THE TOPIC OF VIOLENCE in Flint is unavoidable, because Flint is the most violent city in the English-speaking world. The 2010 homicide rate quoted by that biker—59.5 per 100,000—is a figure so scandalously high that every Flintoid can cite it to the decimal. In 2010, 61 people were killed by their fellow man in Flint (or woman, in the case of an old lady who shot a teenage intruder), breaking a record set when Flint had twice as many people as it does today. The lawlessness was equal to Latin American drug capitals. To put the homicide rate in perspective, if New York City were as lethal as Flint, it would have 5,000 murders a year—twice as many as during the worst year of the Crack Wars, and over ten times as many as today. Flint has topped 24/7 Wall Street’s list of the most dangerous cities over 100,000 people for several years. It won’t drop off until the 2020 census, when the population will officially dip below six figures. (It was 102,434 in 2010.)
But first, it’s important to write about why Flint may be the only place where the Fitches could have transformed their street corner into a veterans’ memorial. Flint, which generates empty lots as multifariously as it once generated Buicks, has done more than any city to put vacant land into the hands of people who can do some good with it. It’s a necessary project, because there’s so much land to spare. Of 57,000 residential properties, 32 percent are unoccupied—12,000 houses, and 6,000 lots. Flint had to invent a solution for abandonment, because it was dealing with empty houses long before the foreclosure crisis struck.
In 1984, a few years after General Motors began its withdrawal, Dan Kildee was elected to the Genesee County Board of Commissioners, from a district in southwest Flint. Kildee came from a political family. His uncle, Dale, was the congressman who’d paid five dollars to sledgehammer a Toyota. A county commissioner runs for reelection every two years. In each campaign, Kildee found himself knocking on fewer doors.
“In this one section of my district, there were empty houses where I’d talked to voters two years before,” he would recall. “It didn’t really occur to me then that this was part of some larger phenomenon, but it was just obvious to me that there was some sort of decline and abandonment taking place.”
Elected county treasurer in 1996, Kildee quickly discovered that Flint was a major market for tax lien speculators. Lured by the “instant wealth” promises of late-night infomercials, investors—or “bottom-feeders,” as Kildee came to call them—would buy liens on abandoned properties in bulk. If the owners paid, the bottom-feeders made a 15 percent return. If the owners didn’t pay, the bottom feeders foreclosed. As long as the land was worth more than its delinquent taxes, the bottom-feeders could profit.
The lien was a nineteeth-century system, designed to ensure that government could get cash quickly, without waiting for tax payments. For pre-postindustrial Flint, liens were a disaster, putting houses into the possession of absentee owners who let them go to seed. Kildee’s office stopped the speculation by borrowing money equal to all the delinquent taxes and paying local governments what they were owed. The county became the tax speculator and the landlord, renting out salvageable houses. In 1999, Kildee convinced the state legislature to change the tax law, allowing counties to foreclose on properties. This led to the establishment of the Genesee County Land Bank, giving the community ownership of its vacant houses and lots. The land bank has demolished 1,500 houses and sold nearly 1,000 lots to neighbors. That’s how the Fitches, who are not a wealthy couple, or even a middle-class couple, acquired so much land.
Genesee County became a model for other communities that suddenly found themselves with more land than anyone wanted. In the words of Cleveland’s Jim Rokakis, “The father of the land bank movement in this country is Dan Kildee. But he will tell you that the Ohio land bank is the Michigan statute on steroids. They led the way and we got to tweak it.”
Although the land bank has rescued individual streets from blight, it has not been able to reshape Flint by shutting down entire neighborhoods. As land bank director Douglas Weiland puts it, “We own 5,669 parcels, but we don’t own an entire block.” Because of the housing crisis, the county can’t buy out residents, either. The average Flint home price crashed from $58,961 in 2005 to $15,372 in 2009. Paying fair market value wouldn’t even provide the sellers enough money for a studio condominium. Plus, resentment still lingers from the urban renewal projects of the 1960s, when black neighborhoods were bulldozed to make way for highways.
The one section of Flint that has been successfully redeveloped is downtown. Saginaw Street, from the mid-1980s onward, was a midway of failure, where the plywood-to-glass ratio was at least 50-50. But prominent local investors and developers have decided to rebuild Flint from the center outward.
“Cities like Flint can’t compete with the suburbs,” Kildee says. “They need to offer something that is a unique urban product. If a purchaser has a choice between a suburb and a suburb in the city, typically, they’re going to take the real thing. What cities should offer is something that’s unique to the urban environment: a high-density, walkable neighborhood that has different types of housing that are not all McMansions built on former city neighborhoods.”
Flint returned the wrought-iron Vehicle City arches to Saginaw Street, as a matter of local branding. The land bank acquired the Durant Hotel, which had closed in 1973 after a half century as the place to stay for traveling salesmen looking to do business with GM. Now, its marble-pillared lobby and checkerboard ballroom restored, the Durant is Flint’s luxury loft building, with two-bedroom apartments renting for around $900 a month. Away from downtown, the land bank also rescued Fisher One, site of the Sit-Down Strike. GM wanted to tear the plant down. It’s now a million-square-foot warehouse for Diplomat Specialty Pharmacy, which ships prescription drugs all over the country.
But downtown’s most important development was persuading the University of Michigan to turn its Flint branch into a residential campus, rather than a glorified four-year community college. With money from the Mott Foundation—Flint’s industrial legacy sugar daddy—an organization called the Uptown Reinvestment Corporation turned the Hyatt Regency into a dormitory. That was symbolic, because, like Auto-World, the Hyatt was a trashed legacy of Flint’s failed campaign to reinvent itself in the early 1980s. Closed for nearly a decade, it was “dilapidated beyond belief,” said an executive of the reinvestment corporation. “Broken glass, boarded-up windows, trees growing on the roof. When we walked in, you could barely move with all the rubble.”
If Saginaw Street and its tributaries were all you saw of Flint, you would probably think you were on the main strip of a staid, stable city, the kind of place whose “Welcome to” sign is surrounded by Civitan and Kiwanis badges: there’s a tapas restaurant, a pipe shop, a men’s clothing store, a hipster T-shirt store, a Barnes & Noble in the U of M student food court, and an independent bookstore on a side street.
“The dozen or so buildings that have been redeveloped in downtown Flint really have had a transformative effect on the psyche of the community,” Kildee said, explaining why Flint is an ideal place to experiment with strategies for rebuilding shrinking cities. “If you did them in Detroit, nobody would notice. We’re big enough for those changes to be significant and small enough for them to be transformative.”
But cross the Flint River, to the North End, and Flint is as close to anarchy as any city under the Stars and Stripes. It’s a twenty-first-century Tombstone, an American Mogadishu. At the bottom of the ladder of lawlessness are the property crimes: scrappers carrying boilers down the street in broad daylight, then, once every empty house has been scavenged, stealing manhole covers off drains. Then there are the robberies. Pizzerias won’t deliver in North Flint, because so many drivers have been strong-armed or held up at gunpoint. A man from New York State bought a house online, attracted by the low price and by Michigan’s liberal medical marijuana law, for his multiple sclerosis. Knowing nothing about his new neighborhood, he was robbed as he moved his furniture in. Then there’s the prostitution,
which on some streets is so flagrant that fed-up neighbors spray-paint “NO HO ZONE” on boarded-up windows. At Dan Kildee’s urging, I visited Jane Street, to see what a nearly denuded block looked like. After I drove past the dirt and rubble several times, taking pictures with my cell phone, a woman began walking toward my car, assuming I was trolling for sex. So I got out of there.
Arson is a popular form of mischief in North Flint. One morning, I read on mlive.com, Booth Newspapers’ Michigan news site, that eleven houses had been torched overnight. (The Flint Journal, Booth’s legacy paper product, is printed only four days a week.) I rushed up I-69 from Lansing to check them out before they were sealed off by fire inspectors. There was no reason for haste. To the Flint Fire Department, arson is an inexpensive form of slum clearance. The firefighters didn’t attempt to put out the flames. If they had, the arsonists would have returned to finish the job, creating more alarms. They just tried to stop the fires from spreading. On Oklahoma Avenue, three houses had burned to their foundations. In the last occupied home on the block, a teenage girl was sitting on the porch.
“I got about ten minutes of sleep last night,” she said. “I saw the flames about one thirty. We had to stand outside on the corner the whole time. We were there until the sun came up. My brother had to spray the house down with the garden hose until the fire department got here. It took them forever to get here. They sprayed our house down so it didn’t spread. The house behind the house next door, their house melted, and they were over here yelling at us because nothing happened to our house. The house next door was really nice, but they moved out a month ago, and they already stripped the siding. We’re the last one on this side of the street. My mom says we’re going to move out at the end of the month. Once we’re gone, they’re going to strip this house and burn it down like all the others. It was three teenage boys who did this. They’re the ones who’ve been threatening to shoot us. They came back and stood on the corner and watched.”
At the top of the ladder, of course, are the shootings. Moose and Suzie called the police after their next-door neighbor—“a would-be pimp, a crackhead thief”—was shot. It took the officers fifty minutes to arrive. (I heard this exact figure from several Flint residents.) Many blamed the violence—and law enforcement’s inability to control it—on the city’s young mayor, Dayne Walling. In early 2010, after the police union refused to accept pay cuts, Walling laid off 57 officers—a third of the force. That fall, he laid off another 20. By the time Walling was finished cutting, Flint was protected by 124 officers, 1.2 per 1,000 residents, by far the lowest ratio in the state, and less than a third of Detroit’s manpower. Murders increased from 36 to 61, making Flint the deadliest city in the country, just ahead of New Orleans, where the social order had broken down due to natural, not economic, causes. The pastor of Eliezer Church of the Apostolic Faith memorialized the dead with crosses. The names were obscured by the overgrown churchyard. (“I am the grass. Let me work.”)
Convinced the police couldn’t protect them, people bought guns. On a few of my visits to Flint, I hung out with a young man named Reginald Kaigler. Kaigler had graduated from UM-Flint with a criminal justice degree and spent a year as an AmeriCorps volunteer in Alaska. When he returned home, he couldn’t get hired as a probation officer by the county, so he started a vlog. Kaigler filmed himself walking around town, sharing his libertarian political views on marijuana laws, immigration, subprime lending, unemployment benefits, and gun control. Like a right-wing Michael Moore, he believed that living in Flint allowed him to witness the real-life results of political ideas he deplored.
“I think Flint shows the consequences of a lot of policies that are being floated around right now,” he said. “We’re seeing what happens when you can’t rely on credit and debt for your economy. We’re seeing what happens when the credit card is maxed out. I see a lot of failed policies here, and I see a lot of people pursuing the same policies on a national level, so that’s where my perspective is coming from. I feel like I can talk about a lot of things that a lot of people are considering doing.”
Kaigler’s YouTube channel, DEMCAD, had over 28,000 subscribers, which meant he earned enough money on advertising to pay the phone bill and the Internet bill at his mother’s house. And also to buy guns. Kaigler owned a Glock 21, a Mossberg 500 pump-action 12 gauge, and a Mossberg ATR 30.06. Some of his video commentaries were filmed at shooting ranges, where he reviewed weapons by shooting up old video game consoles and computers. His test of a GP Walther 10 semi-automatic rifle was viewed by 70,000 gun fans.
As part of his journalistic mission, Kaigler catalogued all the murders in Flint, so he knew exactly who and what he needed to protect himself from.
“You’re seeing a lot of personal robberies of the pizza guys,” he said. “A lot of B and E, muggings. A lot of situations where there’s a domestic dispute, where a guy kills his wife or daughter. In March, one lady, there were four guys broke into their house. There was another incident where a sixteen-year-old boy broke into a woman’s house. She told him, ‘I have a gun,’ and he broke in anyway and she killed him. The police being out of it is a big part of the picture. If there’s gunshots, it may take an hour. If I shoot somebody, I’ve got an hour to get away. Given what’s going on in the city, and the fact that you can’t rely on people to back you up, I feel it’s more necessary to own a gun.”
(While Kaigler was showing me around town, we stopped at an African-American cultural fair on the riverfront where I bought a T-shirt that read I (HEART) FLINT on the front, and, on the back, “GIN-U-WINE HOMEGROWN FLINTSTONE.” “Flintstone”—popularized by Mateen Cleaves, Morris Peterson, and Charlie Bell, three Flint basketballers who played on Michigan State’s 2000 NCAA Championship team—has replaced “Flintoid” as the local appellation.)
When Internet punditry didn’t pay enough of the bills, Kaigler took a job as a security guard, patrolling apartment complexes. It paid $7.50 an hour if you didn’t carry a gun, $9 an hour if you did. Kaigler carried a gun, but not just for the money.
“I don’t go to the grocery store without my Glock Twenty-One,” he commented. “I don’t mow my lawn without my Glock Twenty-One, because there’s been people who’ve been robbed while mowing their lawns.”
Libertarians like Kaigler weren’t the only Flintstones packing heat. I would meet a Baptist preacher who concealed a handgun under his sport coat. The Detroit News profiled a man who protected himself with a .22, a .44, and a quartet of pit bulls.
Mayor Walling had promised to reduce crime by 10 percent. When instead it went up 40 percent, he denied that his police cuts were the cause. “There will never be enough police to sit at every kitchen table to stop these conflicts from escalating into violence,” he said.
Moose Fitch thought that was nonsense.
“They had the mayor on TV. They were asking ’im why Flint’s the most violent city in America, whether it’s because he cut the police. He said it’s a community problem,” said Moose, scoffing. After the police took two weeks to respond to his breaking-and-entering complaint, Moose gave up on calling them for anything but gunfire. “They’re cuttin’ cops and firemen right and left, but they ain’t cuttin’ their own salaries. They ain’t cuttin’ services to rich areas.”
The pastors—including the pastor who carried a gun—were trying to do something about the murders. Flint has a high number of churches per capita: Baptist, Nazarene, Church of God in Christ, African Methodist Episcopal. The statistic is both an indication of the religiosity of people a generation or less removed from the Bible Belt, and of Flint’s depopulation, since many congregations have dwindled to a few dozen parishioners, or less. The pastors lobbied the city to sponsor a chapter of CeaseFire, a violence intervention program that’s been successful in Boston, Chicago, and North Carolina. Flint needed any help it could get: state troopers were patrolling the streets to make up for laid-off cops. The police department agreed to work with CeaseFire, and a former GM executive named Rick Carter se
t up an office in a Catholic church. That summer, CeaseFire and the police were planning to “call in” kids who’d been caught dealing drugs but hadn’t committed a violent crime. The kids would be given a choice: get straight, or go to jail. If the juvenile delinquents went through a job training and a substance abuse treatment program, the county prosecutor would give them a pass.
“These are kids who are hanging out with the wrong crowd, getting involved in their own kind of activities,” Carter explained. “The community is extending an olive branch. Instead of having law enforcement throw the book at you, we are going to try to work with you if you are willing to turn your situation around.”
(CeaseFire called in seven j.d.s; two stuck with the program. The backsliders were remanded to the criminal justice system.)
The pastors were as close to the violence as anyone, because they had lost members of their flocks and, in one case, their families. In a conference room at the church, Carter introduced me to Reverend Ira Edwards of Damascus Holy Life Baptist Church and Reverend Jeffery Hawkins of Peace Missionary Baptist Church. Edwards had baptized a young man on Sunday, then preached his funeral a week and a half later.
“I have a great-grandmother who is taking care of her granddaughter because the mother is in prison for driving a car in a drive-by shooting,” Edwards said. “Her little sister’s father is on the run because he shot someone. We have one other young man, the niece of one of my members, who was being robbed and shot the guy that robbed him, but because [the victim] had an illegal pistol, the guy died and he goes to prison, too. We have one young lady who joined the church with her family after about a year of coming, and her boyfriend joined and was baptized on Sunday, at Bible study on Wednesday; he was dead on Friday because of domestic violence. She said, ‘I’m not taking any more.’ She killed him. I have a congregation of probably less than sixty people. If I’ve got that many in just my small congregation, I really feel for the others.”
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