothing I or my neighbors could explain to her about art. She reminded me, constantly, that she was helping us.

  “We’re helping” became the mantra of the capitalists, the billionaires, the ruling class that got us into this mess in the first place. The talk in the city became of “two Detroits.” Almost all investment was happening in a few neighborhoods, and the usual characters were doing the “development,” their benchmark of “progress” unchanged. One academic described the strategy for turning the city around as “trickle-down urbanism,” mirroring the trickle-down economics of Ronald Reagan that had failed cities so disastrously. All the rest of Detroit was good for were pretty pictures of “Detroit Grit” to sell watches.

  It was telling that the benchmark of “Detroit’s Back!” was business—not how many of its citizens climbed out of poverty, or how racially tolerant and integrated we had become, or how well we knew our neighbors, but by the exchange of money. Like every other meaningful and radical subculture in the United States, Detroit and its ideas of transformational change were being commodified, represented by ruin-porn pictures, but not exclusive to the genera. And they were doing it with a smile and the sheen of “helping.” When the transformation from people and ideas to money and objects was complete, those ideas—and the people—would lose their power.

  I wanted to get all this across in that circle that afternoon, but I saw it was useless, a losing battle. The two groups just shouted at each other until order was completely out of my hands. Finally I said screw it, told everyone to go home, and went back into my house while the budding artists packed up their easels and art supplies and my neighbors slunk back to the homes they had owned for generations. Maybe this whole thing was impossible, the obvious inevitable.

  One woman wearing a yellow bandana refused to leave, and sat on the sidewalk, which she was correct in saying was legal, and painted the abandoned house across the street. She was out there until sundown.

  * * *

  I retreated to where people understood. I sat with Will and Eric and Monk and some others around the firepit at Jake’s, and we cooked meat over the open fire and potatoes wrapped in tinfoil within it. We called them family dinners, and they resembled hobo camps. We must have sat around that fire dozens of times over the years, discussing the best way to frame out a chimney, when to pay taxes, and how to get the electricity turned on in an abandoned house. They were unpretentious affai
rs, and helped us through the endless filth and work.

  Eric the illustrator had just bought a house himself and was about to undergo the no-heat odyssey. Will was working along on his new place, which he was able to purchase at the auction. Jake was chugging along on his, no longer having to battle rogue crack dealers. When once we would have talked about construction, now it was one’s place in a changing city, a change no one had imagined just years previously. A black U.S. president and a white mayor of Detroit? You would have been laughed out of any 2004 social gathering in the country.

  There wasn’t much to say. Progress was galloping.

  As was Gratiot on our bike ride home from the bonfire. He loped along next to me on a thick chain I usually kept in my truck for pulling people out of the snow. I hadn’t been able to find his leash that evening or even a carabiner to attach the chain to his collar, so it was affixed with a big brass lock, meaning I couldn’t unhook him quickly.

  Gratiot and I had made it a couple of blocks off Forestdale and I was feeling good, the dog falling into pace. A friend from work had given me a newly tuned-up bike to replace mine, which had been stolen, and it was humming along when four dogs came tearing out of the urban forest on each side of the road, snarling and spitting and furious. A whole pack of them was on the attack, and Gratiot and I were the prey.

  I screamed at Gratiot to run and I dropped the chain.

  I saw one of the dogs, a white-and-brown pit bull, out of the corner of my eye, his muscular shoulders pumping, running after us.

  I kicked at him. Like an idiot, I was wearing sandals. Why did it have to be this night? Two more on the other side, mangy. Gratiot was keeping up.

  I screamed at the pit bull and back at Gratiot.

  “COME ON!”

  I usually never traveled by foot or bike through the east side without armor: boots, a leather jacket, long pants, a knife or jack handle, a few rocks to defend myself. I stupidly didn’t have anything that night, just the glass salting the streets and my bike. I pumped faster, the dogs behind me.