Tresa Baldas

Detroit Free Press

Former University of Michigan football star William (Billy) Taylor Jr. has barreled through life, blow after blow.

The former All-America running back was once a drug addict, alcoholic, lived homeless on the streets of Detroit and even did prison time before getting his life back together.

But at 68, the blows keep coming. The latest comes from a Detroit neighborhood association that has helped evict Taylor’s drug rehab center from a historic community.

For almost a decade, Taylor has been in a legal feud with the Russell Woods Sullivan Area Association over his drug and alcohol rehab center called Get Back Up. The center on Dexter Avenue was shut down last August after the neighborhood association successfully argued against it, claiming it was a nuisance, a threat to safety, scared potential new home buyers away and that it hurt the neighborhood’s historic image.

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Hogwash, said the comeback kid, who is pushing back with some new legal ammunition: a lawsuit that claims the city is discriminating against disabled people — in this case, recovering drug addicts and alcoholics.

After six years of helping addicts get their lives back together out of an old brick school in Detroit, Taylor filed a federal lawsuit on Jan. 10, alleging the city and zoning officials are discriminating against addicts by catering to stereotypes about them and denying them a place to get better.

Drug addicts and alcoholics are disabled people who need help, not an eviction notice, argues Taylor, claiming zoning officials caved to public pressure by residents who used a “not in my back yard” campaign to deny him the permit he needed to keep going.

“We’ve been treated so unfairly,” Taylor said. “I feel terrible. I’m just tired … but I’m never going to give up.”

'It was a general nuisance'

Officials with the Zoning Board of Appeals, the mayor’s office and the law department declined comment.

According to zoning board meeting minutes, court documents and interviews with lawyers and neighbors, this is the history of Get Back Up, why Taylor wants it so badly, and why residents do not.

In 2007, Taylor purchased an abandoned school from the Detroit Public Schools for roughly $500,000 to start his Get Back Up center for recovering addicts. He spent an additional $3 million fixing up the facility, which is located at Dexter Street, between Cortland and Sturtevant, adjacent to the well-kept Russell Woods neighborhood — home to generations of Detroiters who kept up their brick Tudors, their tidy lawns and never left.

But from the get-go, he met resistance. Taylor needed a "conditional use permit" to run his residential substance abuse center, which would house ex-prisoners and others who needed drug and alcohol counseling. He received the permit, but the neighborhood association filed an appeal to the zoning board. It would last for years.

“Why would he put a facility like that in a historic neighborhood? We went through a lot of trouble to get a historic designation. We’ve had a hard enough time holding onto residents,” said James Boyer, past president of the Russell Woods Sullivan Area Association, who played a key role in lobbying against the center. “We just want a desirable place to live. An institution like that, big or small, is not going to enhance the neighborhood.”

Boyer, a retired Wayne State University education professor who moved to the neighborhood 58 years ago, said Get Back Up came with lots of problems since opening its doors in 2009. He said residents harassed people walking by with lewd comments, especially women, and sometimes banged on their windows. One resident, he alleged, was a regular shoplifter at the nearby CVS. The men also regularly hung out in the parking lot because — he claimed — the facility was too small for them to sit inside all day.

“It was a general nuisance,” Boyer said. “There was no real control of the residents. And so were very concerned that they would be wandering through the neighborhood.”

Boyer also noted that a similar effort was rejected in Palmer Woods, where there was a proposal to open a state-of-the-art rehab center, but the residents lobbied hard against it and won.

In the case of Taylor's center, adding to neighbors’ concerns was that Taylor was getting many of his tenants from the Department of Corrections, with whom he was contracted. The residents could come and go from the center, which worried residents, who also objected to the potential size of the center: it had 40 clients, but Taylor requested a permit for up to 160.

“That didn’t sit well with us,” Boyer said, adding the association tried to work this out with Taylor to no avail. “The bottom line is he wanted to put 160 people in the facility … There was nothing to work out.”

Boyer said he hopes the legal feud is officially over.

“We’ve gone around and around with him since 2007,” Boyer said. “I loved watching him as a football player. He was a star. I thought very highly of him. Too bad he didn’t stick to football.”

Taylor has adamantly denied that his center caused any problems or hurt the neighborhood in anyway. He said that his center provides a much needed service in Detroit, and that he has helped many addicts get their lives on the right path again.

'These people have the nerve'

Taylor is exasperated — and angry.

He has been in the shoes of the men he’s trying to help, but some folks just won’t let him do what he needs to do.

“It’s preventing me from helping those who need help. Drugs and alcohol are an epidemic,” Taylor said. “It’s everywhere and every family has someone who has or has had a drug problem.”

That’s what bothers him the most.

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“My whole intent, my whole purpose was to help people like myself learn how to live without using alcohol and drugs, and how to keep them out of jail … That’s the whole purpose,” he said. “Because I was one of those individuals.”

Taylor, a three-time All America running back who was coached by the legendary Bo Schembechler, finished his football career at U-M in 1971. He was Big Ten’s Most Valuable Player and left Michigan as the leading rusher in the school's history. But a few days after playing his last game in the 1972 Rose Bowl, his mother died unexpectedly, spinning his life out of control.

Depressed, he turned to alcohol and drugs. By 26, he was a convicted felon and served 2½ years in federal prison for being part of an armed robbery. In prison, he received his master's degree and went on to get married and raise a family. Years later, drugs and alcohol took back over. By the 1990s, he was homeless on the streets of Detroit.

In 1997, Taylor experienced what he called a miracle. While drinking a fifth of vodka on the steps of a vacant building, he said God spoke to him and guided him to a new life. With the help of a friend, he went from selling food stamps for beer and drug money to teaching at a community college in Nevada. Six years later, he received his doctorate in educational leadership at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. He eventually moved to Novi and started Get Back Up.

In 2012, Taylor's life was featured in a documentary titled “Perseverance: The Story of Dr. Billy Taylor," which aired on the Big Ten Network.

In denying Taylor’s conditional use permit, Detroit’s Zoning Board of Appeals cited testimony from one of its own members who concluded:

“The city is in need of a substance abuse facility, but this location is a poor choice,” the ZBA wrote in a document. “The original petitioner could have done better research to find a location more suited for this type of use and not this stable historic district.”

In finding against Taylor, the ZBA cited a number of concerns with the center, including: It “had an adverse affect on the community,” detracted from the aesthetics of the historic neighborhood and would “alter the character” of it, would “impede the social and economic development” of the community” and “be harmful to the area.”

None of these are legal or valid reasons for denying drug and alcohol addicts help, argued Taylor’s lawyer, Jonathan B. Frank, who said this case is all about stereotypes.

“Neighbors came in with their own fears and stereotypes about what it's like to live by recovering addicts … That’s discriminatory and it’s a stereotype,” Frank said, noting the discrimination was done by the city officials who caved to this stereotype and rejected the permit.

"Federal law protects recovering alcoholic and addicts, like it does every other group of disabled people. And they should be allowed to get treatment for what is clearly a huge, public health problem,” Frank said. “If the Betty Ford clinic was operating at the corner of Dexter and Cortland do you think people would care? I don't know. But it’s no different.”

Taylor agreed. And for him, it’s personal.

“These people have the nerve to say that it rather remain an abandoned building than for me to be there,” he said. “It’s unfair. I’m a recovering person myself. I’ve walked the streets homeless in Detroit for two years before I finally snapped out of my addiction … I’m not giving up.”

Contact Tresa Baldas: tbaldas@freepress.com