My $500 house in Detroit -- and the neighbors who helped me rebuild it | Drew Philp
In 2009, journalist and screenwriter Drew Philp bought a ruined house in Detroit for $500. In the years that followed, as he gutted the interior and removed the heaps of garbage crowding the...
========== In 2009, I bought a house
in Detroit for 500 dollars. It had no windows,
no plumbing, no electricity and it was filled with trash. The first floor held nearly
10,000 pounds of garbage, and that included the better part
of a Dodge Caravan, cut into chunks with a reciprocating saw. (Laughter) I lived nearly two years without heat, woke up out of a dead sleep
multiple times to gunshots, was attacked by a pack of wild dogs and ripped my kitchen cabinets
from an abandoned school as they were actively tearing
that school down. This, of course, is the Detroit
that your hear about. Make no mistake, it's real. But there's another Detroit, too. Another Detroit that's more hopeful, more innovative, and may just provide some of the answers to citie...