A $500 House in Detroit

January 30, 2017
In this impassioned memoir, a young man finds a community flourishing in a city so depopulated that houses are worth less than a used Chevy. Journalist Philp moved to Detroit fresh out of college in 2008 and bought a derelict house in Poletown, a once bustling but now desolate neighborhood going to prairie and ruin. He finds that deep poverty, scant city services, and little police protection have birthed a culture of do-it-yourself improvisation and mutual aid among its denizens: artists, scavengers, hipsters, and longtime homeowners hanging on by their fingernails. Philp ably captures the frontier feel of Detroit—he gets attacked by wild dogs, fends off a home invader with his shotgun, and is forever gazing at burning buildings—as he laboriously rehabs his ruined house from foundation to roof. His homebuilding narrative is engrossing, but his city-building prescriptions are less so: he serves up overwrought anticapitalist soapboxing against “the calculating men in suits trying to squeeze every last little bit of profit from all I find holy” and extols tired urban farming nostrums that would only further the hollowing-out of Detroit. The book shines when he sticks to the “radical neighborliness” of ordinary people in desperate circumstances. Photos.