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A $500 House in Detroit: Rebuilding an Abandoned Home and an American City, by Drew Philp
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Review
“In this impassioned memoir, a young man finds a community flourishing in a city so depopulated that houses are worth less than a used Chevy.…Philp ably captures the frontier feel of Detroit as he laboriously rehabs his ruined house from foundation to roof. His homebuilding narrative is engrossing….The book shines [in its depiction of] the ‘radical neighborliness’ of ordinary people in desperate circumstances.” —Publishers Weekly“[Philp] quickly becomes an involved resident, using creativity, resourcefulness, ingenuity, and positive thinking to create a place for himself in a depressed city…highly recommended for general readers interested in the history and resurgence of Detroit and other U.S. cities.” —Library Journal“Engrossing…Philp is a great storyteller, and he has done a good job of documenting his struggles to carve out a home. It’s also easy to see why he intends to stay.” —Booklist“[A] deeply felt, sharply observed personal quest to create meaning and community out of the fallen city's ‘cinders of racism and consumerism and escape.’ Philp ably outlines the broad issues of race and class in the city, but it is the warmth and liveliness of his storytelling that will win many readers. A standout in the Detroit rehab genre.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review“Lots of young bohemian types are fascinated by Detroit—land of the fabled $500 house!—but few take the plunge as headily as Drew Philp did, not only buying his own place but renovating it from the inside out, getting to know the neighbors, and learning about one of America's most fascinating cities as only a true resident can. Philp writes about his experience with sensitivity, humility and humor, and his voice is a necessary addition to the literature of the Motor City.” —Mark Binelli, author of Detroit City is the Place to Be“Downright eloquent and deeply moving. Beyond the sheer, compelling force of Philp’s writing, his account is insistently honest and full of insight. No shortcuts. No unrealistic fantasies. No pretenses of the sort that made my nerves twitch before I gave up on the literature of Nightmare Detroit. Philp the 23-year-old kid comes alive convincingly, in all of his confused but determined effort to rebuild a house and sink roots. He captures the city in all of its horrors and hopes, contradictions and blind faith.” —Frank Viviano, eight-time Pulitzer Prize-nominee, and National Geographic writer since 2001“An important and powerful memoir that looks at the struggles and great efforts being spent on breathing life into a decayed city, and delves into the complicated and diverse people trying to carve out better futures.” —New York Journal of Books“A fascinating inside look….Philp writes with exuberance and sincerity....Inspiring.” —Minneapolis Star-Tribune
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About the Author
Drew Philp’s work has been published both nationally and internationally and has appeared in publications, including BuzzFeed, The Detroit Free Press, Metrotimes, Corp! Magazine, the Bakersfield Californian, and the Michigan Daily. He lives in Detroit with his dog, Gratiot. A $500 House in Detroit is his first book.
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Product details
Hardcover: 304 pages
Publisher: Scribner (April 11, 2017)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 9781476797984
ISBN-13: 978-1476797984
ASIN: 1476797986
Product Dimensions:
6 x 1 x 9 inches
Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.4 out of 5 stars
63 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#524,024 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
I wouldn't hesitate to recommend this book to anyone. It's very well written and full of characters that come to life. A couple things keep me from giving it five stars, but it's still a highly enjoyable, inspiring, and entertaining book.A little background to give perspective: I was born in 1961 and raised in Detroit's Cass Corridor, on 4th street just off Grand River. My dad worked on the Cadillac assembly line. I saw the 1967 riots with my own eyes, National Guard tanks and troop carriers drove right by my house. As a white kid in an overwhelmingly black city, I was the minority. By the time I was born, the neighborhood was already on the decline, but after the riot it quickly deteriorated even more. Despite this, we had good times walking to Tiger Stadium or downtown. When I was 11, we moved to a "better" neighborhood, which also quickly declined, especially in the 80s. Despite its problems, I loved my life in Detroit, and although I moved away in my 20s, I still have family there, visit when I can, and consider it home.First, I'll get a couple things out the way that I didn't care for.The author, by his own admission, was/is a very idealistic young man with a lot of opinions about race, class, wealth, poverty, Chinese labor, corporations, banks, politics, and everything that touches our lives. This is fine. No story of Detroit can be told without the context of those issues. However, a point that is made in one paragraph sometimes extends into a page or more of text. Although it's always well-written, sometimes it's a bit much. Along the same line, although I loved the author's poetic writing style, there are portions where it became, to use a cliche, too much by half. These issues were enough to sometimes take me out of the story. One other minor thing, which is true of most non-fiction books I read. Maybe it's just me, but I like knowing the dates, even just the year, of events in a non-fiction narrative. If chapter titles or section breaks had included months and years, I would have kept a better grasp of how things were progressing. Not a mark against it, but just something I personally find helpful.Now, on to the positive. As I said, I was raised in inner-city Detroit. It could be scary, but that was life and I didn't know anything else existed. Despite my love for Detroit, and knowing that it is full of good people, I admit that I would never be courageous enough to do what the author did. He faced an incredible obstacle, self-made to be sure, but through hard work, patience and perseverance, he accomplished something pretty amazing. It's easy to pontificate about "making things better" but most of us stop short of putting any really hard work into it when our discomfort exceeds our convictions. The author put his convictions into action, and didn't quit. There would have been no shame in quitting at any point on his journey; he would have been given credit and admiration for giving it a shot. He could have driven in from the country every day or every weekend, and volunteered on some project, and that too would be worthy of praise. But he put himself on the line and gave it everything he had, without thinking he was going to be the "white savior."Despite my caveats above, I did enjoy the poetic nature of the writing, and the placement of "Detroit" as both a city and a concept within the context of history and world events. The details were vivid and the personalities shined through. The author definitely caught the essence of the Detroit I remember: hard working people fighting to make things better, a little at a time; neighbors evolving from suspicious to "family"; people with few resources willing to give away what little they have. I also enjoyed the author's descriptions of places I am familiar with, such as Belle Isle and the Detroit Institute of Arts.Overall, the positives of this book far outweigh any issues I had with it, and I do highly recommend it. I would read more by this author.
Being a lifelong Detroiter, this book really brings to life the trial, blight and macabre fascination the country has with Detroit. The rest of the country views Detroit as a violent hellhole, and there is a lot of truth to that. But what is missing from the viewpoint, is the other side of Detroit: the decent, hard-working, determined people who call it home.Living in Detroit is not for the faint-hearted, which is why Drew Philp's experience is unique and compelling. Sure, at times his naiveté occasionally clouds his judgment. He is a guy from a small-town in rural Michigan, educated at the fairly prestigious (but equally pretentious) University of Michigan. His time living in a impoverished portion of the city is wrought with new life experiences, different both in what he expected, and in what he was prepared for. His story, though, is not one of idealism or even self-congratulatory braggadocio. It is a story of a collapsing urban center, and an idealistic young man who not only wanted a cheap place to live, but to become one of a community... a community different than the one he grew up in, or the one he was educated in.The book is a lot of stories. Stories about building a roof, or trying to get heat, electricity and plumbing. But it is also so much more. It is about understanding yourself, your neighbors and your local government. As he nears completion of his house, Philp himself grows. Gone are those stereotypes he showed up with, replaced with respect for the people of Detroit, as well as self-respect.This is the kind of a book you can read in one sitting, because Philp's ability to tell a story keeps you turning page after page. His heartfelt honesty and determination are inspirational, and it shows Detroit in a light that no one outside of Detroit ever sees.
I was very skeptical when I picked this up. I had heard good things about the book, but I've certainly read enough "Transplant Discovers Himself/Herself In The 'Authentic', Postapocalyptic Landscape of Detroit And Writes About It" that I wanted to approach this with caution. I didn't quite put two and two together that this was the book that grew out of the 2014 Buzzfeed piece that made its rounds on the interweb, right around the time I was starting to do some work in Detroit but before I moved there-- a piece that seemed to capture a lot of what I was thinking about at the time.First, Philp is an excellent storyteller. He is able to weave a series of small, seemingly inconsequential moments into a deeper, broader narrative that frame his own personal growth as well as the gradual but stark evolution of a neighborhood. Philp tackles basic questions of growing up-- dealing with family, dealing with love and heartbreak- alongside bigger, enormously complicated and utterly important questions: What does it mean to redevelop such a spectacularly decimated city like Detroit? How can we claim "community" when we really mean "consumption"? Is the suspension of urban democracy an acceptable price to pay for revitalization?Many of these questions are posed rhetorically, as if to say, "if you're not outraged, you're not paying attention," and Philp illustrates them through a gamut of individual moments, like the immediate challenges of living in a neighborhood where you have to fear for your life because of stray dogs, as well as broader trends (housing and interstate highway development, or, for example, the cultural crusade against the city by Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson, whose racism could readily contend with Jeff Sessions or your local neighborhood Grand Dragon).Philp's take on race is particularly notable. He provides germane, unapologetically critical commentary on the history of race relations in the Motor City, but he often doesn't describe characters by their race. This is especially interesting as a lot of the artsy, newer transplants to Detroit do not reflect the racial makeup of the city (but are anyway fairly diverse). Indeed, the inability of any new group in Detroit to mirror the demographics of the city (he mentions Alex Hill's critique of the demographics of an army of imported technocrats) is enormously problematic but also something Philp isn't trying to solve-- it's still interesting that he becomes an integral member of this neighborhood, sort of by accident, and comments on the macro picture of race relations while not identifying many of the local characters by their race.At times, the critical commentary added into his writing can seem a bit facile. He sometimes seems to be ignoring the bigger picture of some of the social and economic pressures that affect him and his neighbors, and I think this is the kind of thing that would be solved through some more research and editing (Nathan Bomey's book, for example, covers analytically a lot of the topics that Philp touches on). As a reader and a Detroit resident I sometimes find myself frustrated at how detached he seems from the city at large, for example, vaguely mentioning a bar or a restaurant without mentioning its name, or mentioning his daily grind to make the bucks but not mentioning where he actually worked, his relationship with his coworkers, or what he sets up as a critical critique of his place of employment within the "New Detroit." I wouldn't say he makes any "unfounded" conclusions but rather sometimes just "underfounded." There are no glaring factual errors, by any means, but there are some minor errors and lack of connected dots that I think could be addressed through further examination.There is also a strange sort of Midwestern millennial hamartia, a Hemingwayesque self-flagellation that Philp seems to periodically indulge in, like, "Hey, you know, I could work for the man and be able to afford a loan on this house, but I'd rather suffer through the cold and the winter and drink and smoke heavily." Having fixed up my own house in a Rust Belt city and struggled through millennial underemployment in a crap recession economy, I can say that there is a degree to which this dedication should be lauded, but also to which it is really a personal choice and, sometimes, indeed, a less expedient choice. But he's not losing out in doing it, and I think that's sort of the point. He doesn't get up on a high horse about the "authenticity" of the Detroit experience but rather his ability to get back in touch with the authenticity of human experience of community itself, and basically castigates the hype and heavy marketing around the purported "authenticity" of the New Detroit, which I appreciate because I kind of hate it.Where Philp fails to delve deeper into a more rigorous sort of critical or academic examination of the economic and political climate of Detroit and urban planning at large, he makes up for it by identifying the overall deficiencies of a system that has failed to serve the poor and especially the citizenry of Detroit.This is a must read for any millennial, any Rust Belt transplant, and certainly anyone moving to Detroit.
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