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Answer & Explanation:Demolishing Homes in Detroit.pdf Time Magazine Article.pdf ASSIGNMENT – RE-IMAGINING DETROIT(1).pdf PLEASE FOLLOW ASSIGNMENT INSTRUCTIONS AND RESPOND WITH A COMPLETE ANSWERS BASED ON WHAT YOU READ IN THE ARTICLES. Read the articles posted with this assignment for context about the past and current conditions
in the city of Detroit, use them to support your opinions in an opinion paper for this assignment
(you can cite them with the author’s last name).Re-imagining Detroit
With a basic understanding of the problem, we can form some opinions about a possible
solution. Detroit is cleaning out old abandoned buildings and freeing up space, the
question is what should be done with the empty space? The following slides give images
and examples of 3 different options for what to build in Detroit once the abandoned
buildings are cleared out. Option A: Natural Solution – Let Nature Take It’s Course Option B – Keep up with the Jones’ – Suburbanize Option C – Build the City of the Future Write an opinion paper (at least one page per option, but no more than 2 pages) that
answers the questions related to each option.
• Write a 1-2 page conclusion, make a case for which option would be best to revitalize
the city (and would make you consider or continue living there) and if none of them
would, propose a solution of your own that would make you consider Detroit as a
possible “home”.
Submit a word document file of your paper to the Re-Imagining Detroit Assignment Link on
Blackboard.
demolishing_homes_in_detroit.pdf
time_magazine_article.pdf
assignment___re_imagining_detroit_1_.pdf
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Big Issues
Destroying Detroit (in Order to Save It)
It took over 300 years to build this city. It’ll take about four to knock it down. Howie Kahn rides shotgun with the men who
are demolishing the abandoned, godforsaken homes of Detroit—all 70,000 of them—and paving the way for one last shot at
the future
B Y H O W I E K AH N
PH OTOGR APH S BY TI M H ETH ER I N GTON
May 2011
The
massiv e
twelv ewheeled
demolition
truck
rumbles
down the
street and
lures the
neighbors
out to
gripe. It’s
not that
the truck
or the
driv er,
Lorenzo
Coney , are
unwelcome. The people here just want to know what’s taken them so long.
On this June morning, with the heat and humidity rising, residents emerge from their homes one by one: mostly
women, mostly older, mostly taking care of their mothers and grandkids. They ‘v e been calling the city , they say , for
y ears without response and feel as abandoned as the houses that surround them—the foreclosed, dev italized
structures that require immediate wrecking. They hav e questions for Lorenzo. Comprehensiv e to-do lists for this
man who has powerful machines and, so, they figure, actual power. They ask when the dead trees are coming down.
They want to know when the drug dealing will stop. Does Lorenzo’s boss hav e a job for their sons, by any chance? Or
for their nephews? Or what about for themselv es? They can still work, they say . They can lift things. Handle a shov el.
Run a hose. They pointat any number of v acancies on their street: “Y ou tearing down this one? What about this one?
How about this one?”
When they find out Lorenzo’s only there for one house, they seethe. “But those are drug houses,” they demand,
imploring the crew to tear them all down, imploring me to somehow tear them all down. “That one,” they say ,
“somebody got raped in. Y ou’re not taking that one down? Are y ou serious? I called about that one. I called. And
called. When are y ou doing that one? Y ou should be here all day . All week. All y ear.”
Lorenzo ex plains he’s only a wrecker; he’s not the may or. He’s simply following orders, knocking down houses as fast
as he can.
“I can do twenty a day ,” say s Lorenzo, standing outside a Craftsman-sty le bungalow at 1 8058 Joann. This house took
the better part of 1 926 to build. Crews of men dug a hole, poured a foundation, assembled floor bridging and ceiling
joists and a truss for the roof. Shingles were laid down, one at a time. Wooden siding was hung. Mortar was spread
and bricks were stacked. By the time the house was completed, it boasted a gable roof, central dormer windows, and
generous eav es shading a balustraded v eranda. Cov ering 1 ,300 square feet, it had a couple of bedrooms, a
bathroom, a small kitchen, and a light-filled parlor facing the street. It was priced for a worker—less than $4,000
new—and meant, for a family , a future.
It will take Lorenzo and his two-man crew from Farrow Demolition Incorporated thirty -six minutes to destroy it. It
will be their fourth wreck of the day . By 9:30 a.m., 1 7 1 8 Field, 391 1 Beaconsfield, and 1 31 03 Canfield hav e all been
reduced to rubble, hav ing met the mechanized v iolence of the CAT 330D L ex cav ator. From house to garbage in the
time it takes to do a load of laundry . Soon one of Farrow’s driv ers will collect the remains and haul them to the
landfill—eighty -y ear-old houses, each ground down into a hundred tons of trash and dumped from the back of a
truck. In the end, the house is just one more useless thing.
Thirteen local wrecking crews hav e been hired to demolish 1 0,000 of these forsaken houses, riding up and lev eling
them with brute hy draulic force. Detroit had erected itself as a city of freestanding single-family homes: V ictorians,
neo-Gothics, box y Foursquares, Greek and Tudor Rev iv als. But mostly it’s a city of small, sweet, low-slung
bungalows like the one on Joann that’s about to be demolished so that Detroit might thriv e again.
···
In 1 950, with nearly 2 million people liv ing within its boundaries, Detroit was the fifth-largest city in America. Ov er a
forty -y ear period, the auto industry had boomed in a way that changed the country , and Detroit’s population more
than sex tupled. But starting in the ’50s, the city fell into decline. Factories closed. Jobs v anished. In the wake of the
1 967 riots, race relations collapsed and the city became increasingly segregated. By 1 980 the population had
dwindled to 1 .2 million. With far fewer Detroiters to shelter, many of the city ‘s houses were orphaned, threatening
the ex istence and safety of ev ery thing around them. Blight metastasized across town, leav ing much of the housing
stock better suited for crackheads and squatters than for legitimate inv estors, possible gentrifiers, or working-class
families with any remaining desire to stay . Today only 7 00,000 souls call Detroit home, and nearly a fourth of the
city ‘s houses—a number approaching 7 2,000 units—are empty .
In March 201 0, after ten months in office, Detroit’s may or, Dav e Bing—former Piston, NBA Hall of Famer,
multimillionaire founder of Bing Steel—gav e his first State of the City address. In it, he made residential blight public
enemy number one. “Tonight,” he said, “I am unv eiling a plan to demolish 3,000 dangerous residential structures
this y ear and setting a goal of 1 0,000 by the end of this term.” The de-blighting started immediately . The city had
av eraged only about 1 ,000 annual residential demolitions ov er the prev ious fiv e y ears, and the may or knew he had
to pick up the pace. This was his problem now.
Detroit politicians hav e been deliv ering Sav e Detroit sermons for as long as I can remember. (I was born there in
1 97 8.) But there was something different about Bing’s speech. The may or talked about the city as a whole, not just
the nugget of Downtown that local leaders hav e been cradling, coddling, and polishing since the ‘7 0s. The notion of
“bringing Detroit back” has alway s focused on sev eral square miles of partially occupied office buildings, lux ury box ed sports stadiums, and casinos—and on keeping solv ent the city ‘s most iconic contemporary -era building, the
Renaissance Center, which looks like sev en stacks of obscenely wax ed tires. (It has been the headquarters of both
Ford and General Motors.) Meanwhile the neighborhoods, the places where the people actually liv e, hav e been
almost uniformly scrubbed from public awareness. This neglect left ev ery where but Downtown withered and has
long set the rest of the city up for a comeback.
···
Though we’re technically in the middle of the morning rush, there’s hardly any one on the road. Lorenzo, 49 and a
twenty -six -y ear demolition v et, maneuv ers his Kenworth, and the 80,000-pound ex cav ator he’s towing behind it,
with ease. The temperature in the cab is calibrated to freezing. There’s a plastic bag of water bottles and Amp Energy
drinks sitting behind the gearshift on the floor and a smaller bag filled with oranges on a ledge behind Lorenzo’s seat.
“We don’t stop long enough to eat any thing else,” he say s, widening his sleepy ey es. “Sometimes I bring bananas.”
Lorenzo heads up Gratiot, one of Detroit’s main roads, one of six arteries that emerge from Downtown like the spokes
of a wheel. It’s a stretch of the city that once teemed with retail and restaurants. Life. Now, with its faded signage and
trashed storefronts, it’s wasted in a way that will prompt this story ‘s photographer, Tim Hetherington, who liv ed in
West Africa for almost a decade, and who was tragically killed Misurata, Liby a on April 20th, to call me when he
lands at the airport—just off the Gratiot drag—and ask whether he’s somehow touched down in Kinshasa or Monrov ia.
Lorenzo turns the truck into a residential pocket and stops in front of the bungalow on Joann. The zip code we’re in,
48205, has the fourth-highest foreclosure rate in the city . More than half of the twenty -three homes on this block are
empty . But compared with some of the other streets I’v e seen—where, say , a single resident remains among the
charred and picked-ov er husks of thirty -three neighboring v acancies—this stretch doesn’t seem so bad.
“Blink y our ey es,” say s Lorenzo, nodding his head at the house. “It’ll be gone.” He flips a switch on the Kenworth’s
dash, drops the lowboy , and steps down to the street. Otis Huff, his 39-y ear-old machine operator, who mov ed here
from Alabama in 1 990 and worked the line at Ford before getting laid off, climbs up into the ex cav ator and backs it
off the trailer. Essentially , an ex cav ator is a nonweaponized tank. It mov es on metal treads. A swing bearing allows
the cab, where the operator sits, to piv ot a full 360 degrees. But instead of a cannon, an ex cav ator has a boom and an
arm connected to a series of hy draulic cy linders and hoses that look, when the CAT starts humming, like adrenalized
v eins. At the end of the arm is a 5,000-pound iron-grapple attachment with teeth. It hinges open like a giant metal
mouth—twelv e feet across—and closes like claws clasped in pray er.
As Otis approaches the house, Lorenzo cranks open a fire hy drant. A rush of rusty water pours out. He attaches a
hose and starts spray ing the house to tamp down all the dust and ash that come with obliteration. The CAT thrums
insistently forward, mmmmm-hmmmm-mmmmm-hmmmm, and Otis digs the grapple into the front y ard, pulling it
up in pieces and lay ing the lawn ov er the sidewalk to protect it from the weight of his encroaching machine. “The
city ‘s a wreck,” say s Lorenzo, “but we don’t treat it like that. We try not to crush any thing we don’t hav e to crush.”
···
I witnessed fifty -three demolitions, ev en stepping into the ex cav ator’s cab to carry out parts of a fifty -fourth my self.
Wrecking gets hy pnotic in its consistency , as do the patterns of decay and decomposition. Old roofs half-collapse
under the weight of snow, forcing the walls to bulge outward. Moisture eats away the insides. Mold spoils the walls,
softens the floors. In the summer, the sun bakes it all to a high stink and turns it crisp as tinder. Nature takes ov er.
Trees sprout through the dormers. Animals get comfortable. We see this ev ery where we go. Lorenzo runs down the
list: 81 25 Mt. Oliv et. 41 7 3 Pennsy lv ania. 1 4224 Blackstone. It’s like he’s reading the names of the missing, the dead.
So many innocent onetime starter homes, built on credit and striv ing, now in foreclosure. The holding company
writes it off as a loss. And unless some crusading neighborhood association acts as a sentry , no one’s watching the
house any more. In essence, it belongs to nobody —or to ev ery body . Because once a house becomes worthless and
unwanted—ev en by the most intrepid gentrifiers and “freegans”—it’s ev ery body ‘s problem. Ev ery body ‘s crime scene.
Menace seeks a v acuum, and v acancies attract undesirables in wav es. The scav engers hit first, picking a house clean
of whatev er v aluables remain. It’s not legal, but that doesn’t stop people from pulling up in a junked-out v an, taking
an ax to the front door, and shouldering their way inside. They bust open the walls and the ceilings, strip copper
from the wires. They drag out the furnace and the stov e and any thing else with enough metal to be ex changed for
cash at the scrap y ards whose ads hang all ov er town. Scrap metal in increments less than a ton isn’t worth much
these day s, but when there’s block after block of houses to pick through, getting to a ton isn’t so hard. The pipes go
nex t. If the water is still on, the basement floods. The scrappers would steal the bricks, too, if they were worth
any thing—if construction were still something that happened in Detroit.
“When I see guy s stripping a house, I just want to kick their asses,” say s Arthur Edge, one of the city ‘s elev en
dangerous-buildings inspectors. “They alway s say , ‘But it’s empty .’ And I tell them, ‘Y ou’re not home right now. Y our
house is empty , too. What if I go ov er and take out y our windows and y our pipes?’ ”
Edge is 54, with a solemn, arched mustache and hands heav y as sledgehammers. He grew up on the northwest side,
deliv ering Smokey Robinson’s newspapers. By the time Edge reaches a house, it’s likely been picked ov er already . He
cruises the city constantly , responding to calls from concerned neighbors, conv erting blighted homes into data—his
department’s inv entory , the master hit list of what needs wrecking. For Edge, a good day includes getting forty
houses onto the city ‘s preliminary demolition list.
There are no conserv ation groups or historical preserv ationists attempting to sav e these blocks. Only the lawless
resist demolition. Tim Sherman, who runs an ex cav ator for Adamo Demolition, another company deputized by city
hall to get the blight out, has a story about some truant kids setting his rig on fire. His brother Paul, also a wrecker at
Adamo, has one about a woman who offered him a blow job in ex change for sparing the house she and her family
were squatting in. Mark, the y oungest Sherman brother and Adamo’s field superintendent, tells me about a drugfilled couch buried beneath the rubble of a house he’d demolished. Dealers hid their stash under the cushions and
showed up at the job site toting AK-47 ‘s, demanding it be recov ered. Quickly it was.
Wreckers in Detroit are like human Google Maps: They track all the phy sical changes—the torn-down houses, the
fires, the new v acancies—practically in real time. They ‘v e also dev eloped a finely tuned sense of protection that the
city at large greatly lacks. Ask a wrecker here what he does and y ou won’t hear him talking about demolishing
any thing. When wreckers get talking, they talk primarily about making things safe.
“Before we can put a hole in a house,” ex plains Mike Farrow, owner of Farrow Demolition, “we hav e to make sure it’s
clear. The city doesn’t clear it. If there’s squatters, dealers, crackheads in there, we’v e gotta get ’em out.” Farrow is 41
y ears old, six feet tall, 250 pounds. He’s sitting behind the wheel of a Silv erado pickup in baggy jeans, an ov ersize
black polo, and a black baseball cap display ing his company ‘s logo, a red fiv e-sided poly gon in the shape of a house.
A Nighthawk Predator pistol is holstered under his shirt. “One time I was clearing a house,” say s Farrow, “and I got
cut. The guy thought I was a cop. He was all doped up and slashed me with a knife.” Wreckers and inspectors enter
these houses nev er knowing who or what lurks inside. They could be empty but could just as easily prov ide cov er for
the impulsiv ely v iolent, the mentally unstable, or some solo junkie intent on protecting his daily ritual of dissolv ing
into the ruins.
Once a structure is finally approv ed by the city council for teardown, it usually takes sev eral more months for the
water company to come shut off the supply and the energy company to shuttle ov er in two separate crews to kill the
electricity and the gas. If the house has not been burned out, an asbestos-abatement crew comes in to deal with the
hazardous material—stripping ev ery thing off the walls, shav ing down the wood, and leav ing the house looking as if it
was built not with lumber but with frail and sallow bones. A board-up crew might be dispatched to spend a couple of
hours sealing off the structure with screw guns and custom-cut sheets of ply wood to secure it until it gets
demolished. Those crews work twenty -four hours a day , sev en day s a week and are led by men like Orlando
Robinson, an ex -Marine. “Sometimes I’ll get a call from the city at 2 a.m. and I’ll get right out there,” he say s while
boarding up a house at 1 8891 Anglin in one-hundred-degree heat. “Y ou get a call from the city of Detroit in the
middle of the night? Y ou get to work fast.”
Most of the time, though, Robinson can’t get there in time to stop the v ultures—or the dealers who colonize skeleton
houses with working stov es and conv ert them into crack and meth labs. One Detroit resident liv ing not far from the
city ‘s northern boundary , 8 Mile Road, described the weekly gatherings at a v acant house on her street. All week, she
said, the house was dark and empty . But on Thursday nights the men would start showing up. On foot, on bikes, in
shiny cars. They ‘d line up out the door, down the block: tall and short, plump and emaciated, some of them shirtless.
Going in standing stiff. Coming out limp, loose, detached. It went on like that all weekend, she said. A steady stream
of users until late Sunday night.
Usually , though, there’s no pattern. Chaos breaks out randomly . Last y ear fiv e Detroit police officers were shot inside
a v acant house on Schoenherr, one fatally . Any of these structures can host a murder, any day , any time, like the one
on Maddelein, where the body of an abducted 21 -y ear-old man was found shot dead in August of 2009. Any of the
unliv ables can go up in flames or become the scene of a rape. That’s the neighbors’ greatest concern: “Kids get raped
in there. Walking to school. Coming home from school. Any one can grab ’em.” I heard it all ov er the city . Dozens of
times. Mike Farrow once saw a boy fleeing an empty lot on Beaufait. His rapist, obese and half-dressed, was buttoning
his pants as the boy escaped.
···
There’s a wrecker’s paradox in Detroit: Repetition is the thing that keeps them working and also the thing that breaks
their hearts. Because Detroit is a city of single-family homes, not apartment buildings, there is an enormous number
of structures to tear down. For some of these guy s, it amounts to y ear after y ear of wrecking houses.
Paul Sherman comes from a wrecking family . His father, Allen, wrecked for Adamo, too. “All I did was wreck,” say s
Allen, 69, “and it looks like I nev er ev en did any thing.” The Shermans hav e been taking Detroit apart, hoping to make
it something better, for more than forty y ears. “There was a time,” say s Paul, “when I was married and I’d come home
and my wife would say to me, ‘Why are y ou y elling at us?’ And it was because I didn’t know who to v ent it at. I used to
take it out on the houses, but after a while it’s like, fuck, that doesn’t do any thing. There’s alway s another one. And
another one. I’v e made a good liv ing doing this, but it’s gotta fucking stop sooner or later. I’ll keep going, I’ll finish the
job, but something’s gotta giv e.”
Wreckers hide it, but when y ou spend weeks with them, riding in their trucks, sitting in their machines, trailing them
all ov er their job sites right out to the dump where they ‘ll deposit the remains of a house, it becomes clear that
they ‘re a reflectiv e and empathetic group. They ‘re raconteurs and historians. They want y ou to know what they ‘v e
seen in this city . They want to take y ou there. They believ e it’ll help.
Mark Sherman insists on driv ing me down a street called Robinwood, a few blocks from Adamo’s home base. “This
one,” he say s, “breaks me up ev ery time I’m on it.” The stretch is so blighted it seems haunted. Somehow it’s totally
dev oid of color. All the Craftsman-sty le homes, with their tapered support columns and stonework porches, are
empty . “Y ou can see,” say s Mark, tugging on the brim of his black John Deere cap, “these were really beautiful.
Unique.” And he’s right. They ‘re ex actly the kinds of homes y oung families in Portland and Los Angeles line up to liv e
in. “This is the perfect ex ample,” he continues, “of what can happen in two y ears. Two y ears ago, this street was
mostly full. This is what happens when nobody cares.”
Wreckers alway s look ahead. “It’s a process,” say s Mark, “but I see a future. I hav e to. The only other thing to do here
would be to drop an A-bomb, but y ou can’t do that. Demolition—there’s the future. It pav es the way to build.”
These day s ev ery one in Detroit is talking l …
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