Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City

By Gordon Young

After living in San Francisco for fifteen years, journalist Gordon Young found himself yearning for his Rust Belt hometown: Flint, Michigan, the birthplace of General Motors and the “star” of the Michael Moore documentary Roger & Me. Hoping to rediscover and help a place that had once boasted one of the world’s highest per capita income levels but had become one of the country's most impoverished and dangerous cities, he returned to Flint with the intention of buying a house. What he found was a place of stark contrasts and dramatic stories, where an exotic dancer could afford a lavish mansion, speculators scooped up cheap houses by the dozen on eBay, and arson was often the quickest route to neighborhood beautification.

Skillfully blending personal memoir, historical inquiry, and interviews with Flint residents, Young constructs a vibrant tale of a once-thriving city still fighting—despite overwhelming odds—to rise from the ashes. He befriends a ragtag collection of urban homesteaders and die-hard locals who refuse to give up as they try to transform Flint into a smaller, greener town that offers lessons for cities all over the world. Hard-hitting, insightful, and often painfully funny, Teardown reminds us that cities are ultimately defined by people, not politics or economics.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Feb 23, 2021
• ISBN: 9780520976405

Gordon Young

Gordon Young grew up in Flint, Michigan, the birthplace of General Motors, where his accomplishments included learning to parallel park the family’s massive Buick Electra 225. After reaching an uneasy truce with the nuns in the local Catholic school system, he went on to study journalism at the University of Missouri and English literature at the University of Nottingham. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Utne Reader, and numerous other publications. Young has published Flint Expatriates, a blog for the long-lost residents of the Vehicle City, since 2007. He is a senior lecturer in the Communication Department at Santa Clara University and lives in San Francisco.

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Preface

Let’s be honest. There is bound to be trouble when a man in midlife decides to reconnect with the past in order to understand the present. There’s a reason it’s referred to as a crisis. This vague quest can take many forms, and it often results in emotional and financial turmoil, not to mention embarrassment. That was certainly true in my case.

After living in San Francisco for nearly two decades—immersed in the often-petty concerns of life in a city everyone wants to live in, if only they could afford it—I felt compelled to rediscover my hometown, the place that made me who I am, for better or worse, and buy a house there. To complicate things, I was broke and I had grown up in Flint, a troubled spot on the Michigan map that many people can’t wait to escape. Perhaps you’ve heard of it?

Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City tells the story of what happened when I returned to Flint and how that changed my view of San Francisco and life itself. It’s my story, but it’s also a heartfelt portrait of a once-great place and the inspiring people who are still fighting to make it a livable, viable, welcoming community in the face of what sometimes feel like overwhelming cosmic forces (though, to be fair, the battle is often just against stupid or uncaring public officials). And it’s an exploration of what it means to have a sense of belonging—a sense that you are in the right place, that you are home.

For very different reasons, San Francisco and Flint—the two places I’ve spent the majority of my life—have been transformed since the book was published in 2013. On the surface, the gulf between the two couldn’t be wider. And yet, improbably, the undercurrent roiling the City by the Bay these days seems eerily similar to the vibe that has defined Vehicle City for so many years. And it’s not good.

Just as economic realities forced thousands of Flint residents, including my family, to leave the city to survive, many San Franciscans are now hitting the road because they can no longer make it in the most expensive city on the planet, pushed out by skyrocketing rents and the horde of Google bus–riding newcomers who can afford them. Flint just doesn’t have enough money, jobs, or opportunity to go around. San Francisco has too much of all three. So Flint, with its shrinking population, is plagued by abandoned houses while increasingly crowded San Francisco is afflicted with two-bedroom apartments that rent for $4,200/month and the homelessness that ensues. Neither one is all that easy to live in these days.

In each case, a place people cared deeply about, where they felt connected, has slipped away. And esoteric things like the mood or feel of a city rarely return once they’re gone.

It is the same story across the country. The cities and towns that have been left behind can feel doomed. And the prosperous ones have been flooded with so much money that locals who grew up there can no longer afford to call them home.

I may be more attuned to this at the moment because I’m writing to the sound of jackhammers in San Francisco. It’s my new next-door neighbor this time, a nice young guy who is excavating a significant portion of granite and clay beneath his $1.2 million house to add another bedroom, a bathroom, and who knows what else to the tune of $600,000, according to the contractor, who passed along this unsolicited piece of financial information with a shake of his head. And, of course, my neighbor’s Tesla will have a nice new garage space.

Tech lucre is remaking the city, especially my modest neighborhood of Bernal Heights, once home to a collection of cozy, often tumbledown houses accented with oddly shaped, low-budget additions that increased square footage at the expense of logical floor plans. The new, gentrified Bernal is expensive, efficient, and modern. Think open floor plans, Neutra street numbers, and Herman Miller Nelson saucer lamps hanging from the ceiling. Houses are not just spruced up. They are gutted—six on my block alone in the last couple years. Nothing is left but the old-timey exterior, which is often painted black, like a laptop. (My lightly constructed, seven-hundred-square-foot fixer-upper, purchased with a series of dubious no-money-down, no-credit-check loans, is still a fixer-upper.)

The neighborhood is noisy as hell, yet a little lonely. My new neighbors are seldom seen, perhaps because they work long hours to earn the money to pay for all this construction. Or maybe they’re at their second homes in Tahoe.

Many journalists have produced a lot of content about San Francisco’s hypergentrification. People of color have been hard hit, particularly in the Mission, where longtime Latinx residents are being displaced by wealthy newcomers. But for an unexpected clue to how disruptive the changes have been for those of more modest incomes, look no further than the Good Life Grocery calendar, an annual freebie for customers of the small, locally owned store with locations in Bernal Heights and Potrero Hill. It typically has a cheery, upbeat message that celebrates the many charms of San Francisco to accompany endearing amateur photos. Not this year.

Everyone calls it progress but sometimes it feels more like destruction, the calendar states. Our small quaint streets are either being torn up for repair or filled to capacity with demolition, jack hammers, and concrete trucks. The crane is the new symbol of SF rising high into the sky to build bigger and bolder buildings. Older properties are sold off and snatched up by developers who change the footprint forever.

Later, a question: Will our small shops born out of a dream and sweat equity survive?

Now, before anyone starts complaining, I am fully aware that there are worse things in life than skyrocketing property values. I know I’m lucky to own a house, especially one purchased in 2004 with the unimpressive, five-digit income generated by me, an adjunct college lecturer, and my wife, a journalist. (I also recognize myself as a gentrifier, albeit one from an earlier, less wealthy wave.) Four generations of my family lived in Flint, so I know all too well that San Francisco’s civic boo-hooing and existential angst are nothing compared to what Flint has suffered for more than thirty years.

My friend Jan Worth-Nelson, whose improbable journey to Flint is detailed in Teardown, fully understands the devastation left behind by the water crisis, as well as the long-running series of body blows the city has suffered.

It’s almost like PTSD, she told me. Flint seems like it’s always on the precipice of collapsing. So you can never feel like, okay, we’re figuring this out. We’re never quite there. We’re never quite sure we can keep this city from going down the drain.

So I know things could be worse. But I can’t help feeling a little sad, a little nostalgic, and, let’s face it, a little pissed off sometimes, because once again a place I love has unalterably changed for the worse—first Flint and now, unexpectedly, San Francisco. But if you can’t deal with change, you probably don’t belong in either city.

When I was writing Teardown, Flint was struggling with such a long list of afflictions that it seemed as if nothing could surprise the populace. Then the area was terrorized by a racially motivated serial killer from Israel. That sounds like a bad movie pitch, but it was all too real. My reaction wasn’t logical, but I believed Flint’s catalog of misfortune made it immune to a serial killer, that fate would not impose such a pointless affliction on a place that had already suffered so much. I relied on the gallows humor that is often employed by anyone who has spent time in Flint to describe how I felt. What next? I wrote. A catastrophic flood caused by a tsunami from Lake Huron? An outbreak of the Ebola virus? An invading army from Canada?

Poisoned water didn’t make my list of hypotheticals, and I didn’t fathom the scope of the water crisis in its early stages. The national media and many Flint residents were equally slow to react.

Even when people were raising red flags about the quality of the water, and even if folks heard their complaints, they just put it on the pile of problems in the city. Oh, here’s just another shitty thing happening to Flint, journalist Anna Clark told me recently. She is the author of The Poisoned City: Flint’s Water and the American Urban Tragedy, the most compelling and in-depth look at the crisis. Because the city was seen as such a basket case, everything was an emergency so nothing was an emergency.

She paused and added: I hate that. I hate that it’s true.

Coverage began to build in the summer of 2015, and the state of Michigan finally kinda sorta acknowledged the problem that October. But it wasn’t really until early 2016 that the story crested nationally. Journalistically, it had something for everyone. It was a public health story, an environmental story, a political story, a social justice story, and an urban planning story, to name a few. It can be told in a thousand different genres, and it was, because when you talk about water you’re basically talking about everything, Clark said.

Seemingly overnight, everyone was talking about Flint, including celebrities who had never set foot in the city. Rachel Maddow was outraged. Mark Ruffalo showed up with good intentions and a bad grasp of water science. Cher—yes, Cher—called Michigan’s Republican governor Rick Snyder a murderer on Twitter for his crimes against the former factory town that Michael Moore put on the map with Roger & Me.

It’s easy to understand why the water crisis eventually sparked outrage. It was such a fundamental, basic affront to the people of Flint, especially the city’s children, that few had difficulty understanding it.

Governor Snyder appointed a series of emergency financial managers with sweeping powers to run Flint instead of its democratically elected representatives because of the city’s chronic budget shortfalls. The economic revival of a Rust Belt city is definitely above the pay grade of a carpetbagging political appointee, so instead of doing the hard work to address Flint’s underlying structural problems, the managers engaged in ham-fisted budget cuts and ill-advised tax hikes.

Sewer rates were increased and a fee was imposed for streetlights in one of the country’s poorest cities. Cops were laid off in a place regularly listed as one of the nation’s most dangerous. (When Charlie LeDuff, a writer who makes a living chronicling Detroit’s dysfunction, took a field trip to Flint in 2011 for the New York Times Magazine, the headline labeled Flint Murdertown, USA.) Firefighters got pink slips in a town where arson was so common the smoky, acrid smell of burning houses floated in the air. Crowds often gathered to watch the fires. It’s cheap entertainment, provided your own home isn’t endangered because the overmatched fire department can’t contain the blaze.

And, of course, an unelected manager oversaw the decision to switch Flint’s water supply from Lake Huron to the Flint River. Note that the much-maligned Flint River is actually far healthier than it is often portrayed, thanks to the efforts of the Flint River Watershed Coalition. But government officials neglected to monitor the water and treat it properly to offset its corrosive effects on the old lead pipes that crisscrossed the city.

As a result, Flint residents drank lead-tainted water, leading to sickness, irreversible developmental disabilities, and death when at least a dozen people died after the contaminated water led to an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease. Then there was denial, equivocation, and finger-pointing by the state of Michigan and the EPA. More people suffered as a result.

Clark calls the emergency manager law an experiment in benign authoritarianism, and it has been a catastrophic failure from the start in Michigan. The state was so uniquely and directly responsible, Clark said. It was such a direct cause and effect. It felt all the more grievous.

Thanks to the international outcry, money and resources have slowly started flowing to the city to replace damaged pipes and help the city in other ways, such as increased health care coverage for residents. In downtown Flint, renewal in the form of new restaurants, a thriving farmers’ market, housing infill, and renovated buildings have sustained the dream that the city can still transition into a smaller, safer, greener place. There’s hope that Flint might emerge as a quiet county seat with colleges, some industry, good medical facilities, and a quaint downtown that lures suburbanites—many of whom are now too terrified to visit the city—on a regular basis.

But let’s be realistic. Fixing the pipes won’t fix Flint. Keep in mind that with the city’s continual population decline a good number of the houses that get new pipes will be abandoned or demolished in five or ten years.

The water crisis is the latest symptom of the punishing global economic forces, along with misguided federal and state policies, that penalize places like Flint. It will take a monumental national effort to turn things around. That means an investment of federal and state money that gives Flint a chance to prosper but might not pay dividends for years.

Dan Kildee, Flint’s Democratic congressman, has championed downtrodden cities for decades. He believes he has the solution to achieve this seemingly impossible goal. We both grew up in the Civic Park neighborhood at a time when the city was slipping but still had a lot to offer. Neighborhood kids had to decide which of the dozens of free summer programs to attend. It was a far cry from today’s Flint.

Kildee believes a massive program that devotes several trillion dollars to rebuilding the country’s infrastructure has the greatest chance of someday getting support in Washington. And if emphasis is given to Flint, Youngstown, Gary, and cities like them, the program could function as a new Marshall Plan to reset these troubled areas, much as the original Marshall Plan helped rebuild Europe after World War II.

I don’t think we can chip away at the problem, Kildee told me. We need a big, bold, and very significant effort to help areas where you have chronic poverty. Until we fix the fundamental problems, we are really just managing the decline.

Kildee envisions clearing away the thousands of abandoned structures in distressed cities. Extra funding would be used to rehabilitate abandoned factory sites and provide tax credits for developers to build on them. Cities would also get resources to right-size their aging, inefficient water and sewer systems. Because these projects would take years to complete, job programs could train the chronically unemployed to complete some of the work.

It’s a clear-eyed plan that doesn’t downplay the problems facing Flint. I want to believe this could all come to pass, but I also know that Flint is a place where optimism gets its ass kicked on a regular basis.

Kildee didn’t try to reassure me. He simply pointed out that there weren’t very many alternatives, other than tinkering around the edges. It may well be that this does not happen anytime soon, he said, but it will never happen if we don’t define what the real solution is for Flint. And it will never happen if we don’t try.

The more prosperous past and the troubled present have a way of intertwining in Flint. Long-gone Flint expatriates who remember a happy childhood are inextricably linked to the current catastrophes. Today’s residents aren’t safe, and neither are the memories of the ones who have moved on.

All Flintoids—as we sometimes call ourselves—can catalog the places that meant something to them that have disappeared. My personal list includes Homedale Elementary, the East Side school my mother, my brother, and I attended less than a mile from the massive automotive complex known as Buick City. The school was torched and then demolished in 2010. The factory is long gone, too, along with thousands of GM jobs. My grandfather’s elegant brick office building downtown, where he earned the money that kept our family afloat, is a parking lot. And the pool where I learned to swim is a grassy field in Kearsley Park.

I was reminded of this when a house that I knew well, in Civic Park on Greenway Avenue, caught fire in the summer of 2017. Two teenage girls named Amber and Autumn burned to death, along with their sixty-one-year-old father. Their mother escaped by jumping out a second-floor window.

A quick search for the property on Zillow captures the falling fortunes of Flint real estate. The handsome, 1,872-square-foot house with four bedrooms and two bathrooms last sold for just $7,027 in 2014.

A group of us from the old neighborhood filled a Facebook post about the fire with memories of the Greenway house. My friend Jim Holbel, who now lives in Atlanta, had grown up next door, and a state police sergeant did a live remote for the local TV news on his old front lawn.

It was hard to watch because the girls who died are about the same age as my two kids, Holbel said. I’ve taken them back to Flint to show them the old neighborhood, but it’s impossible for them to really imagine that this used to be a great place with great jobs. When my young son first saw a store with full bulletproof glass inside and asked if it used to be a giant aquarium, I knew they were too far removed to understand.

When I was a kid in the seventies and eighties, the Scieszka family lived at the house. Louis, a middle school principal, and Shirley, a nurse, raised six boys who became legendary for their misadventures—a car that crashed through a garage but was repaired before their parents returned, and the invention of street hockey played with a tennis ball soaked in gas and set on fire. Jon, the second oldest, attended Culver Military Academy, which seemed exotic, and went on to become a best-selling children’s book author.

It’s just one house, but it’s emblematic of Flint’s tortuous civic trajectory, a reminder that anyone trying to improve Flint must accept that there will be heart-wrenching setbacks along the way and a good chance that things may never get significantly better, but must make the decision to keep trying anyway. It’s probably the best approach for anyone who wants to have a long-term relationship with Flint.

And, thankfully, many people still do.

Teardown is filled with the stories of Flint residents who understand the daunting challenges and basically say, Bring it on. And I’ve met many more since the book came out. One of them is Derek Dohrman, a soft-spoken thirty-six-year-old who works in IT at McLaren, the same hospital where my mom was an admitting clerk for many years.

Derek grew up in Grand Blanc, a suburb that was one of the primary destinations for Flint residents looking to escape to greener (and whiter) pastures. In 2016, he was living nearby on Lake Fenton, another desirable destination, when he began spending a lot of time in downtown Flint, hanging out with a friend who owned a bar called The Loft.

I fell in love with the whole Flint scene, he told me recently. I saw the potential for resurgence and wanted to be a part of it. Plus, suburban life was just boring.

He started driving around Flint on his lunch breaks, scouting for a place to live. He settled on Carriage Town, just around the corner from where I had slept on the floor of a friend’s empty house when I first returned in 2009. He rented for a few months, then bought a small house for $22,000, about the cost of a bathroom remodel in San Francisco. Then he bought a larger place with a huge city lot for $62,000. He describes it as his dream house.

The move surprised his friends and his parents, who are still a little uncomfortable when they visit. They sit on the front porch and I can just see the look on their faces, he said, laughing. My dad’s head is on a swivel when someone walks by, maybe a homeless guy. He watches them the whole way. To me it’s just life, but in Grand Blanc they’d be running inside and locking their doors.

He has since bought a third house, so he has two rental properties and a beautiful historic home. His tenants don’t fit the Flint stereotype—one is a candlemaker and another a local artist whose murals adorn downtown.

The city’s problems are real, but the positive things happening are just as real, he said. A lot of people only see one side of Flint. I feel like my role is to shine a light on the other side of Flint and be part of the solution.

My hope is that this book does the same. I’m surprised it has sold enough to warrant a paperback edition. I thought of it as an insider’s guide that would appeal primarily to Flintoids, both past and present. My mom was the ideal reader I had in mind—a smart, tough Flint native with a sense of humor and a highly tuned bullshit detector who embodied the heart and spirit of the city. The fact that it has resonated with so many outsiders is gratifying, but it also indicates just how many other Flints are out there in America. "Even casual readers who have no experience with Rust Belt cities or real estate investment will find Teardown compelling and worth their attention, wrote Jim Schulman in a 2013 review. Flint is very much a poster child, not only for the fate of the underclass in America but also for the destiny of most American cities."

I believe what’s happening in cities like Flint is morally wrong, and we could fix it. Kildee’s infrastructure plan—or something like it—would be a good start. But we, as a nation, choose not to act. As a result, water gets poisoned, kids wallow in poverty, houses burn, and people die. I wish we could remember that we’re all Americans. We are in this together. And it’s time to start doing the right thing. Otherwise, I fear it’s only a matter of time before the next crisis arrives in Flint—or in your hometown.

But if Teardown illustrates anything, it’s that these dark realities have not overwhelmed many Flint residents. I am reminded of this yet again when Derek tells me that he and his Carriage Town neighbors went all out planting tulip and daffodil bulbs this fall. He is excited for spring, when the snow finally melts and he can see them bloom. He is looking toward to the future.

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 was on the magazine’s compendium of Worst Cities for Recession Recovery and Worst Cities for New Jobs. Though these labels angered locals and Flint expatriates alike, the numbers didn’t lie.

The Flint area had lost more than 70,000 GM jobs since peak employment in 1968. The official jobless rate hovered around 30 percent, but if you counted the people who had given up looking for work it was closer to 40 percent, maybe higher. When the auto factories were booming, it had one of the highest per capita income levels in the country for a city its size; now more than a third of all residents lived in poverty. But given Flint’s dismal high school graduation rate, it might make sense to dispense with the facts and figures and describe the city in more direct terms, the way a guy had summed it up for me the previous night in the Torch, a bar hidden away in a lonely downtown alley that had somehow managed to survive Flint’s socioeconomic swan dive: What can I say? he offered with a shrug of his shoulders. This place is fucked up, man.

It goes without saying that such devastation has led to population loss. Flint has become the ultimate shrinking city. My family moved out, along with what seemed like everybody else, in the mid-1980s. As the B-52s used to sing over the sound system at the Our Lady of Lebanon dances I attended in high school—after overindulging in illegally obtained Boone’s Farm and/or Mickey’s Malt Liquor—Don’t feel out of place/’Cause there are thousands of others like you. In fact, Flint has lost half its residents, plunging from 200,000 to just over 100,000 in five decades. As a result, roughly one-third of Flint is abandoned. If all the empty houses, buildings, and vacant lots were consolidated, there would be ten square miles of blight in the city.

The decline has had a devastating impact on local schools, perhaps the most powerful symbols of happier times, the brick and mortar repositories of childhood memories. In 1968, Flint schools had 46,557 students attending kindergarten through high school. By the fall of 2008, there were just 14,056 kids left. Enrollment is projected to dip to 10,432 students by the fall of 2013—a 78 percent decline.

Throughout the city, abandoned schools suffer the same fate as empty houses. They are torched by arsonists and ravaged by thieves, known as scrappers, in search of any metal they can resell—doorknobs, radiators, aluminum siding, but especially copper wiring and plumbing. Despite these indignities, you can sometimes peer through the gaping holes once framed by windows and see old American flags and weathered bulletin boards filled with tattered assignments decorating the classrooms. Four of the schools I attended as a kid are now closed.

It was clear that after fifteen years in San Francisco I had drifted uncomfortably far from the town my grandparents had moved to from the cornfields of Iowa at the turn of the twentieth century. How did I know? I sometimes fretted over the high cost of organic avocados. I went to Belgian beer tasting parties. Once an investigative journalist, I was now a freelancer who wrote meandering travel essays and sappy feature stories in college alumni magazines. I also taught journalism at a Silicon Valley university where the tuition tops the yearly income of many Flint residents and BMWs are easy to spot in the dorm parking lots. After growing up driving a silvery blue Buick LeSabre and a bamboo cream Buick Electra 225—that’s a deuce and a quarter in local parlance—I owned a dull gray 1990 Toyota Camry, a car that was once officially banned from the city hall parking lot in Flint and still isn’t welcome on UAW property. Embarrassingly, it’s only a four-cylinder. And then there was the fact that I was so jittery that I was bedding down with a baseball bat.

I had returned to my troubled hometown on a quixotic mission. I was there to buy a house.

That was the most concrete aspect of my plan. I wasn’t sure if this would be a permanent residence, an improbable vacation home, a low-cost rental for a needy family, or a rehab project that Traci and I would give to charity. Those were details I could figure out later. I was worried that if I did too much thinking, I’d talk myself out of all this. And I didn’t want that to happen.

It’s difficult to explain why I would want to spend time away from the quaint little house Traci and I had somehow managed to buy in San Francisco, let alone consider moving to Flint and giving it up forever. Although it’s characterized by what the housing inspector charitably called light construction—the place shakes when you walk through it too quickly—our five-room bungalow in the heart of the Bernal Heights neighborhood is just a short stroll from a used bookstore, a wine bar, an organic market, a great Peruvian restaurant with dishes I can’t pronounce, and two taverns with names that wouldn’t be out of place in Flint—Skip’s and Wild Side West. It has a front and back yard, a rarity in San Francisco, albeit only because it is so small at seven hundred square feet that it doesn’t take up much of the city lot. Unlike numerous Flint residents, it’s a safe bet that most of my neighbors don’t feel the need to own firearms or police scanners. Why would I leave the City by the Bay, sometimes described as forty-nine square miles surrounded on all sides by reality, for a city where violence and heartache were all too real? And why would I try to convince Traci to do the same?

It’s complicated.

PART ONE

1

Pink Houses and Panhandlers

I had arrived in Flint in early June of 2009 after listening to the Tigers game in my rental car during the ninety-minute drive up I-75 from the Detroit airport. I thought baseball on the radio would snap me into a Michigan frame of mind, but the legendary Ernie Harwell, whose distinctive voice had mesmerized me as a kid, was no longer calling the games. It wasn’t quite the same. But the game did remind me to stop at a thrift store and buy that baseball bat, a handy accessory for any extended stay in Flint.

I eventually made it to Saginaw Street, the city’s main artery, which roughly divides Flint between east and west. As I crossed the river into what was once the thriving shopping district in the heart of downtown, the first of several black metal arches harking back to the early twentieth century spanned the thoroughfare, announcing that this was the Vehicle City. The rumble caused by the uneven, old-timey bricks that still lined several downtown blocks gave me a jolt of nostalgia, a rush of the familiar that tapped into memories of numerous trips down this bumpy street with my mom, my grandparents, and my friends. It felt reassuring. And although no one would describe downtown as bustling, with its empty storefronts and boarded-up buildings, I saw signs of hope.

There was a crowd at Blackstone’s, a new restaurant located in the former home of a fashionable men’s clothing store that had folded decades earlier. (Spotting a new business in downtown Flint is as rare as seeing someone driving a new Buick in San Francisco.) The Art Deco splendor of the sixteen-story Mott Foundation Building, scrupulously maintained with the financial legacy of a fabulously wealthy industrialist once referred to as Mr. Flint, would draw attention in any city. There were enough people out and about to chase away the eerie sense of emptiness pervading so many other parts of the city. A few construction projects generated a reassuring racket that indicated something was happening here. The city wasn’t dead yet.

I was headed to a vacant house owned by a friend of mine named Rich. Like me, he had grown up in Flint and eventually moved to San Francisco, where we met. He owned three investment properties in Flint, although the fact that all of them were empty indicated they weren’t exactly generating a lot of income. He had happily agreed to let me crash at one of them. It’s good to have it look like there’s someone actually living there, he had told me. It keeps the thieves from stealing the plumbing.

It took me a while to find the house because downtown still had an inexplicable number of confusing one-way streets, an unnecessary remnant of the days when growth and good fortune meant traffic congestion. I’d also never spent much time in the Carriage Town neighborhood. It was unfamiliar terrain when I lived in Flint, a neighborhood to avoid unless you were in the market for drugs, hookers, or an ass kicking.

Rich’s sister,