My 500 house in Detroit and the neighbors who helped me rebuild it Drew Philp
In 2009, I bought a house
in Detroit for 500 dollars.
It had no windows,
no plumbing, no electricity
and it was filled with trash.
The first floor held nearly
10,000 pounds of garbage,
and that included the better part
of a Dodge Caravan,
cut into chunks with a reciprocating saw.
(Laughter)
I lived nearly two years without heat,
woke up out of a dead sleep
multiple times to gunshots,
was attacked by a pack of wild dogs
and ripped my kitchen cabinets
from an abandoned school
as they were actively tearing
that school down.
This, of course, is the Detroit
that your hear about.
Make no mistake, it’s real.
But there’s another Detroit, too.
Another Detroit that’s more hopeful,
more innovative,
and may just provide some of the answers
to cities struggling to reinvent
themselves everywhere.
These answers, however, do not
necessarily adhere to conventional wisdom
about good development.
I think Detroit’s real strength
boils down to two words:
radical neighborliness.
And I wasn’t able to see it myself
until I lived there.
About a decade ago,
I moved to Detroit with no friends,
no job and no money,
at a time when it seemed
like everyone else was moving out.
Between 2000 and 2010,
25 percent of the city’s population left.
This included about half
of the elementary-aged children.
This was after six decades of decline.
A city built for almost two million
was down to less than 800,000.
What you usually don’t hear
is that people didn’t go very far.
The population of the Detroit
metro area itself
has largely remained steady
since the ’70s.
Most people who left Detroit
just went to the suburbs,
while the 139 square miles
of the city deteriorated,
leaving some estimates as high
as 40 square miles of abandoned land –
about the size of San Francisco.
Aside from platitudes such as the vague
and agentless “deindustrialization,”
Detroit’s exodus can be summed up
with two structures:
freeways and walls.
The freeways,
coupled with massive
governmental subsidies
for the suburbs via
infrastructure and home loans,
allowed people to leave the city at will,
taking with it tax base,
jobs and education dollars.
The walls made sure
only certain people could leave.
In multiple places,
brick and concrete walls
separate city and suburbs,
white and black,
running directly across municipal streets
and through neighborhoods.
They’re mere physical manifestations
of racist housing practices
such as redlining,
[Denying services to people of color]
restrictive covenants
and outright terror.
In 1971, the Ku Klux Klan
bombed 10 school buses
rather than have them transport
integrated students.
All these have made Detroit
the most racially segregated metro area
in the United States.
I grew up in a small town in Michigan,
the son of a relatively
blue-collar family.
And after university,
I wanted to do something –
probably naïvely –
to help.
I didn’t want to be one of the almost
50 percent of college graduates
leaving the state at the time,
and I thought I might use
my fancy college education at home
for something positive.
I’d been reading this great
American philosopher named Grace Lee Boggs
who happened to live in Detroit,
and she said something I can’t forget.
“The most radical thing
that I ever did was to stay put.”
I thought buying a house might
indelibly tie me to the city
while acting as a physical protest
to these walls and freeways.
Because grants and loans
weren’t available to everyone,
I decided I was going
to do this without them
and that I would wage my personal fight
against the city that had loomed
over my childhood with power tools.
I eventually found an abandoned house
in a neighborhood called Poletown.
It looked like the apocalypse
had descended.
The neighborhood was prairie land.
A huge, open expanse of waist-high grass
cluttered only by a handful
of crippled, abandoned structures
and a few brave holdouts
with well-kept homes.
Just a 15-minute bike ride
from the baseball stadium downtown,
the neighborhood was positively rural.
What houses were left looked like
cardboard boxes left in the rain;
two-story monstrosities
with wide-open shells
and melted porches.
One of the most striking things
I remember were the rosebushes,
forgotten and running wild
over tumbled-down fences,
no longer cared for by anyone.
This was my house on the day
I boarded it up
to protect it from the elements
and further decay.
I eventually purchased it
from the county in a live auction.
I’d assumed the neighborhood was dead.
That I was some kind of pioneer.
Well, I couldn’t have been more wrong.
I was in no way a pioneer,
and would come to understand
how offensive that is.
One of the first things I learned
was to add my voice to the chorus,
not overwrite what was already happening.
(Voice breaking) Because
the neighborhood hadn’t died.
It had just transformed in a way
that was difficult to see
if you didn’t live there.
Poletown was home
to an incredibly resourceful,
incredibly intelligent
and incredibly resilient community.
It was there I first experienced
the power of radical neighborliness.
During the year I worked
on my house before moving in,
I lived in a microcommunity
inside Poletown,
founded by a wild and virtuous farmer
named Paul Weertz.
Paul was a teacher
in a Detroit public school
for pregnant and parenting mothers,
and his idea was to teach
the young women to raise their children
by first raising plants and animals.
While the national average graduation rate
for pregnant teens is about 40 percent,
at Catherine Ferguson Academy
it was often above 90,
in part due to Paul’s ingenuity.
Paul brought much of this innovation
to his block in Poletown,
which he’d stewarded
for more than 30 years,
purchasing houses
when they were abandoned,
convincing his friends to move in
and neighbors to stay
and helping those who wanted
to buy their own and fix them up.
In a neighborhood where many blocks
now only hold one or two houses,
all the homes on Paul’s block stand.
It’s an incredible testament
to the power of community,
to staying in one place
and to taking ownership
of one’s own surroundings –
of simply doing it yourself.
It’s the kind of place where black doctors
live next to white hipsters
next to immigrant mothers from Hungary
or talented writers
from the jungles of Belize,
showing me Detroit
wasn’t just black and white,
and diversity could flourish
when it’s encouraged.
Each year, neighbors assemble to bale hay
for the farm animals on the block,
teaching me just how much
a small group of people can get done
when they work together,
and the magnetism of fantastical
yet practical ideas.
Radical neighborliness is every house
behind Paul’s block burning down,
and instead of letting it fill up
with trash and despair,
Paul and the surrounding community
creating a giant circular garden
ringed with dozens of fruit trees,
beehives and garden plots
for anyone that wants one,
helping me see that our challenges
can often be assets.
It’s where residents are experimenting
with renewable energy and urban farming
and offering their skills
and discoveries to others,
illustrating we don’t necessarily
have to beg the government
to provide solutions.
We can start ourselves.
It’s where, for months,
one of my neighbors
left her front door unlocked
in one of the most violent
and dangerous cities in America
so I could have a shower
whenever I needed to go to work,
as I didn’t yet have one.
It was when it came time to raise
the beam on my own house
that holds the structure aloft –
a beam that I cut out of an abandoned
recycling factory down the street
when not a single wall
was left standing –
a dozen residents of Poletown
showed up to help lift it, Amish style.
Radical neighborliness is a zygote
that grows into a worldview
that ends up in homes and communities
rebuilt in ways that respect humanity
and the environment.
It’s realizing we have the power
to create the world anew together
and to do it ourselves
when our governments refuse.
This is the Detroit that you
don’t hear much about.
The Detroit between
the ruin porn on one hand
and the hipster coffee shops
and billionaires
saving the city on the other.
There’s a third way to rebuild,
and it declines to make
the same mistakes of the past.
While building my house,
I found something
I didn’t know I was looking for –
what a lot of millennials
and people who are moving
back to cities are looking for.
Radical neighborliness is just
another word for true community,
the kind bound by memory and history,
mutual trust and familiarity
built over years and irreplaceable.
And now, as you may have heard,
Detroit is having a renaissance
and pulling itself up
from the ashes of despair,
and the children and grandchildren
of those who fled are returning,
which is true.
What isn’t true is that this renaissance
is reaching most Detroiters,
or even more than a small fraction of them
that don’t live in the central
areas of the city.
These are the kind of people
that have been in Detroit for generations
and are mostly black.
In 2016 alone,
just last year,
(Voice breaking) one in six
houses in Detroit
had their water shut off.
Excuse me.
The United Nations has called this
a violation of human rights.
And since 2005, one in three houses –
think about this, please –
one in every three houses
has been foreclosed in the city,
representing a population
about the size of Buffalo, New York.
(Sniffles)
One in three houses foreclosed is not
a crisis of personal responsibility;
it is systemic.
Many Detroiters, myself included,
are worried segregation
is now returning to the city itself
on the coattails of this renaissance.
Ten years ago,
it was not possible
to go anywhere in Detroit
and be in a crowd
completely made of white people.
Now, troublingly, that is possible.
This is the price that we’re paying
for conventional economic resurgence.
We’re creating two Detroits,
two classes of citizens,
cracking the community apart.
For all the money and subsidies,
for all the streetlights installed,
the dollars for new stadiums
and slick advertisements
and positive buzz,
we’re shutting off water
to tens of thousands of people
living right on the Great Lakes,
the world’s largest source of it.
Separate has always meant unequal.
This is a grave mistake for all of us.
When economic development
comes at the cost of community,
it’s not just those
who have lost their homes
or access to water who are harmed,
but it breaks little pieces
of our own humanity as well.
None of us can truly be free,
none of us can truly be comfortable,
until our neighbors are, too.
For those of us coming in,
it means we must make sure
we aren’t inadvertently contributing
to the destruction of community again,
and to follow the lead
of those who have been working
on these problems for years.
In Detroit, that means average citizens
deputizing themselves
to create water stations and deliveries
for those who have lost access to it.
Or clergy and teachers
engaging in civil disobedience
to block water shutoff trucks.
It’s organizations buying back
foreclosed homes for their inhabitants
or fighting misinformation
on forced sales through social media
and volunteer-run hotlines.
For me, it means helping others
to raise the beams
on their own formerly abandoned houses,
or helping to educate
those with privilege,
now increasingly moving into cities,
how we might come in and support
rather than stress existing communities.
It’s chipping in when
a small group of neighbors decides
to buy back a foreclosed home
and return the deeds to the occupants.
And for you, for all of us,
it means finding a role to play
in our own communities.
It means living your life as a reflection
of the world that you want to live in.
It means trusting those
who know the problems best –
the people who live them –
with solutions.
I know a third way is possible
because I have lived it.
I live it right now
in a neighborhood called Poletown
in one of the most
maligned cities in the world.
If we can do it in Detroit,
you can do it wherever you’re from, too.
What I’ve learned over the last decade,
building my house,
wasn’t so much about wiring
or plumbing or carpentry –
although I did learn these things –
is that true change, real change,
starts first with community,
with a radical sense
of what it means to be a neighbor.
It turned at least one
abandoned house into a home.
Thank you.
(Applause)