Teardown
Teardown
Memoir of a Vanishing City
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