Once upon a time, Detroit Michigan was a thriving city, its 125 auto companies, churning out over 7 millions cars every year. At its peak, in 1950, nearly 2 million people called it home. It lost 25% of its population in the ten-year span between 2000 and 2010. At the beginning of the 20th century, 285,704 people lived there. By the mid-20th century, 1.85 million people lived there, making it the fourth largest city in the country. Large homes sprung up. People shopped at Hudson’s and Crowley’s department stores, and walked to schools.
Then the automobile industry that built Detroit started to tear it down. By 1967, when the industry was still thriving, the city had lost more than 130,000 manufacturing jobs. New plants were built in small towns in the Midwest and in the Sunbelt. That same year, one of the worst race riots in American history erupted on the city’s streets. Then came the oil crises of the 1970s, Chrylser filed for bankruptcy and boomtown Detroit became bust-town.
This generalizes, of course. I’ve never been to Detroit – my friend Diane is from there and I know she could tell stories – but its current woes are regularly in the news; its troubles continue. People have fled; tens of thousands of houses have been abandoned. This past year, the city filed for bankruptcy. Everything that once made the city bright and shiny is now dull and tarnished.
Abandoned house in Detroit
Except for a new program I heard about today that I found fascinating. It wants to “enliven the literary arts of Detroit by renovating homes and giving them to authors, journalists, poets, aka writers. It’s like a writer-in-residence program, only in this case we’re actually giving the writer the residence, forever.”
The program is called Write a House, and it’s a Detroit-based organization that is taking distressed housing, of which there is a lot, and promoting renovation with the writer in residence doing much of the work on each individual property. In exchange for the work, the writer gets the house. No payment. It’s just theirs.
I thought this was about the coolest thing I’d ever heard. I know Detroit is in a bit of a hole right now, broken and destroyed, but what an amazing thing, to involve writers as a way to revive or reinvent – hell, perhaps just invent – a literary arts community.
Write a House is starting with three two-bedroom houses and currently accepting applications for writers to move in this Spring. They have to stay for two years, work on the house, engage in the city’s literary community and contribute to the program’s blog. If they fulfill these duties, they get the house. Within 24 hours of launching the program, 200 writers had already inquired.
Two of the houses were bought for a thousand dollars each; the third was donated by Power House Productions, a local community organization run by artists. There is currently a fund-raising campaign going on to help raise a minimum of $35,000 for each house to help fund the major renovations like electrical and plumbing.
Write a House being renovated
It’s rather brilliant. I can only imagine the amount of material that will come from this endeavor. Living in a city that has been virtually decaying for years gives great visual imagery. The animals that are living there, both on four legs and undoubtedly on two; the joy amidst the despair; the hope within the defeat. The colors can come to life, the sky will be bluer, the birds’ songs will be more melodic. The drama will also be more heartfelt and the comedy more cutting. Life, as observed by a poet or novelist could be similar to what Elmore Leonard said in 1985 of his home city:
“There are cities that get by on their good looks, offer climate and scenery, views of mountains or oceans, rockbound or with palm trees; and there are cities like Detroit that have to work for a living…. It’s never been the kind of city people visit and fall in love with because of its charm or think, gee, wouldn’t this be a nice place to live.”
Except maybe that’s changing. Maybe Detroit is the write city after all.