Thoughts on How the Middle Class is Shut Out of Moving to Detroit

I know I've been quiet. You all probably thought we gave up or got fed up. Truth is that there has been a lot of activity. That I haven't posted about it is largely due to my loss of sense of humor about the less-than-satisfying developments. In the last months, we got ignored by the one and only lender that had been willing to talk to us; reassigned to two different loan officers; then, because of all the time that had passed, had re-submit all the paperwork and applications; only to spend $400 on and wait for weeks for a very disappointing appraisal. In the meantime, Chai and I started disagreeing about how to proceed, mostly due to our very different coping styles for and tolerance levels for stress. I'll spare you the blow-by-blow and let it suffice to say that we ended up in 5 weeks of couples' counseling and briefly diverted to a Plan B (cutting our losses and finding a different house to buy that doesn't have all the gotchas).

I've kept copious notes about the financing saga, which I hope to find time to write up in this blog. But since we are fresh off elections and still have politics in mind, I have a few thoughts about the obstacles that keep people like us from moving to Detroit. (And, by "people like us", I mean, middle class folks who work for a living and have good credit, some savings to put into a home, and a desire for meaningful community involvement that trumps the common sense motivation to pick a house based on its financial investment potential.)

One More Time, With Feeling

I came back from our June trip to Detroit pretty despondent. I practically refused to talk about the house with Chai. She was ready to plan out next steps and I couldn't see past the dollar signs blocking our path. Most of the time, I was so stressed about it that I felt like throwing up. Every time Chai would bring up the topic, I'd get defensive and pissy--mostly because it was hard for me to have any sort of back-and-forth when I didn't know myself where I stood anymore.

I mean, I still loved the city and I still loved the house. I couldn't see giving up on the prospect of a life there--especially considering that our West Village neighbors already felt even more like real neighbors than any place I had ever lived before. But the cost of the renovation was freaking me out. I couldn't see where the money was going to come from and what kind of long term impact that debt would have on our lives.

What would it mean for us if we didn't go? I mean, aside from the fact that we would let all of our new and old Michigan friends down. Aside from that we would have blown at least $35K in cash so far and would still be saddled with what would then be an albatross of a house. We'd still be stuck with the problem that we don't want the life we have in Colorado anymore and something has got to give.

HDC says, "Advance to 'Go'"

The post is part three to the "Shit's Gettin' Realz" series. To read part two, click here.

It's easy to come to Detroit, with so many of its architectural treasures decaying or torn down, and assume that the people there don't appreciate what they have. Or, perhaps, think, like so many European post-colonialists, that the natives are simply ill-suited to care for what they've inherited. Most cross-cultural stupidity comes down to an overblown sense of oneself and a lack of knowledge of the other.

I didn't know what to expect from the Historic District Commission. Many of our non-Detroit friends figured that Detroiters would be thrilled to have someone want to restore a historic home and that they would gratefully grant us free license to do what we wanted without quibbling about details. But, with that aforementioned sensitivity in mind, I thought that pretty unlikely. What I was concerned about, knowing the history of  corrupt power dynamics in Detroit politics and the dwindling resources in the city, was that anyone with any amount of authority would milk it for all it was worth.

Considering the direction the initial conversations were going with the HDC staff about our application, my concerns were not assuaged. Maybe the entry portal and balcony we proposed were historic but they weren't historically appropriate for our house. Sure, the windows needed replacing, but we would be expected to replace them with rebuilt, wood sash windows (which are very expensive and energy inefficient) even though our neighbors clearly had modern windows in their historic homes. Maybe that plywood bay was rotting but it wasn't within our rights to tear it off and fill in the wall; we would have to rebuild it, even if that meant from scratch. Oh, and the HDC staff person noticed when she went out to our property that the dead tree that was visible in the picture we submitted of the back of the house had since been removed ... with no permit. Add on a $500 fine. (Yes, we had the dead tree removed because it was rotten through and through and could have fallen on the house in a storm. Our tree guy hadn't mentioned a thing about needing to get a permit.) The only real gimme was that the HDC staff agreed that the additions on the back of the house were too badly damaged to save.

Now, I hate conflict but I'll be goddamned if anyone tries to use me as a pawn in some nickel and diming scheme. I don't care how much I love this city.

But here's what I didn't understand: There's the HDC staff and there's the HDC committee. It is the job of the staff to point out every possible, little non-compliance to the neighborhood's historic guidelines. It is the committee's job to give individual consideration, clarify policy, and grant exceptions. If anyone (neighbor, city services, or otherwise) were to ever complain about what we had done to the house and it came down to the staff person having let something slip through, that person could lose their job. It's their obligation to be captious.

Fortunately, it was the committee's disposition to be reasonable, even downright generous. Before our appearance at the June meeting, Chai and I rehearsed our presentation over an early dinner. She was the more qualified in terms of architectural lingo and background knowledge to go in front of the committee, but we both agree I've got more of, shall we say, a way with people. It's probably the dimples.

The first guy on the docket had bought a house a few blocks up from ours in an auction. He claimed a small budget and no experience renovating, or even owning, a home. As a result, he had gone about replacing all but a handful of the original, wood sash, "6 over 1" windows (a top window divided into 6 panels hung over a single panel, bottom window) with vinyl, "1 over 1" windows before the neighbors reported him to the HDC. In front of the committee, he was all apologies and explained that he really had had no idea that what he was doing was wrong. He was polite and obsequious. It was hard to be mad at him. More than the owner, the committee members were pissed at the contractor that allowed him to purchase the windows for a historic home without telling him to get a permit, since they should know better. They could have fined the owner up to $5000 and made him throw out the vinyl windows and start over (which would have cost him thousands more). But they gave him a firm talking to, a $25 fine, and a directive to restore any of the windows on the front of the house that he could by moving any compatible, salvageable windows to their openings.

This gave me hope that the committee would be as cooperative with us. But Chai was pissed that this guy got off so easy since we were going to the trouble of doing the right thing (and would pay for it) and so had many of our neighbors. I thought she was overreacting until we later found out that a neighbor had indeed approached him before he installed the windows and told him that he needed to go through the HDC first.

We heard the committee review a few more requests (for signs to be installed on commercial buildings, for a fence to keep foot traffic out of a yard, for trees to be trimmed and/or removed etc.), then came our turn. They heard our logic about blocking up the rotting bay and one basement window and about the french doors and Juliet balcony we proposed for the newly rebuilt back wall of the house. There was some discussion among themselves and a few questions for us, and a bit of confusion on my part. Turns out that they were fine with what we were proposing and, if anything, were worried about our modifications looking too historic. They were glad we were preserving what we could of the home but didn't want future generations to look at the house and mistake our renovations as original. That actually gave us more freedom to make some less costly and stylistically unique choices that could give the place a tasteful, little, eclectic pop. Schweet.

Last came the fine for tree removal. All I could do was apologize. It had never occurred to me that "do not touch the exterior without a permit" included the damned trees. And our tree guy, who came recommended by someone who works for the city's forestry department, mentioned nothing about it. They wanted to know what kind of evidence we could give them that this was a tree that they would have granted a permit for anyway. We showed them the picture of the 12-ish foot tall, leafless trunk that used to be there and explained that our tree guy had found it to be so soft that he could poke his finger into it and feel it give way. In the end, they were OK with us having removed it and didn't even really want to give us a fine (considering everything else we were doing at considerable expense and by the book). But they had given the other permit violator a $25 fine and felt they had to be consistent. I could live with that.

As if.

We left with the understanding that they would grant our building permit once we had submitted pictures of the proposed changes to the details they wanted us to make less historic and we had paid our fine. We left relieved and went to Cliff Bell's to celebrate with a drink and, for one night, not think about where we going to get the money for this project. (We left, I mean, after first paying, $18 for 3 hours in the parking structure! Turns out that the posted rates were old and, based on how abandoned the garage was at that time of day, everybody but us seemed to already know it. Sheesh. Where we come from, on-street parking is more expensive than the structures. But I should know by better by now that, in Detroit, we shouldn't take things at face value because they are usually completely different from how we are used to thinking about them.)

While we were sipping cocktails and the marathon HDC meeting went on into the night, our rock star neighbors were forming a flash mob at the end of our street to stop what appeared to be scrappers making off with our hood's Elgin Marbles. If you aren't familiar with the Elgin Marbles, they were major architectural features in the Parthenon, to which the British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire helped himself in the first decade of the 19th century. He had discovered that some other architectural sculpture had been ground up for its valuable lime content, and kindly "rescued" the remaining pieces from a similar fate by shipping them off to a British museum. The British parliament were not immediately enamored with these ratty, old things and didn't want to pay for their transport and storage. In the end though, they recognized their value and gave them "asylum" under a "free government". How thoughtful and selfless.

West Village has its own iconic piece of architecture, right at the gateway to the neighborhood. It is a 10,000 sf mansion that started life as the home of the owner of the Finck's overalls company (which later became Carhartt), has been a home to a famous fashion designer, was a restaurant for a time, and has sat mostly empty in recent years. One older neighbor claims that the Beatles and Mick Jagger once stayed there. It recently escaped foreclosure with a cash purchase by a Findlay, Ohio millionaire. The new owner had had contractors inside the house for a couple of weeks. Nothing suspicious about that, but the neighbors were curious to say the least. We had noticed the workers in the yard over the last couple of days and felt hopeful that something positive was being done with the place. But when the neighbors saw them removing the wrought iron balcony and decorative limestone features from the exterior and placing on palettes for transport, they flew into action.

As Chai and I had just learned quite well, nobody touches the exterior of a property without a permit from the HDC. The police came and put the workers in the tank until they figured out who the owner was. The new owner claimed he was merely temporarily removing these items to repair water damage and intended to fully restore the place. However, an anonymous tipster from the contracting company revealed that the owner, experienced with historic renovations in his hometown, intended these items for his private lake house. I'm sure he thought they'd be more appreciated there.

This is just a reminder of how people, looking from the outside in to Detroit, read the fatalistic stories in the national media and assume the city is closing up shop and having a fire sale. Despite appearances, people live in the city quite happily. Our treasures are not up for ransacking. If the signs of urban decay are anything, they are a reminder that it takes a collective to accomplish anything of scale. In the past, people expected that collective to be embodied by government. But government doesn't have the resources to keep up anymore. And Detroiters, after decades of failed promises and faltering attempts, are wary of rich saviors and quick fixes.

And here we are again, back to what I love about the city. It's all "do it yourself", and by "yourself" I mean the plural you--you the neighbors, the community organization, the social network, not just the individual. One returning Michigander said it best: “This city, man, you’ve got to leave your ego at the door. If it’s about you getting famous, or you moving ahead, then you’ve picked the wrong city because you will be sniffed out within moments.”

Stay tuned for the next post in the "Shit's Gettin' Realz" series in which I think my way out of my hyperventilation paper bag.

A Very Detroit Problem

This post is part two in the "Shit's Gettin' Realz" series. Click here to read part one.

Here's the thing about navigating the experience of Detroit: What are normal, reasonable assumptions often turn out to be quite wrongheaded and yet serendipity seems to be built into the social fabric of the place. This is how you can buy a historic house for $7500, within a week meet 20 people who genuinely make you feel like you matter, and still wonder what the frick you have gotten yourself into. How things work here reminds me a little of the Mad Hatter's tea party except that everyone is pulling up a chair for you.

By late April, Chai had finished the final tweaks on the architectural drawings and we had gathered 6 names of contractors from neighbors and local architects we have met. Six seemed like plenty, and so we sent out the drawings for bids. Weeks passed. Crickets chirped. Planets spun on their axes. And we got nearly no response to first emails and to second emails. We were baffled--I mean, we wanted to throw 10s of thousands of dollars of work to people in an economically depressed area. You'd think that would be a welcome opportunity, right?

An idealist and pragmatist walk into a bar ....

I've been pretty quiet while this project has been incubating over the last few months. It has been hard to balance the possibilities of the house with the realities, especially considering that Chai and I respectively embody these competing ideals. The process has not been easy on our relationship. From the get go, I advocated for limiting the design effort to simply the things that needed to be done to get the place habitable. But Chai pointed out (rightly so) that we could waste a lot of time and money working piecemeal if we didn't have a vision of how we'd ultimately like it to look so that we can prioritize work and avoid paying for doing things twice.

The problems started when it came time to pare the list back down to something we could afford.

Life: Uh, fulfilled much?

So, Chai says to me last night, "Are you fulfilled?" It's a classic middle-age question and one that has come up a lot for us in the last few years. I can't say I had thought much about "fulfillment" before I hit my 40s. Maybe the only reason that I give it more than a passing consideration now is that there a certain amount of inertia that comes with being 20-some years into adulthood, a career, and a community.

OK, since one of my friends already got
mesmerized by all the skin and forgot my
love of irony, I should probably point
out that this is not actually my tattoo.

I mean ... years after having gotten that tattoo (which is now blurry and faded) and the body piercings (which never healed right), doing those protests and marches (which have yet to show signs of paying off), traveling the world (which yielded some equally scary and hilarious, fish-out-of-water moments), nearly failing out of grad school, and losing a friend to AIDS in my twenties; after the spin cycle of failed romances, the thousands of hours spent in therapy, meditation, and loneliness, a second graduate degree (this time, at the behest of my underserved right brain), the car wreck (in which my sturdy Chrysler P-body was totaled by a semi but from which I remarkably walked away), the ongoing years of physical therapy, the long-awaited flowering of a dear young person (who I had helped through a difficult adolescence and young adulthood), and the loss of my dog (my closest companion) of 17 years, all while still working full time in my thirties; only to close out the decade by actually finding somebody who wants me AND puts up with me, followed immediately by her diagnosis and ass kicking of Stage 4 cancer,  I'm tired. And, frankly, there's some really good TV on these days.

Shout Out: "Difficult Dealings in The D" from Curbed

Sarah F. Cox, over at Curbed Detroit, stopped by this week to snap some pics of the clean up progress on our property and share with you some "highlights" of our buying saga. Check out the photo spread and her article "Difficult Dealings in The D: What Two Gals Dealt With to Buy".

Be sure to add Curbed Detroit to your newsfeed so you won't miss the continuing stooorrry of what it has been like for us to buy and renovate in The D.

Shout Out: Detroit 1914 gets an intro from Curbed

Yo, yo, friends. Sarah Cox over at Curbed Detroit gives us an intro today on her blog.

Be sure to add Curbed Detroit to your newsfeed so you won't miss the upcoming retelling of the real estate angle of our continuing saga.

Why Detroit?

If you are like everyone else who has never been to Detroit (or maybe just hasn't been below 8 Mile lately), you probably know it by its music, cars, and destitution. Mostly the latter anymore. So, when I tell people I'm moving to Detroit, I find myself always having to follow it up with an elaborate explanation as to why. (The subtext being "Why would a well-traveled, highly educated, middle aged, white women want to give up her life in a low crime, low pollution, 25 sq mile piece of manicured paradise that she shares with a couple hundred thousand other well-traveled, highly educated, white people to move to a place like, uh, Detroit?" Or maybe when I put it like that, I needn't say more.)

Well, to save me the trouble of repeating myself and you the disservice of losing the essence in a sound bite, below is montage and a few hours worth of reasons why I cannot wait to call Detroit home. (If you don't have time for them all, then at least watch the first video, "Redefining Dreamland".)

I love Detroit for ... 

Shout Out: Guest Blogging on Detroit Moxie

Becks over at Detroit Moxie let me take over her blog one day last October. For a little bit of philosophizing and unrestrained Detroit fangirl gushing, check out "Some People Get New Cars for Their Midlife Crisis. One Woman Wants the Motor City".

If you are just getting to know us here at Detroit 1914, this is a good place to start. Be sure to add Detroit Moxie to your newsfeed. We'll be updating there about our upcoming move to The D and what we discover along the way.

Why 1914?

I am not a history buff. I mean, the older I get, the more appreciation I have for the "long arc", as they say. But before my more creative half and I got interested in this house, I wouldn't have been able to tell you the difference between the Spanish-American War and the Louisiana Purchase, other than that one involved some damned irresistible, 3-tiered pastries. When really did electricity come to homes? The telephone? Kitchen appliances? Based on my exposure to "Leave it to Beaver" reruns, I am solidly certain it was some time before 1950, but whether it was closer to the civil war or to WWII? Well, let's say, I'm not a fan of "Jeopardy" or homework that involves memorization.

I've glossed over this lack of well-roundedness thus far by nodding my head a lot in conversations, looking inquisitive, and changing the subject. So, it's actually kinda fun for me to now finally get around to learning the stuff I sucked at as a kid and thought was totally irrelevant to me and the rest of the MTV generation.

The plan for this blog is to relive the year 1914 (the year my house was built) and cram at least as much book knowledge as actual hammering and painting and check writing into this home renovation project. In the end, maybe I'll have both leveled up the house and my understanding of my place in history. And when 2014 rolls around, I'll be ready to host the most kickass, costumed, period themed, 100-year-old birthday bash a house could ever want.

And now ... the reason for all this fuss.

Pretty cool, eh?