Teardown. Gordon Young
children. It launched a community education program in the Flint schools that became a national model, providing students with an array of after-hours recreational activities and offering adults low-cost enrichment courses in everything from gift wrapping to sheet metal drawing to creative writing.
Mott was also a driving force behind the Flint College and Cultural Center built in the 1950s and 1960s, kicking in millions of dollars via the foundation and donating thirty-six acres of land from his sprawling estate, known as Applewood. Along with a community college, the collection of public institutions included the Flint Institute of Arts, Sloan Museum, Bower Theater, Dort Music Center, and the Robert T. Longway Planetarium.
The best example of what it meant to grow up in a place with GM money coursing through its civic veins and wealthy elites driven by a sense of noblesse oblige along with a desire to keep the masses happy came from a guy named Mark, who emailed me after reading the Flint Expatriates blog. Now a professional harpist living in the Chicago area, he had learned to play in Flint in the late sixties and early seventies. There were five “public harps” available to residents who had an interest, along with complimentary lessons. He played in the Flint Youth Symphony Orchestra, sharing the stage with a fellow musician who went on to become the principal percussionist for the New York Philharmonic. “Somehow I thought it was normal for a town the size of Flint to have a dozen harp students,” Mark told me.
That’s right. The Vehicle City once provided free harp lessons to its residents. I felt like I needed to apologize to my much-maligned hometown. I’d been way too hard on it. I began to realize that the multitude of cultural and recreational activities available to me as a kid had been a little unusual, especially in a town now considered one of the worst places to live in the nation. I took tennis lessons at public courts in the summer, ran track at city-sponsored meets, participated in a local sports extravaganza modestly called the Flint Olympian Games, and learned to swim at a neighborhood community center. I joined baseball, soccer, and floor hockey teams. I took driver’s ed before I was ten at a place called Safetyville, a miniature town in Kearsley Park with tiny cars and classroom sessions on how to make a left turn and parallel park. I still have my license and a few tickets for moving violations. My friends performed in children’s theater productions and took painting classes at the art museum. All of it was free or close to it.
I had lived in the city during a transitional phase when things were just starting to go downhill. The tipping point may have been 1973, when I was a seven-year-old student at Saint Michael’s on the edge of downtown. That’s the year C.S. Mott died at the ripe old age of ninety-seven. His foundation would live on, continuing to generously fund local initiatives and projects around the world, but it was hard to imagine Flint without the paternalistic guidance of Charlie Sugar. It was also the year when the OPEC oil embargo caused a spike in gas prices, followed by fuel shortages and lines at service stations. GM was near peak employment in the Flint area, with roughly eighty thousand workers at the time, but the crisis triggered a round of layoffs, a trend that would plague the city for decades as “Generous Motors” abandoned its birthplace in search of cheaper labor in right-to-work states and foreign countries.
By accident of birth, I came of age in Flint when it still had a remnant of the old prosperity. I caught the end of an era when shop rats could drive new Buicks, buy a vacation cabin up north, and send their kids to college. The utter despair that would grip the city in the nineties was looming, but there was still hope that things could be put right. How else would a crackpot scheme like transforming the city into a tourist destination with the doomed AutoWorld amusement park seem feasible, at least to Flint’s delusional civic leaders? By the time I was in high school, the rising crime rate meant that cops couldn’t be bothered with trivialities like underage boozing, trespassing, or petty vandalism. That translated into a lot of freedom. There were abandoned buildings to explore, fake IDs to perfect, and bars to discover. I had to admit there were certainly worse places to grow up than Flint, Michigan. I just didn’t realize it at the time.
Over three generations, my family had experienced the extremes of capitalism in a city that was a bellwether for the nation. We stuck with Flint from boom to bust, from the emergence of a thriving manufacturing economy to deindustrialization and the advent of the information age. We were there as the middle class emerged, prospered, and began to wither. We were part of history.
I came to realize all this by blogging, taking full advantage of the technological innovations that had left places like Flint behind. But while a virtual Flint was a lot safer and had better weather than the real thing, the blog didn’t soothe my nagging feelings about my hometown. Even as Traci and I tended to the little house we owned together, I was filled with nostalgia—and something more. Despite the vital role Flint played in my life and the life of the nation, it was slipping away, becoming nothing more than a catchall for urban decay, a handy joke when references to Detroit were too obvious. It was losing more of its identity with every passing year. I thought it deserved better and I wanted to help. The question was how.
7
Bar Logic
It’s fitting that the notion of buying a house in Flint began to take shape in a bar, like so many other ill-formed and potentially disastrous ideas. I played basketball every Saturday morning at the Mission Playground in San Francisco. A collection of players would retire after the game to the grimy gravel patio of Zeitgeist, a dumpy bar that has the trappings of a tough dive without the credentials to back it up. Yes, people who ride motorcycles hang out there, but so do aging punk rockers, bike messengers, assorted hipsters, uninhibited pot smokers, and the occasional yuppie types slumming from the more upscale Marina District, all united in the desire to start drinking at 1 P.M. on a Saturday or as soon as the morning fog burns off. The Zeitgeist motto showed that it didn’t take itself too seriously: “Warm Beer/Cold Women.”
Although our gang of mediocre basketball players was a mixture of native Californians, Midwest transplants, and a few Texans, we were all conditioned by the exorbitant cost of local real estate, even in the midst of the Great Recession. In 2008, a few players were unsuccessfully trying to buy houses, and they were frustrated by the fact that a down market meant a two-bedroom house in a decent San Francisco neighborhood was now going for $775,000 instead of $800,000. The minor drop in price was offset by stiffer mortgage requirements that demanded 20 percent down. “Can you imagine writing a check for $160,000?” one of my friends asked. It was a big shift from the easy-to-find, no-money-down, interest-only loans that were prevalent just a short time earlier. The kind of loans that enabled Traci and me to buy our house and pushed the planet to the brink of economic collapse.
After a few beers, I inevitably began regaling the Zeitgeist crew with tales of Flint gleaned from my blog, both depressing and uplifting. There was the one about the family who posted a “No Ho Zone” sign in their yard to ward off the neighborhood prostitutes. Or the retired blues musician who was nurturing a huge garden on the vacant lot near his home. And of course there were stories about all the Flint houses going for pocket change on eBay with the option of buying them by the dozen, like the jelly rolls I used to love at Dawn Donuts. With a little cocktail napkin math, we determined that I could own a Flint house for the cost of our bar tab. Wild speculation ensued. I could snap up a house in Flint, quit my job, and survive on the freelance income Traci and I could generate once we were freed from San Francisco’s crushing cost of living. I would be embarking on a grand adventure and helping Flint at the same time. Or I could buy a few Flint houses, rehab them, then rent them out—stabilizing the local housing market and making a modest profit at the same time. Or I could improve the city by transforming a junker into a summer house, allowing me to reconnect with Flint without abandoning San Francisco. Or instead of giving money to charity, why not buy a house, make it livable, and give it away to a needy family? The ideas came fast and furious, and the possibilities were intoxicating, perhaps because we were often intoxicated.
My friend M.G. understood the appeal of a Flint house. He grew up in a small town in the suburbs of Los Angeles, the kind of close-knit place where you could return books to the police station if the library was closed. He had no desire to ever live there again, but he liked the idea of it enduring more or less as he remembered it. Being a homeowner meant something to M.G. His father had immigrated from Iran, where property symbolized wealth and success. His mother was on her own at