Teardown. Gordon Young

      UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

      Berkeley•Los Angeles•London

      University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

      University of California Press

      Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

      University of California Press, Ltd.

      London, England

      © 2013 by The Regents of the University of California

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Young, Gordon, 1966–

      Teardown : memoir of a vanishing city / Gordon Young.

      p. cm.

      Includes bibliographical references and index.

      ISBN 978-0-520-27052-7 (cloth : alk. paper)

      eISBN 978-052-095537-0

      1. Flint (Mich.)—Social conditions. 2. Flint (Mich.)—Economic conditions. 3. Plant shutdowns—Michigan—Flint. 4. Urban renewal—Michigan—Flint. I. Young, Gordon, 1966– II. Title.

      HN80.F54Y682013

      307.3’4160977437—dc23

      2012039951

      Manufactured in the United States of America

      22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13

      10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

      In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Rolland Enviro100, a 100% post-consumer fiber paper that is FSC certified, deinked, processed chlorine-free, and manufactured with renewable biogas energy. It is acid-free and EcoLogo certified.

      For Pat, Traci, and Leone

      Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.

      —Joan Didion, Blue Nights

      It’s a dismal cascade of drek, but it’s still home.

      —Ben Hamper

      We shall not cease from exploration

      And the end of all our exploring

      Will be to arrive where we started

      And know the place for the first time.

      —T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding

      Contents

      Prologue: Summer 2009

      PART ONE

      1Pink Houses and Panhandlers

      2Bottom-Feeders

      3Bourgeois Homeowners

      4Virtual Vehicle City

      5Bad Reputation

      6The Road to Prosperity

      7Bar Logic

      8Downward Mobility

      9Black and White

      10The Forest Primeval

      11The Naked Truth

      12The Toughest Job in Politics

      13Urban Homesteaders

      PART TWO

      14Quitters Never Win

      15Burning Down the House

      16Emotional Rescue

      17Get Real

      18Living Large

      19Fading Murals

      20Gun Club

      21Bargaining with God

      22Psycho Killer

      PART THREE

      23Winter Wonderland

      24Home on the Range

      25California Dreamin’

      26Thankless Task

      27Joy to the World

      Epilogue: Summer 2012

      Updates

      Acknowledgments

      Notes

      Sources and Further Reading

      Index

      Photographs

      Prologue

      Summer 2009

      The sticky summer weather had finally overpowered the cold, rainy spring, and I was sleeping on the floor of a vacant house across the river from downtown Flint, Michigan, in a neighborhood called Carriage Town.

      Festive Victorian-era homes in various stages of restoration battled for supremacy with boarded-up firetraps and overgrown lots landscaped with weeds, garbage, and “ghetto palms,” a particularly hardy invasive species known more formally as Ailanthus altissima, or the tree of heaven, perhaps because only God can kill the things. Around the corner, business was brisk at a drug house where residents and customers alike weren’t above casually taking a piss in the driveway.

      Hardwood floors were as advertised, but my camping pad and L. L. Bean sleeping bag weren’t nearly as comfortable as they had looked in the catalog. A loud thud—either real or imagined—had woken me with a start at two in the morning, and I finally drifted back to sleep snuggling what passed for my security blanket—an aluminum baseball bat. A siren served as an alarm clock just after dawn.

      Awake, I wanted to call my girlfriend, Traci, back in San Francisco, but I knew she was still asleep. I figured Sergio, our aggressive twenty-pound cat, would have reclaimed what he considered his rightful spot in our bed by now, as he always did when I was out of town. I grabbed my cell phone. Maybe Traci was up early for work. At 4 A.M. West Coast time? Not a chance.

      I tossed the phone down, got dressed, and ventured outside for what had become my morning routine. Each night, someone unfettered by bourgeois concerns about recycling deposited an empty pint bottle of Seagram’s Wild Grape in the front yard of my temporary residence. For the uninitiated, it’s “Extra Smooth Premium Grape Flavored Vodka.” I dutifully picked it up before breakfast, arranging it with all the others in a corner of the front room, figuring I’d throw them out once the pattern was broken. Years of Catholic school had made me unwilling to depart from ritual.

      This was my old hometown. Birthplace of General Motors. The “star” of Michael Moore’s tragically funny Roger & Me, the unexpectedly popular 1989 documentary that established Flint as a place where desperate residents sold rabbits for “pets or meat” to survive. A city that continually challenged the national media to come up with new and creative ways to describe just how horrible things were in a place synonymous with faded American industrial and automotive power.

      In 1987 Money magazine ranked Flint dead last on its list of the best places to live in America, and the city’s reputation hadn’t improved much over the ensuing years. Time called it the country’s most dangerous city in 2007. Forbes named Flint one of “America’s Most Miserable Cities” and one of “America’s Fastest-Dying Cities” in 2008. (Alas, the clever editors at Forbes keep no such tallies for magazines.) The next year, Flint