Master plans are being drawn up under a Rooseveltian rubric, the Detroit Works Project, which includes a $25 million light-rail system, an ambitious proposal for turning empty spaces into recreational greenways, and a focus on attracting sustainable industries. Completed plans are expected to be revealed in December. By then a dent should be made in Detroit's inventory of at least 10,000 dangerous buildings that need to go down, and perhaps some of the 70,000 vacancies could be rehabilitated, revitalized, and sold. "There's been a lot of administrations prior to this one that talked about demolitions," says Bing. "Everybody set these high goals but never achieved them. I wanted to be realistic in my approach. My problem is that I'm not that patient."

To the Shermans, to Lorenzo and Mike and Otis, the exact numbers don't matter. Three thousand houses down now? Ten thousand houses by 2014? Seventy thousand empty homes? To them, that's just political posturing. Building by building, it all needs to go. Whatever the count, they're more than happy to help Bing meet his goals. After the mayor's speech last year, Mike Farrow was determined to do his part to hit the 3,000-house target by December 31. "If they want me wrecking those last few houses at midnight on New Year's Eve," he told me last summer, "I'll be out there dropping those motherfuckers like the ball."*

···

Otis grinds the CAT forward and grapples up the trees that have grown around the front door in the two years since 18058 Joann was abandoned. Once they're gone, we get a good look at the house. The fractured balustrade, the busted dormers, the slumping gable. All the requisite municipal graffiti is tagged, Katrina-style, on both sides of the doorframe: w/cut and the date, 7/12, indicating, in blue spray paint, that the water has indeed been turned off.

The boom and arm are raised as high as they go. The grapple looms over the house. Neighbors are watching now, some setting up chairs in the street, clutching their children tight. Lorenzo has the hose trained on a spot just over the porch. "All right, baby boy," Lorenzo shouts, and Otis slams his metal through the roof. Glass crunches. Wood snaps. The grapple assaults the empty house, tearing it open. Otis starts making deeper cuts, punching all the way into the basement so the house has a place to fall. Wreckers know how to contain their messes, and for all the destruction he's unleashing, Otis is keeping things as organized as possible. Working from right to left, he picks apart one room at a time: the bedrooms, the kitchen, the bathroom. Wreckers don't dwell on the ghosts, the lives lived when these houses were homes. Up in the CAT, as it happily does its hydraulic bounce, there isn't room to memorialize: This is where a mom rocked her babies to sleep, or whatever. There's only the impulse to hit the house good, to hit it just right, and to hit it again without damaging the house next door. When you look at a completed demo site, after the remains have all been hauled away, after the hole has been backfilled with dirt, you're supposed to simply think: This is nothing.

Otis works his way into the back of the attic. The whole front of the house is off. It's like seeing an atrophied body stripped of its skin—almost too invasive. Lumber bows, then breaks like fractured ribs. Soggy pink insulation tears like weakened tissue. The grapple plunges into the roof again, jaws agape, and the force of the blow sends skyward a plume of paper and plastic crap—Domino's bos and unopened packages of First Quality adult diapers. The diapers, the bos, they're intermingling now, floating through the air, landing on the soaking-wet refuse piling up around the CAT. It could have been tires, phone books, or used heroin needles. The grille of a Dodge Neon came tumbling out of one structure. Or pairs and pairs of children's shoes, which seem as prominent on Detroit's residential blocks as weeds. "Sometimes we recover bodies," says Lorenzo. "Pit bulls, cats, people."

In a few more minutes, all that's left standing is one exterior wall until Otis, with the grapple in prayer position, drops it to the ground in one piece. "Now he's gotta munch the house," says Lorenzo, "fine as toothpicks." Otis drives the CAT right up on top of the pile—on the spears of wood, the twisted metal and fragmented brick, the limp strips of siding. With the teeth of the grapple, he starts shredding all of it, breaking 18058 Joann down, smaller and smaller, until none of its form remains.

*As of the first week of March, there are about 500 houses to go, and the city expects to reach 3,000 in April. Another 3,000 are already in process, with their utilities being cut and their paperwork moving more swiftly through the system than ever.