A Canvas in Detroit

Detroit has become the butt of countless jokes and to many in Michigan and beyond, it's a national embarrassment.  The automobile industry has collapsed, crime is rampant, and hard numerical evidence is demonstrated by the fact that San Jose recently passed Detroit as the tenth largest US city.  Finally, the Motor City is one big festering eyesore, in part because of the foreclosure crisis that has left many of its residents to abandon their homes.

I take it somewhat personally.  My father was born in Detroit, and while he left when he was five, as a child I remember listening to my older Armenian relatives of what Detroit once was:  a great place to raise a family with plenty of jobs.  My uncle Eddie used to talk about sneaking into the bleachers at Tiger Stadium.  Detroit was a symbol of American might, with the Big 3 running the roost! Times had changed even when I visited Detroit my first and only time in 1994.  I remember my cousin Gail, and her mother, Arsine, picking me up at the train station, which was more like a Greyhound station.  The drive out of Detroit to their home in the suburbs was depressing—boarded up homes, spray-painted storefronts, garbage on the streets . . . it was as if the Great Depression never ended.  A few days later we went to Detroit and rode the monorail, a hideous legacy of Coleman Young’s failed 20 years as Detroit mayor.  Whew, at least Greektown was nice! It was such a shame because clearly Detroit was once a vibrant, bustling city, urban Americana at its best.  Unlike most large American cities, Detroit has few apartment buildings and high-rises . . . most residents lived in homes, from simple bungalows and cottages to Queen Anne and Colonial Revival.   Detroit's core is full of beautiful churches and buildings with an impressive array of architecture.

With the collapse of the automobile industry and housing market, home prices have plummeted . . . I’ve heard stories on NPR about Brits buying handfuls of houses at $10,000 each . . . and they can go for even less than that.  But even with these homes going for half the price of a decent sedan, there are still many empty homes (Detroit had a population of 1.8 million at its peak, now its down to 912,000), many uninhabitable because they’ve been stripped of everything from copper plumbing to electrical wiring. 

Now Detroit is becoming an artist colony—artists such as Mitch Cope and his wife, Gina, are encouraging artists from across the world to move to Detroit, buy homes, and well, deck them out!  Tired of all the eyesores surrounding them, the Copes are refurbishing homes in their north side neighborhood and turning them into colorful works of art.  Not only that, they and other artists are going a step further, using renewable energy sources such as solar and wind to power these homes, keeping them off the grid while keeping expenses down.

It hasn’t been easy—there’s still much crime, these refurbished homes sometimes get plundered, and locals are jaded.  But think about it:  for a song you can get your own place, do what you want, and experiment with different forms of energy . . . and hopefully healing a city instead of moving into another McMansion   . . . which probably isn’t a hard sell now since those neighborhoods in exurbias across the US are suffering as well. 

And if Detroit ever becomes a renewable energy or green technology hub, these pioneers will be laughing all the way to the bank—maybe even early retirement!