The online foreclosure bid to redeem my city's soul

April 11, 2017 8:58 PM

Drew Philp moved to Detroit after graduating from UMich and bought an abandoned house. He reconstructed his home the old way, as the community, thrown between spirals of poverty and torrents of money, began to heal, regrow, and look for its future. They are faced with a test: in dollars, how much do you love your neighbor? (SLGuardian)
posted by runcifex (20 comments total)

Great story. So many issues raised here. I think the bigger point, that we are all in this together no matter our race, background or wealth, he makes well. Neighbors, really just familiar strangers, can work together to help each other out, to build a better tomorrow. Watching out for each other is important.

Detroit is pretty much a blank canvas still and maybe there is hope that the mistakes of the past, the racial segregation, the wealth segregation can be corrected. The real question is do the wealthy white folk gentrifying parts of town want to. Let us hope.
posted by AugustWest at 9:18 PM on April 11, 2017 [4 favorites]

He did an AMA today.
posted by k8t at 10:01 PM on April 11, 2017

I thought I remembered a previously from this guy.
posted by coolxcool=rad at 10:26 PM on April 11, 2017

That AMA is not all that easy to navigate to get past the snark.

You know, as an FIY. Well, perhaps a potentially redundant FYI but forewarned is--
posted by Johnny Hazard at 11:01 PM on April 11, 2017

Whenever I read about these types of auctions, I tend to wonder -- how much would the bank and/or taxing authority have required from the homeowner to consider their debt paid? If they'd accept some wildly lower amount from a third party bidder, is there some way to require them to offer the homeowner right of first refusal on paying just that much? There are obvious ways to cheat a system like that on both sides, but it just feels wrong that someone can lose their house because they owe thousands and thousands of dollars, but then have someone else get it for a few hundred.
posted by jacquilynne at 1:15 AM on April 12, 2017 [11 favorites]

Sounds very similar to what Rolling Jubilee. does for student debt.
posted by benzenedream at 2:09 AM on April 12, 2017

It's neat what he did but it's never really going to make sense financially. I did a somewhat similar thing in my mid-twenties, buying a $40K house in Pittsburgh in the early '90s and it was great to be able to buy a house that cheap but if your house is only worth that much, you can't really put much money into it and ever expect to get it out unless you want to wait a really long time. It's not like Home Depot charges less for copper pipe and wire and electric service entrances if your house is worth less than a nice car so even if you and your friends are doing all the work, it's still trivially easy to spend way more than the house is ever going to appreciate just getting it minimally livable.
posted by octothorpe at 4:26 AM on April 12, 2017 [1 favorite]

> how much would the bank and/or taxing authority have required from the homeowner to consider their debt paid?

It looks like, at least five years ago, Wayne County had realized that tax debt was preferable to progressive blight and was selling property tax forgiveness to people in arrears for $500.

In the 90s, Detroit did a bad job of managing the titles on the properties put up for tax auction and there were a lot of stories of people buying $50 houses and $100 storefronts and getting dunned for decades of back taxes, tens of thousands of dollars due immediately because the collectors suddenly had traceable names on the deeds.
posted by ardgedee at 5:27 AM on April 12, 2017

On one hand, white savior complex and a book deal, on the other that lady isn't getting evicted.

This feels a bit like phase 2 of the Detroit ruin porn of a few years back; a weird fetishation of Detroit. See also Shinola. You never see this kind of stuff about Newark.
posted by leotrotsky at 5:36 AM on April 12, 2017 [4 favorites]

...or even Flint. Detroit has taken on this iconic representation of Failed City in the minds of the world, and it's tremendously irritating.
posted by leotrotsky at 5:43 AM on April 12, 2017 [1 favorite]

That was as awesome as anything I've heard this year, and boy do I need to hear it.
posted by bookbook at 6:39 AM on April 12, 2017 [1 favorite]

The Rolling Jubilee stopped in 2013, and made their last debt purchase in 2014. I think they're currently organizing a debt strike. Is there another group doing debt buy-offs? I like that method. I'm not sure how effective a debt strike will be.
posted by domo at 7:31 AM on April 12, 2017

Detroit is pretty much a blank canvas still and maybe there is hope that the mistakes of the past, the racial segregation, the wealth segregation can be corrected. The real question is do the wealthy white folk gentrifying parts of town want to. Let us hope.

Wasn't the point of the article that Detroit ISN'T a blank canvas? That there are people living there with their own ideas of what should happen to their city?

This is a really great article and kudos to the author for his work and his approach. One of the great things happening in Detroit right now is that, with the downtown/Midtown/New Center corridor thriving, attention is now turning to the neighborhoods. Mayor Mike Duggan hired a game-changing planning director who is getting down to the enormous task of rebuilding Detroit's neighborhoods. Our statewide preservation advocacy non-profit and the National Trust for Historic Preservation are focusing their efforts on the Jefferson-Chalmers neighborhood on the east side. Neighborhood organizations like the Grandmont-Rosedale Development Corporation, Southwest Detroit Business Association, and Jefferson East are rebuilding their areas property by property and block by block.

We're still in the cautious optimism stage, and the impact is going to take time to unfold. And it is ENORMOUSLY important to emphasize that these efforts are being undertaken with the existing residents as equal partners. Gentrifying white folks sweeping in to remake the city (or to put their stamp of approval on racial and wealth de-segregation) is not what is happening here.

But the signs are good.
posted by Preserver at 8:17 AM on April 12, 2017 [11 favorites]

Gentrifying white folks sweeping in to remake the city (or to put their stamp of approval on racial and wealth de-segregation) is not what is happening here.

I am also cautiously optimistic, but let us not forget that Mike Duggan lived in Livonia until the last required moment to run for Mayor of Detroit.
posted by Etrigan at 8:53 AM on April 12, 2017

I am also cautiously optimistic, but let us not forget that Mike Duggan lived in Livonia until the last required moment to run for Mayor of Detroit.

Duggan worked in the city for nearly 30 years, he was hardly sweeping in. And wherever he resided (or his color), the point remains that his administration is not taking the "gentrifying white folks" approach to redeveloping the neighborhoods.
posted by Preserver at 9:07 AM on April 12, 2017 [2 favorites]

I would also add that Duggan was born and raised in Detroit.
posted by Preserver at 9:10 AM on April 12, 2017

Detroit is pretty much a blank canvas still

Excuse me? Several hundred thousand people, an urban landscape, and two and a half centuries of history do not make a "blank canvas."

You should really ask yourself what in the world makes it possible for you to vanish those people away in your mind to create a "blank canvas."
posted by praemunire at 10:53 AM on April 12, 2017 [7 favorites]

Uh yeah, the blank canvas comment in the article was an example of an insult to Detroit, it's not something to repeat as if it's true.

I am a proud grad of Wayne State (2006) and also spent time there while I was in college at Univ of Michigan (1998-2002). It's really crazy to see how much the city has changed from 1998 to now. I do kind of miss the random, nowhere-else-like-it insanity of Detroit (it's where I came up with the phrase "unattended dead body," like, you're walking/driving and see a person lying on the ground, and you go to help them, and in doing so, figure out they are dead, and there is NO ONE ELSE around. No cops, no EMTs, no friends, no family, no killers, no passersbys; just you and this corpse on the street. It's the kind of place where this happens often enough that you need an acronym for it-- at least 3 times for me that I recall, and my husband's had several independent sightings too, and so have several of our friends. I could go on-- there is so MUCH MORE of Detroit shenanigans) but overall I am 100% OK with the city gentrifying a bit. Especially because a lot of the development is newer housing, which is really what is holding back people I know from moving-- not everyone wants to rehab their own house.

I am familiar with the artist's residence that he discusses at the end of the article. It is a shame they were/will be kicked out (I was there over New Year's and they've gotten a stay through the summer) but that seems really similar to what happens whenever someplace gentrifies. First, the artists come and take over an empty factory. Then that factory becomes trendy lofts, and the artists move to a different empty factory (of which there are several in Detroit!), and the area around the lofts fills in with businesses, and then condos/houses, and then it slowly moves to everywhere in the area. I do hope Detroit becomes a functional city again in my life.
posted by holyrood at 8:11 PM on April 12, 2017

It's neat what he did but it's never really going to make sense financially.

As much as I aspire to real estate investment, it's also financially smart to not owe any money on your home. I'm not sure if that's what you were referring to, but everyone has their own priorities.
posted by bendy at 9:41 PM on April 12, 2017

Huh? A house is one of the few things that it is financially smart to owe money on. You get that nice federal tax break and at least around here, your mortgage payments are much less than rent would be for the similar sized unit. I mean for what our monthly payments is on a four bedroom house with a garage, we could only afford to rent a dinky 1BR apartment in the same area. Spending $1200 a month on rent on an apartment seems to make a lot less sense than using that as a mortgage payment.
posted by octothorpe at 4:12 AM on April 13, 2017