Welcome To Detroit 2009
Toby Barlow writes in the IHT about the $100 home:
I myself had moved to Detroit, from Brooklyn. For $100,000, I bought a town house that sits downtown in the largest and arguably the most beautiful Mies van der Rohe development ever built, an island of perfect modernism forgotten by the world.Two other guests that night, a couple in from Chicago, had also just invested in some Detroit real estate. That weekend Jon and Sara Brumit bought a house for $100.
Ah, the mythical $100 home. We hear about these low-priced "opportunities" in down-on-their-luck cities like Detroit, Baltimore and Cleveland, but we never meet anyone who has taken the plunge.
Understandable really, for if they were actually worth anything then they would cost real money, right? Who would do such a preposterous thing?
A local couple, Mitch Cope and Gina Reichert, started the ball rolling. An artist and an architect, they recently became the proud owners of a one-bedroom house in East Detroit for just $1,900. Buying it wasn't the craziest idea. The neighborhood is sort of half-decent. Yes, the occasional crack addict still commutes in from the suburbs but a large, stable Bangladeshi community has also been moving in.
So what did $1,900 buy? The run-down bungalow had already been stripped of its appliances and wiring by the city's voracious scrappers. But for Mitch that only added to its appeal, because he now had the opportunity to renovate it with solar heating, solar electricity and low-cost, high-efficiency appliances.
Buying that first house had a snowball effect. Almost immediately, Mitch and Gina bought two adjacent lots for even less and, with the help of friends and local youngsters, dug in a garden. Then they bought the house next door for $500, reselling it to a pair of local artists for a $50 profit. When they heard about the $100 place down the street, they called their friends Jon and Sarah.
...Now, three homes and a garden may not sound like much, but others have been quick to see the potential. A group of architects and city planners in Amsterdam started a project called the "Detroit Unreal Estate Agency" and, with Mitch's help, found a property around the corner. The director of a Dutch museum, Van Abbemuseum, has called it "a new way of shaping the urban environment." He's particularly intrigued by the luxury of artists having little to no housing costs.
By "the city's voracious scrappers," he's referring, at least in part, to the copper thieves attacking houses around Detroit. The mother of a friend had her home copper-robbed when she was out of town, and the thieves even made off with some piping connecting the washer or dryer to a gas line -- without turning off the gas. Luckily, the residents aren't in the habit of walking around with lit cigarettes hanging out of their mouths.
The copper thieves thing reminds me of a front page story on the LA Times a few years ago about how an industrial area near here kept getting ripped off (and ripped apart) by tweakers. A law-enforcement guy, stunned by the grinding persistence of the criminals said (in all innocence): "It's like they don't sleep..."
Anyway, I can imagine drug dealers and other ne'er-do-wells looking at real estate like this as a quick way to establish a compound from which they can expand their operations.
Crid [cridcridatgmail] at March 11, 2009 3:12 AM
As far as I can say, this means the end of Detroit as a city. I know many log cabins out there with the same level of amenities sold much more higher than that. This tells me how deep the whole city collapsed. I wonder how the city will raise taxes with houses selling so low.
Toubrouk at March 11, 2009 5:41 AM
It's stories like this that make me glad I escaped Michigan 16 years ago. (I grew up in Saginaw). GM's insanity has killed the whole area. Maybe the artists can give Detroit the chance at a comeback, but I doubt it.
Ann at March 11, 2009 7:37 AM
"the end of Detroit as a city?" I dunno. Seems like a northern city perched between two great lakes has a built in future. Just something to think about out west there while the hills burn and the water is rationed.
tjbiv at March 11, 2009 8:27 AM
Yes, I hold my claim as the end of Detroit. Maybe we can add some schematics but when you have a house AND a terrain sold for less than 5000$ in a major city, it is as good as gone.
Of course, the geo-political position of Detroit at the West-end of the Canadian Quebec-Windsor Axis is important but the terrain is so cheap that a single consortium can buy entire city blocks and secede from the city itself just like Miami-Dale.
And then, there's the tax factor. How much can you tax out of a 500$ home? If the city get no revenue while holding a monopoly on water and waste management, how they will pay for the maintenance of the service?
Toubrouk at March 11, 2009 8:42 AM
What the city taxes you on and the sale value of your home are rarely in the same neighborhood. I think Detroit will come back. Maybe better, with less undesirables and more artists. Cool. I might move there if DH could get a transfer, and I didn't have kids. Ebb and flow, that's all of life, people.
momof3 at March 11, 2009 9:12 AM
Move to Detroit and reverse commute out to the suburbs like Ann Arbor. My folks still live in A2 and it's a shockingly healthy Michigan city. The University is its lifeblood, of course. They just completed another high school a mile from my folks' house; that makes 6 high schools. There are so many restaurants you could eat out every weekend and never hit the same place twice. The A2 Art Fair is bigger than ever. Those artists could hunker down in edgy New Detroit in a bunch of retro hippie Beatnik enclaves that would be more affordable than the ones in A2.
Juliana at March 11, 2009 11:18 AM
Detroit city politics are pretty scary. Possibly not for hippy artists though.
I'd love to buy a cheap house and put a lot of elbow grease into fixing it up, but I'm not willing to put up with most of the reasons why it's cheap.
Pseudonym at March 11, 2009 1:32 PM
Wow, interesting article. I've read other accounts of artist-types making the move to the Motor City as part of a nascent "green" movement. There's even an outfit that offers tours of Detroit's dystopian architectural cityscape. I wonder if someone will try something similar in Dubai.
Amazing, considering 40 years ago Detroit's mayor was vying to host the 1968 Olympics with booster campaigns like this.
Jason S. at March 11, 2009 10:00 PM
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