Getting to Know Our City
Rebuilding a Beautiful, Vacant Historic Detroit Home (Episode 1)
“Detroit is big enough to matter in the world and small enough for you to matter in it.” — Jeanette Pierce
When I moved to SE Michigan in the Fall of 2014, some of the most common questions I’d get from family and friends would be, “Why would you want to move to Detroit?”…“Isn’t it dangerous?”… “I hear that there are roaming packs of wild dogs in Detroit.” … “Well, at least you’ll be able to buy a house for the price of a mid-level microwave.”
I moved here for a job, working as an Automotive Designer for one of the “Big 3”. After I finished my degree at the University of Cincinnati’s Industrial Design Program, I received job offers in the coming months in various cities around the country. I was concerned with the prospects of being able to find a job out of school, but quickly saw my hard work pay off as offers from Colorado, Chicago, Columbus, California, and finally Detroit came in. While many companies and the cities they called home were flashy and fun, nothing intrigued me as much as the opportunity to design vehicles.
What that opportunity meant though, was taking a chance on a city that I only experienced through visits to an abandoned downtown in the dead of winter while growing up, to see the Auto Show. Massive abandoned hotels sat directly across the street from the convention center where the Auto Show was held. Boarded up windows on 30-story buildings, graffiti, and crumbling concrete as far as the eye can see. Detroit was an empty city as far as I knew and had heard. No more fun, no more jobs, and no more hope.
But the opportunity to design cars was too compelling, I had to at least give it a shot. If it was as bad as everyone said, I could always leave in a year or two.
Brandon (my significant other of 4 years at the time) had received a job offer of his own the same week. We worried about when he’d ultimately be able to move to Detroit, but decided that we each had opportunities we couldn’t turn down, and that we’d make it work.
On suggestion from my HR Department, I quickly found a small bungalow to rent dead between Royal Oak and Ferndale, two Detroit Suburbs, and a short 10-minute drive to work. Within a few months, I realized that the Detroit suburb life wasn’t what I wanted. As a moped enthusiast, I found myself wanting to ride downtown and into the city often to meet other enthusiast friends at various dive bars in the city and at their clubhouse near the Ambassador Bridge.
My mopeds allowed me to explore Detroit in a very naked and open-minded way. In order to get to the “fun” or “up-and coming” areas of town, and in order to meet people, I couldn’t take the highway, which meant I had to drive through the rest of Detroit to get there. I couldn’t just roll up my windows if I felt uneasy in a neighborhood, I had to confront it, acknowledge it, and embrace it. Within a single summer, I got to know how welcoming Detroiters can be by exploring on my mopeds. People wave at you, smile and laugh, and have quick stop-light conversations with you. “Where did you get that thing?” “Where are you riding to?” “What is that, a baby bike?!” “Ha! That thing sounds like a weed-wacker!”
Not all of these interactions were positive, but most are. I remember having a stop light “drag race” between my 50cc, two-stroke moped and a man’s suped-up, custom chopper. As I was left in the dust I got to have a real and fun moment with a complete stranger as we laughed at each other on a random summer night. Once, I was followed and harassed by a homeless man at a gas station because I wouldn’t give him any money, I had to get the gas station attendant to help me in order to get the guy to leave me alone. Another time, my muffler fell off 1/2 way to a concert to see my friend’s band, I had to use chunks of concrete that were crumbling off the sidewalk to hammer the hot muffler back onto my bike in an otherwise rough area of town as onlookers watched me and my friend. But they cheered and clapped once we got back on the road.
After just a year, Detroit already felt like home. And not just my home, even as just a weekend visitor, Detroit was feeling like home to Brandon too. We love the city’s culture, its community, and its grit. Neighborhoods are tight knit in Detroit, they’ve had to be. You know your neighbors, what they do, how many kids they have, and when they’re out of town, you watch their back, because that’s what they’d do for you. Detroit isn’t out to make it easy, so if you want something, you’ve got to make it happen yourself as members of the community. It’s not like Chicago, or Baltimore, or San Francisco, or New York. In Detroit, you truly feel like you have the ability to matter to your community. In the suburbs where I lived, and pretty much every town I’ve lived in since I was a kid, I couldn’t tell you a single neighbor’s name let alone what they were like because they rarely came outside and never said hello, I didn’t even know what most of them looked like. The answer of what to do next was clear.
We decided it was time to start looking for a place to live, and we wanted to call Detroit home. Now all we have to do is find out how to get the “mid-range microwave” pricing we’d been hearing so much about from the national news.
Our Journey isn’t over! We’ve been working hard since we purchased the home in November 2016 and are writing updates on our progress roughly every week. Make sure to check out our latest updates on our homepage!
