I was just finishing what was likely the final mowing of my lawn, just before the winter came. As I looked up, I noticed my neighbor was sitting in his truck across the road, watching me as he smoked a cigarette.



Just a few years earlier, at age 23, I had purchased an abandoned house in Detroit from a live auction for $500, less than the price of a decent television. It had been empty for more than a decade and was still a shell, its bones exposed, anything of value stolen long ago.

The structure was filled with trash and had lived a hard life: two monstrous stories of no doors or windows, plumbing, or electricity – nothing. The backyard was a literal jungle, the porch needed to be ripped off and done again, the front yard looked like it wanted to be cut with a scythe.

When I bought it in 2009, a white kid in Detroit was strange. Most people, white and black, were moving out. By this time I’d been working on the house for five years.

I’d removed the trash – nearly ten thousand pounds of it – added windows and electricity and all the other accoutrements, and had begun to carefully insert myself into the chorus of Detroit among my neighbors. Both my house, and the neighborhood, were starting to feel like home. But during those eight years I’d lived in the city, a massive change had begun, Detroit was growing, shifting, molting. Old grudges clashed with new ideas and nowhere was America’s fight for its soul more clear than in what was the Motor City.

During that time some people had begun to speak of Detroit as a “blank canvas,” a playground for young white kids like myself. I felt uneasy about this.

What I’d learned from those eight years was that there were still 700,000 people living in Detroit, with their own ideas about what it should become. There was a community already here, not a grotesque one that needed changing as I had been told, but a powerful and innovative one I wanted to assimilate into.

I had inadvertently stepped into a real community, one tied together with memory and friendships, history, shared experience and relationships, and it was facing a new threat, one arguably greater than all the fires and crime of the past decades: the auction I had purchased my house in still ran each year, now live via the internet, and it wasn’t just abandoned houses they were selling.

Starting bid for this house in Detroit: $500. Photograph: Mike Williams

When the mower went quiet, my neighbor Woods, still sitting in his truck, called me over.

“What’s up?”

“Climb in here a second.”

I sat in the passenger seat and lit my own.

“Did you check the auction for that abandoned house next to yours this year?” Woods asked.

“Yeah. It wasn’t on there.” Whoever owned the LLC had paid the taxes, or something more nefarious was going on, always a possibility in Detroit.

“Did you notice anything else on the auction?”

“No, not really.”

“The Terrys’ house is going up for sale.”

Photograph: Scribner

They were the neighbors behind me, and aside from a single woman, the only others on the block. My first friends among neighbors, the elderly couple had always been kind to me, invited me to barbecues, gave me advice about navigating the neighborhood, and personified the Biblical directive about how to treat your neighbors, even ones who were strange white kids banging on filthy houses.

The woman of the house was rotund and had some trouble walking. She said she had worked as an elementary teacher in the Detroit public schools for 30 years, and her husband put in 30 at the Ford River Rouge Plant as a maintenance man. They had inhabited their house as long, and by this time owned it outright. They lived their own version of the American Dream in a crumbling America, but had no plans to move anywhere else. Now they were in trouble – the only home they’d known for the last 30 years would be sold to the highest bidder.

“What, how?”

Between 2005 and 2007, 67,000 houses went into mortgage foreclosure in Detroit. That was the beginning of the problem

“I don’t think the missus knows. The house is registered in the old man’s name, and he hasn’t been all there for a while.” He tapped his temple. “The dementia. I doubt she has any idea they’re behind.”

“So did you tell them?”

“No, not yet. You know she doesn’t have any money and you know she ain’t no good at the Internet.”

“When are you going to tell her?”

“I wanted to talk to you first. I have an idea. You have any money?”

“Some.”

“I’ll talk to her, but we might need to buy that house back. They’ve been great neighbors, and I would hate to lose them. I think we’ll be able to get it back for $500, but we have to put a $2,000 deposit down to make any bids at all. I don’t think anyone would bid on that house. We can split it 50/50, and we can put it in her name, so she gets the bills.”

I thought of all the barbecues I had been to at her place, all the times she’d offered encouragement, watched over me while I was working, and the first day I’d met her, when she’d given me, a stranger, a drink on a hot day.

“Oh, Jesus,” I sighed. “Yeah, I guess I would be able to do it. Just $250?” I lit another cigarette. “All right, sure. I can probably come up with that. You talk to her, though, and see what she has to say.”

Poletown: On the surface, the neighborhood can seem desolate. But a strong, resilient community remains. Photograph: Mike Williams

On the day of the auction, someone had placed a $500 bid on the house.

I’d been watching the sale in the weeks leading up to the final countdown and couldn’t believe it. I sat there looking at the computer for a moment. This was going to be much more complicated, and maybe way more expensive than I had hoped.

I placed a bid of $600.

Just between 2005 and 2007, 67,000 houses went into mortgage foreclosure in Detroit. That was the beginning of the problem. Between 2011 and 2015, Wayne Country had foreclosed on nearly one in every four homes in Detroit for nonpayment of property taxes. Not only did the forced sales leave many homeless, they further decimated Detroit’s tax base, one of the crucial factors in a municipal bankruptcy that people had begun to whisper about but no one thought could actually happen. The Terrys’ house was now one of them.

When I was looking for my place, aside from the abandoned houses that looked like they had been through war, I also looked into some move-in-ready foreclosures, pert brick homes in Detroit’s stable and well-populated areas. I could have purchased many of these for less than $3,000. I just couldn’t bring myself to profit from someone else’s misery. All I could think of were the families once living in these homes and the day the banks and sheriff put them on the street. Apparently whoever was bidding on the Terrys’ didn’t feel the same.

I called Woods to let him know someone was bidding against us, and we decided not to tell Terry. I made some calls to see if there was any way I could find out who the opposing bidder was, and explain to them the situation. There was nothing. Whereas before you could see, in real time, who was bidding on properties, just that year the county had stopped it. I guess some speculators were a bit nervous about all the attention they made buying up homes, including those of people who live in them and had owned them for more than 30 years.

I emailed everyone I knew and splashed social media with a plea that if anyone was, or knew who was, bidding on this particular house to contact me so I could explain.

No one knew. I did receive a huge outpouring of support from the internet, though. People who I barely knew or didn’t know at all offered to donate money. Volunteers from different states, and even different countries, offered to help in any way they could. The first Latina city council member in Detroit, Raquel Castañeda-Lopez, called me asking if she could help. Friends that I hadn’t spoken to in years phoned me, asking to donate or pitch in somehow. One gentleman in London, a graphic designer, made a flyer from what I had written and tailored it to Twitter. I’d never heard of him before and haven’t since. He just sent it to me and asked for nothing. Unfortunately I didn’t have any infrastructure to take donations and the bidding price hadn’t moved. I was still the top bidder, and I was hoping it would hold out.

On the day of the auction I told Woods to be on standby near the phone while he was at work, in case something happened. There were 30 minutes left to closing, and if the price stayed the same, the Terrys’ house would be safe. At 15 minutes I thought we were home free. Surely whoever had placed the first bid recognized the house was occupied and the better angels of their nature had prevailed.

Ten minutes.

Five minutes.

A bid.

I moved to Detroit with no friends, no job and no money. I just came, blind. Nearly anyone I told I was moving to the city thought it was a terrible idea, that I was throwing my life away. I was close to graduating from the University of Michigan, one of the best universities in the world, and I was a bit of an anomaly there, too.

Aside from an uncle, I’m the oldest male member of my family with all of my fingers intact, and the first in at least three generations never to have worked in front of a lathe. Growing up, I thought blue collar still meant middle class. No longer. At the university I met only one other student whose father worked with his hands.

The wealth of Ann Arbor, the liberal college town just 40 miles west of Detroit, had become stifling. Compared with many Detroiters I was wildly privileged, but at the university I was feeling increasingly distant. I had great friends who were generous, and I felt lucky to get the education I did, but I wanted to use that for something meaningful at home. At the time more than half of UMich students were leaving the state upon graduation, and I didn’t want to be one of them.

If I was going to stay in Michigan, Detroit seemed natural. It was the most important city in the state by any measure, and in some ways it was the most important city in the midwest. In symbolic terms, it’s maybe the most important in America. Henry Ford and Detroit had invented the modern age along with the assembly line. Then, when it was convenient, that line had turned into a conveyor belt dumping Detroit straight into the junkyard of American dreams.

I thought I might be able to use my schooling to help somehow. I naïvely thought, with all the zeal of a well-read 21-year-old white kid, that I could marry my education with my general knowledge of repairing things and fix the biggest project, the ailing city that had loomed over my childhood, as if it were a sink or a roof. I thought I’d just be there for one summer.

I sold my car and bought a truck for $1,000, a rusted F-150 built when I was still in elementary school. That birthday, my 22nd, I asked my parents for a power tool set that included a reciprocating saw, circular saw, drill and flashlight. And I went to the pound and got a dog, a puppy that would grow into 100 lbs of fur, teeth and tongue.

It was during that time I decided I was going to build my place the old-fashioned way, without grants or loans or the foundation money beginning to pour into the city. I would work for everything that went into the house, because not everyone has access to loans or foundational grants. I could have called the house “art” and people would have thrown money at me. It would have been comparatively easy, and I likely would have been able to get more done. But I wanted to prove one man could take a house and make it into a home without someone subsidizing it, like the baseball stadium downtown. If it needed to be done that way, what was the point? What could you prove? Building the house would be a protest of sorts.

What I didn’t realize at the time, was that Detroit was just America with the volume turned all the way up, that what was about to happen would have repercussions for the rest of the western world. Detroit was the most interesting city on the planet because when you scratched the surface you found only a mirror.

Eventually, Detroit would become the Lower East Side of the 80s, the Berkeley of the 60s, the Greenwich Village in the 50s, but up to that time had only been seen as an open and active wound on the American body that we had been ignoring for decades. The greatest sea change in American culture since the 1960s was about to happen in Detroit, and it contained the seed of something brand new and revolutionary for urban areas across the United States and Western Europe.

The author’s dog in his back yard. Photograph: Garrett MacLean

Detroit proper gained 14,000 white residents between 2010 and 2014, its first uptick in 60 years. And the numbers were growing. The vast majority of the newcomers were like me: educated, relatively well off and having the ear of the government and foundations. This new bloc of Detroiters had outsize political power. Whether we would use that to support and amplify the community ideals already present or go the way of gentrification remained to be seen. We were looking for the opposite of the pain and alienation and social pathology we had grown up with, and didn’t know if we would bring some of it with us, unintentionally or not.

New restaurants were opening daily and new art galleries were sprouting out of the cracks in our concrete. There was an undeniable buzz forming around the city, but it seemed most of the new business and media attention centered on a few neighborhoods near downtown, with the rest of Detroit left to burn as it always had.

The narrative of Detroit as the “comeback city” began to flower. Chrysler aired a commercial during the Super Bowl declaring its cars were “imported from Detroit,” playing upon the city’s grit and determination to sell cars we barely made. I found it ironic that a commercial, the form of communication that teaches people they need products to be happy, vaulted Detroit into the American consciousness as something other than an apocalyptic hellhole.

Detroit’s billionaires began to flex their greenback muscles, too. There were rumors that Mike Ilitch, the owner of the Detroit Red Wings, Little Caesars and the baseball team and stadium (the latter heavily subsidized by the city and state), was attempting to build a new hockey arena, partially with taxpayers’ money.

Dan Gilbert, owner of Quicken Loans, Rock Financial, the Cleveland Cavaliers and more than 60 skyscrapers downtown, went on a buying spree. He had made his money originating mortgages. Gilbert says he is so prosperous because he didn’t sell junk during the collapse. It’s difficult to tell for sure how much he contributed to Detroit’s mortgage crisis, because Quicken is largely just an originator of mortgages, and the loans were almost immediately chopped up and sold in complex financial practices that can’t easily be traced.

Quicken is being sued by the US justice department for mortgage fraud. Gilbert just lost a labor lawsuit. One of his real estate companies also emptied two downtown buildings full of people: one was a longtime artists collective, the other was full of the elderly. In a widely panned video discussing the new market-rate and fashionable apartment building, energetic white participants said, “This is our time.”

Some of us began to wonder whose time it really was. The thing that made Detroit so special was that as we built the city once again, this time we had the opportunity to fix some of the mistakes of the past – racial segregation, power imbalance that came with wealth inequality, displacement as the city grew – and many began to wonder if this wasn’t just a naïve dream, that Detroit would be built back as a mirror of the current America and the former Detroit. It wasn’t just whites moving back to the city, segregation was moving back to Detroit as well.

Drew Philp on his porch. Photograph: Garrett MacLean

The sneaky bidder was trying to wait just until the end in hopes I wasn’t watching and snake the Terrys’ house out from us.

I made a bid of $700 and called Woods. For each bid recorded in the last five minutes the clock would start over. He bid again. As did I.

“Hello.”

“Hey, Woods, someone else is bidding on the property.”

“No.”

“Yep. We have to decide how much we’re going to be able to spend.”

“Who the hell would be bidding on an occupied house, I mean–”

“Woods, there’s no time. He just placed another bid. It’s at $1,000 right now. Should I bid again?”

“Yeah.”

I clicked.

“We have to make a decision here, buddy. We going to go up to $1,500, $2,000?”

“I don’t know, $1500, I guess.”

“It’s climbing again.”

We bid.

“It’s at $1,500 right now, Woods, what should we do?”

“Go ahead and do it.”

$1600.

$1700.

“I can go as high as $2000, Drew, I don’t think I can afford any more.”



It’s a funny thing, deciding, in US dollars, how much good neighbors are worth. To put a price, a dollar amount, on how much someone’s security, the only home in the world they have, costs. Do unto others, right? Love your neighbor, right?

Right?

Well, in dollars, how much do you love your neighbor?

“It’s at $1,800, Woods. What do we do?”

“Do it.”

“This is so fucking stressful, this is so fucked up.” I clicked the button.

“He bid again. It’s at $1900. Do we go up to $2500?”

“I don’t know, Drew, I don’t know where this money is going to come from. Go ahead and do it, I’ll figure something out.”

$2,000.

$2,100.

$2,200.

I never got the chance to find out for myself how much my neighbors were worth. As a great man once wrote, only those who fall over the edge truly know where to find it.

Woods and I purchased the house for $2,300.

Blue print for Drew Philp’s house. Photograph: Drew Philp

I ran back to the Terrys to tell them we had got it. Woods had told the missus we would be bidding on the house earlier that day, and she was home waiting. The inside of her home, the one I momentarily now owned, was cool and dark. Terry played with a grandbaby in a diaper, her boys at work, but her brother was sitting with her, reading the family Bible. When I told her, she cried. She said she would find a way to pay me back, somehow.



Later, I’d receive it, too, $50, $100 dollars at a time.

I ran back and forth to get all the paperwork right, and decided to put the house back in the Terrys’ names. Everyone I had talked to beforehand told me to put my name on the deed until I got paid back, but I didn’t want to hold someone else’s house hostage. I owned it for about an hour. I had a thought, just a glimmer, to fill in my name on the deed. I could have, I would have been well within the law to do it. I had paid for it. But I put the house in Terry’s name, along with one of her sons. It was theirs.

Afterward someone remarked, “That’s very George Bailey of you,” referring to the film It’s a Wonderful Life. That movie had a happy ending, right?

Right?

The war for our humanity is upon us. It is personified by our politicians, our interactions on the internet, in tens of thousands of people losing their homes in places like this, in the violence racking our country, the gun deaths once tolerated only in Detroit broadening to suburban enclaves all over America. It’s on the front page of every newspaper in the country. Now we all live in Detroit.

But it is not lost. Not yet. As spring approaches I have more wood to cut for the fireplace, a garden to plant, and more friends to help fix up their own homes. The water from an overtaxed sewer system floods my basement and again I pump it out. The city installs more streetlights and old habits die hard. Spring’s cyclical rebirth is upon us and the inevitable change of the season is at hand.

As before an August thunderstorm, the air is heavy with the coming transformation, the rain, the lightning, the release. Things cannot stay this way for long. The souls of the people are angry, they are hungry, uncertain of the future. The people are becoming desperate, yearning for some kind of hope, any kind, a way out, a way through. They know it in their bones, in the hunger in their stomachs, the crumbling of the roofs over their heads. The fire is lit and the pot will boil.

It is your sacred duty to find hope somewhere, anywhere, and keep trying to make that world in which you wish to live. I don’t succeed at it every day. But I try, and know I must keep trying. The thing is, there are a lot of people who feel just like you and I.

Even if it’s simply sitting on the porch, watching the sunset and listening to the birds as the dog sniffs the waning summer air, I know that this is a victory. At least for myself I’ve build my own little world, and all the money on a decaying planet can’t buy that. I live with decency, relative security and self-respect.

But I can’t truly have any of it until my neighbors do too.

• This is an edited extract from A $500 House in Detroit, published on 11 April by Scribner