Local News is Dying When We Need It Most // By Grace Walker

One of the empty Michigan Times newspaper racks that are still scattered throughout

the University of Michigan-Flint campus.  (Photo by Michigan Times Editor-in-Chief Eric Hinds)

As a journalism major, I’m always asked the inevitable questions. “Why journalism? Isn’t that a dying field? Will you ever get a job?” Sometimes I find it difficult to come up with good answers. Headlines are constantly trumpeting the demise of journalism. We’re told about the latest newspapers that went under, the growing number of journalists being laid off, and the dire threats social media poses to the profession as we become more reliant on our devices. 
 
In my community, I’ve seen the demise of local news close up. The well-known daily paper, the Flint Journal, has all but vanished. And now I am left with the unenviable title of last staff writer for the Michigan Times, the UM-Flint student newspaper closing after 68 years of publishing. 

Despite these challenges, local news coverage is now more important than ever. In a city known for its well-documented problems, local journalists are essential to illustrate these issues and explore solutions. Without this coverage, residents remain uninformed and uninterested, which kills democracy. My hope is that local news coverage survives in a different form. My question is, how? 
 
Many local journalists have been outspoken about their frustrations since the death of the Flint Journal. One such journalist, Scott Atkinson, was willing to share his experiences in the field.
 
After graduating from Michigan State University, Atkinson started at the Flint Journal in 2008 where he believed he would have a stable job for years to come. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case. After a while, Atkinson left to pursue his graduate degree at the University of Michigan - Flint. Upon his return in 2013, the Flint Journal started seeing significant changes. The issue was that fewer and fewer people were looking at newspapers.
 
“If you took away social media, the newspaper is all you had,” Scott Atkinson stated. “People would flock to get a newspaper for not only the news but also the ads.”
            
In its prime, the Journal’s editions were packed with news and advertisements, sometimes hitting up to 100 pages. All of this came crashing down as the Internet gained popularity. Why pay for a newspaper when you can access free news on the Internet at home?                 
       
The Flint Journal announced in 2009 that it would reduce its print editions, and conducted massive layoffs to reduce its operating budget. The company that once saw newsrooms filled with journalists, editors, and other staff rushing to find their next story quickly became a ghost town.
 
During this time, the owners of the Flint Journal decided to combine it with the Grand Rapids Press, the Ann Arbor News and other regional papers under the banner of MLive, a heavily based internet media group that, according to its website, “provides innovative ways to inform, connect and empower Michigan.” This new arrangement resulted in even less Flint coverage.
            
This sort of consolidation is widespread. "The largest 25 newspaper chains own a third of all newspapers in the US," writes Penelope Muse Abernathy the formerly Knight Chair in Journalism and Digital Media Economics at the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media. "These large chains own two-thirds of all dailies."
Some of these chains include Gatehouse and AIM, two of the top five largest newspaper chains in the nation. This corporate focus only hurts the industry. Many regional newspapers now lack in-depth reporting, offer low salaries for their journalists, and provide fewer benefits. These changes created what Jason Kosnoski, who teaches political science UM-Flint, calls “a shell of an institution.”
            
Why does this matter? Journalism is vital for our democracy. It helps hold the government, corporations, and anyone else in power accountable for their actions. When this is missing, we lose a part of our democracy. We lose the right to know what’s going on in our community.      
            
“People no longer know what their city does, or why certain things are being done,” Atkinson said. 
The death of local news has helped usher in apathy in our community. Atkinson observed that local government meetings once packed with concerned citizens are now often empty. 
            
Kosnoski added that without good local journalism, people become confused, and angry, leading to distrust of institutions and governments. 
“Decline of local news is part of the decline of community,” he said.
 
This is apparent in Flint. No one seems to know or care why certain businesses are being shut down. Residents remain distrustful of their water after a decade of the ongoing water crisis. Without a robust, aggressive news source, the community lacks a trustworthy advocate that holds individuals accountable for their actions. 
            
Given this reality, what's the future of journalism? 
            
“Local news is shrinking,” Atkinson said after admitting that he isn’t highly optimistic that local news will survive. 
            
Others believe that local news isn’t dying, but changing. In an interview with WNEM news anchors Meg Mcleod and David Custer, both expressed optimism that local news has a future in our society.
            
“While I don’t think local news will become obsolete, I do believe some mediums for providing local news will,” Mcleod said. “You no longer have to wait for the 6 p.m. news or for the paper to be delivered in order to get the latest headlines. Nowadays, confirmed information can instantly be sent via a push alert or posted on social media by journalists in TV, newspaper or radio.” 
            
Many local news outlets now use multiple media types to continue attracting their audience. In the past, news outlets typically focused on one type of media. Now, outlets like WNEM TV5 not only broadcast daily news coverage on TV but also on itswebsite and social media platforms such as Instagram and YouTube. As the future looks to be more technology and internet-focused, we can expect to see less physical news and more of an online presence.
            
WNEM works hard to ensure that its content on different platforms tailors to those specific audiences. 
            
“We realize most people always have more than one screen in front of them, whether it’s a TV, cell phone, computer, or tablet,” Custer said. “We make a conscious effort to be aware of the latest apps or social media trends and figure out ways to reach the audience using them. We haven’t always been successful and often realize the person who sits down to watch the news on TV isn’t the same person scrolling through TikTok to get information.”  
            
In their efforts to maintain their audience, WNEM puts importance on the “little stories” of a community.
            
“The little stories have the biggest impact because they mirror all of us,” Custer reported, “When we can relate to an issue or topic it pulls on our inherent sense of community.”
 
Despite these challenges, local news coverage is now more important than ever. In a city known for its well-documented problems, local journalists are essential to illustrating issues and exploring solutions. Without this coverage, residents remain uninformed and uninterested, which kills democracy. My hope is that local news coverage survives in a different form. My question is, how?

Grace Walker is an aspiring journalist from Flint who graduated from Grand Blanc High School. She is currently a freshman at UM-Flint and the last writer for Michigan Times. She plans to transfer to Central Michigan University to pursue a Journalism degree with a minor in Political Science.

Digital Divide: The Michigan Times is a local news site. Or is it? By Gordon Young

 

UM-Flint is without a student newspaper for the first time in more than sixty years. (Photo by Gordon Young)

Technically, the Michigan Times still exists, but it’s probably not what you think it is.

When the University of Michigan – Flint student newspaper let its domain name lapse last year, it was a clear sign that the Michigan Times was in trouble. The publication that covered the downtown campus for more than 60 years is now officially “sunsetting” and will shut down completely at the end of the academic year, a victim of declining student interest and, some argue, university budget cuts.

The domain “themichigantimes.com” was quickly purchased by another entity, and a new publication with the same name soon appeared online pledging to cover “all types of local news for the cities of Flint and Detroit in Michigan.” It resembles a slickly produced version of the old student newspaper site, albeit one that is heavy on regional and state news.

It still claims a strong connection to the university and describes the staff as a “team of young people, consisting of University of Michigan-Flint grads.” Another page identifies them as “former University of Michigan-Flint students” who “are committed to helping current students and being the place where their problems will be heard.“

But with almost no campus coverage, readers might be left wondering: what exactly is this thing?

Read the rest on East Village Magaine

Tough Times: The Death of a Student Newspaper in Flint, Michigan by Gordon Young

The former offices of The Michigan Times. (Photo by Santiago Ochoa/The Michigan Times)

The Michigan Times, the student newspaper at UM-Flint, is officially "sunsetting." That's the sort of euphemism a good editor would slash and replace with something more clearcut. It's a nice way of saying the publication that has been covering the downtown campus since 1959 is all but dead.
 
The Times hasn't published a print edition this year. Its website and online archive have disappeared. All of its social media feeds are dormant. Confusingly, another publication calling itself The Michigan Times that covers "all types of local news for the cities of Flint and Detroit" has purchased the paper's domain name and is publishing online, but it's not connected to UM-Flint. It's as if the paper's very identity has been stolen.
 
College papers are not immune to the brutal economic conditions that have killed publications across the country as advertisers and readers disappeared. The United States has lost nearly 2,900 newspapers and 43,000 journalists since 2005, according to a recent report from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. But while there have certainly been budget cuts over the years at the Times, lack of funding isn't the biggest problem. It's lack of interest.
 
"Ever since I took over, I've been bailing water out of a sinking ship that never left the dock," said Eric Hinds, the current and, it appears, last editor-in-chief. "There just didn't seem to be any way to find people to work at the paper."
 
Just a decade ago, more than a dozen staffers and freelancers put out the paper, according to then-editor Alex Benda. But it dwindled to a few students before the Covid shutdown during the 2020-2021 academic year and continued to shrink when in-person classes resumed. Hinds, who lives in Flint's Mott Park neighborhood, is headed to law school in Rhode Island in the fall. His only reporter is transferring next year. Despite intense recruiting efforts, no viable candidates have emerged to replace them, let alone expand the staff.
 
"You have to have a passion for journalism," Hinds said. "In the current climate, you get a lot of hate. It's a difficult job. And if you don't really want to do it, you're going to be bad at it. I guess no one wants to deal with that."
 
The not-so-slow demise of the paper corresponds with the elimination of most journalism courses at UM-Flint. In 2009, the university added an ambitious journalism program, with a major, a minor, and several new classes. "The program was proposed in response to student requests," according to a university press release. "For years, students in the media studies track of the communication degree program have asked for more journalism courses."
 
Tony Dearing, then editor of The Flint Journal, was enthusiastic at the time. "It is important that we cultivate and train the next generation of journalists, and I strongly believe that a journalism program at UM-Flint would help meet that need," he stated in the press release.
 
The timing could not have been worse. UM-Flint was embracing journalism education just as newspaper revenues were falling off a cliff. It wasn't long before nearly the entire curriculum was eliminated, a victim of budget cuts and lack of interest. It's hard to attract students to a dying industry. And without journalism students, it's tough to keep a student paper up and running, especially at a commuter school in an economically depressed city where many students work to pay for school and need a good job after graduation.
 
The paper is still considered a "sponsored student organization," meaning it's eligible for funding from student activity fees, but it will soon lose that status. If students want to relaunch the publication in the future, it will have to be a volunteer-only organization responsible for its own fundraising.
 
"From the university's perspective, providing a robust student life experience is essential to help augment classroom teaching with practical skills," Julie Snyder, associate vice chancellor and dean of students, stated in an email. "The newspaper being sunsetted means that there is one less avenue for students to be actively engaged in our community, an outlet for their budding talents and a practical co-curricular learning opportunity. However, as the students are not currently interested in taking advantage of that avenue, they have used their collective voice."
 
First-year student Grace Walker — the only other staff member besides Hinds — is transferring to Central Michigan University next year. The 19-year-old Flint resident plans to major in journalism and hopes to join CMU's student paper, a scrappy, vibrant outlet that’s been around for more than a century.
 
In the meantime, she's working on a final project for a class that chronicles the demise of local news coverage in the Flint area, a topic she knows all too well. She's not sure where it will be published, if at all. "I've always been interested in journalism and politics," she said, "so it's been really hard and disheartening to get involved with something when it's shutting down, when it’s going away."

A revised version of this story also appear in East Village Magazine.

Charles W. Nash House For Sale

The Charles W. Nash house in Flint.

Ron Fonger of Mlive reports: 

The former Flint home of Charles Nash, co-founder of Buick Motor Co. and former president of General Motors, is for sale, but the historic structure won’t necessarily be sold to the highest bidder.

The Genesee County Land Bank is hosting a showing of the home at 307 Mason St. from 2-6 p.m. on Wednesday, June 28, and attendance is the first requirement for making a proposal to buy, invest in, and preserve the Victorian-style, three-bedroom home that was built in 1890 in the city’s Carriage Town Neighborhood.

Michael Freeman, executive director of the Land Bank, said the Nash house ended up in his agency’s hands after the county foreclosed on it for failure to pay property taxes. The Land Bank is highlighting the home’s availability and accepting proposals from prospective buyers until 4 p.m. July 24.

Readers of Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City may remember that this was the house where I stayed when I returned to Flint in the summer of 2009. It was then owned by my friend Rich Bennett, who was instrumental in convincing me to rediscover my hometown. Rich is no longer with us, but his memory and all the things he did for Flint live on. 

Let's hope the new owner of the Nash House treats it well.

My sleeping arrangements at the Nash House in 2009

Laundry day at the Nash House in 2009.

Brockmire and Flint: An endless parade of suffering with no one offering any help

 

The Best Non-Fiction Flint, Michigan: Books about the past, present, and future of American cities

If you're looking for the heart, humor, and, at times, horror of Flint, Michigan — and cities like it all over the country — look no further than these five non-fiction books.

Rivethead: Tales from the Assembly Line by Ben Hamper

I was assigned to the Cab Shop, an area more commonly known to its inhabitants as the Jungle. Lifers had told me that on a scale from one to ten — with one representing midtown Pompeii and ten being then GM Chairman Roger Smith's summer home — the Jungle rates about a minus six.

"It wasn't difficult to see how they had come up with the name for the place. Ropes, wires and assorted black rubber cables drooped down and entangled everything. Sparks shot out in all direction — bouncing in the aisles, flying into the rafters and even ricocheting off the natives' heads. The noise level was deafening. It was like some hideous unrelenting tape loop of trains having sex. I realized instantly that, as far as new homes go, the Jungle left a lot to be desired. Me Tarzan, you screwed.

Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City by Gordon Young

I was headed to a vacant house owned by a friend of mine named Rich. Like me, he had grown up in Flint and eventually moved to San Francisco, where we met. He owned three “investment” properties in Flint, although the fact that all of them were empty indicated they weren’t exactly generating a lot of income. He had happily agreed to let me crash at one of them. “It’s good to have it look like there’s someone actually living there,” he had told me. “It keeps the thieves from steal­ing the plumbing.” 

It took me a while to find the house because downtown still had an inexplicable number of confusing one-way streets, an unnecessary rem­nant of the days when growth and good fortune meant traffic congestion. I’d also never spent much time in the Carriage Town neighborhood. It was unfamiliar terrain when I lived in Flint, a neighborhood to avoid unless you were in the market for drugs, hookers, or an ass kicking. 

Rich’s sister, Berniece, was there to greet me when I finally arrived. She still lived in Flint. Although we’d never met, she showed me around the house like I was an old friend, presenting a very practical house­warming gift—a four-pack of toilet paper. She seemed worried about me, offering advice like “Don’t let anybody you don’t know into the house” and “Be careful who you talk to on the street.” I tried to reas­sure her that I knew how to take care of myself. I was from Flint, after all. But I sensed that my San Francisco pedigree, the new Patagonia shirt with lots of snaps and pockets that I’d bought for the trip, and my teal-striped Pumas were undermining my street cred. 

Before I try to pawn myself off as a minor-league George Orwell writing a Rust Belt version of Down and Out in Paris and London, I should point out that Rich’s house wasn’t as rundown as many in the neighborhood. It was the well-preserved former home of Charles W. Nash, the president of GM in 1912 and founder of Nash Motors. It was just across the street from the Durant-Dort Office Building, the beautifully restored birthplace of GM. Unlike many of Flint’s empty structures, the Nash House had luxuries like plumbing and electricity. The water heater was broken, but a cold shower would be better than nothing. Inexplicably, the place was painted pink, destroying any chance I had of establishing myself as some kind of tough-guy writer, a Buick City Bukowski. 

The wood floors, wraparound porch, handsome stained glass win­dow, and high ceilings oozed Victorian charm. There was no sign of habitation other than an awkwardly modern glass table in the dining room, a couple of folding chairs, and an expensive-looking Persian rug in the living room. Our voices echoed in the empty space. The bulk of the tour was devoted to the house’s four doors and eight locks. The kitchen door had been nailed shut from the inside with a two-by-four after a break-in. The side door was locked and seldom used. If there was a fire, Berniece advised, the front door was my best option, other than the windows. 

“I’ll try not to burn the place down,” I joked. 

“It’s not you I’m worried about,” she answered. Like any city with a lot of abandoned property, Flint houses regularly went up in flames. 

I decided to bed down on the nice rug. Besides adding a little padding, it was close to the fire exit. 

The Magical Stranger: A Son’s Journey Into His Father’s Life by Stephen Rodrick

But on November 4, Americans are taken hostage in the U.S. Embassy in Iran. I fold my papers and stare at pictures of blindfolded Americans. I don't connect the dots. Then, two weeks later, in the middle of a November night, Dad calls from the officers' club in Subic Bay. Mom says he wants to talk to me. I rub the sleep out of my eyes and cradle the phone. He says he's sorry. The boat is being turned around, off to the Persian Gulf, as a show of strength. I don't know what that means. I just know there will be no trip to Hawaii. 

Dad's letters continue to arrive from somewhere in fits and spurts. They used to be marked on the back with the number of days until his return. Now he just circles the seal on the envelope with a question mark and an unhappy face. 

Soon, it's the morning of November 28. Mom sleeps in; Chrissie has been up with the croup. By 11 am, I'm trying, unsuccessfully, to skate backward at the Roller Barn for eighth-grade gym class. I can tell you the electoral-college breakdown of the Carter-Ford presidential election and the status of Kenny Stabler's wobbly knees, but when it comes to the things that confer acceptance upon boys – hitting a baseball, building a catapult for Webelos, roller-skating backward – I'm hopeless. I need someone to show me how, someone to tell me that it really doesn't matter anyway. But that man is always 8,000 miles away. 

So I fall on my ass. The cool kids snicker. My gym teacher calls me over. I'm relieved at first because it stops the laughing. But the teacher's permanently upbeat face has gone flat. She points to a man standing by the snack bar. He wears a black uniform and carries a white hat in his hand. It is Lieutenant Commander Laddie Coburn, Dad's best friend. I slowly skate over and sit down on a bench. He hesitates, sits down next to me, and puts a hand on my knee. 

"Your father has been in an accident."

Demolition Means Progress: Flint, Michigan, and the Fate of the American Metropolis by Andrew Highsmith 

Back in 1945, when Americans celebrated the conclusion of World War II and looked forward to a future of peace and prosperity, Buick historian Carl Crow claimed that the United States consisted of a thousand Flints. Even though many decades have since past, Crow’s words still ring true. From coast to coast, the America of the twenty-first century is, in fact, a thousand Flints, but not at all in the whiggish capacity that Crow envisioned. There are Flints in the economically depressed neighborhoods of Decatur, Illinois; Camden, New Jersey; Erie, Pennsylvania, and other struggling cities once renowned for their industrial might. Flints also exist in hypersegregated ghettos on Chicago’s south and west sides, in Miami’s Overtown district, and in struggling suburbs such as Yonkers, New York; East Palo Alto, California; and Ferguson, Missouri, where the legacies of white supremacy and legal, popular, and administrative Jim Crow continue to abridge civil rights and economic opportunity. However, there are also a thousand Flints in the booming, affluent bastions of suburban capitalism surrounding high-tech metropolises such as San Francisco, Boston, Raleigh, Seattle, and Austin—places like Cupertino, California; Redmond, Washington; and Round Rock, Texas, all of them defined more by fragmentation and exclusion than by cooperation and inclusion. There are Flints on the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts as well as in the so-called Rust Belt and Sunbelt, for the conditions of racial, spatial, and economic inequality that took shape in the Vehicle City during the twentieth century know no regional boundaries. Indeed, Flints can be found anywhere in the world where the eternal quest for metropolitan growth and revitalization has buttressed social inequalities. Because it took the full weight of government at all levels along with the efforts of untold numbers of ordinary Americans to construct and fortify the walls that still surround the nation’s Flints, it will require an equally concerted movement of millions to demolish them all and build anew.

The Poisoned City by Anna Clark

In the first full account of this American tragedy, Anna Clark's The Poisoned City recounts the gripping story of Flint’s poisoned water through the people who caused it, suffered from it, and exposed it. It is a chronicle of one town, but could also be about any American city, all made precarious by the neglect of infrastructure and the erosion of democratic decision making. Places like Flint are set up to fail—and for the people who live and work in them, the consequences can be fatal.

Through a series of disastrous decisions, the state government had switched the city’s water supply to a source that corroded Flint’s aging lead pipes. Complaints about the foul-smelling water were dismissed: the residents of Flint, mostly poor and African American, were not seen as credible, even in matters of their own lives.

It took eighteen months of activism by city residents and a band of dogged outsiders to force the state to admit that the water was poisonous. By that time, twelve people had died and Flint’s children had suffered irreparable harm. The long battle for accountability and a humane response to this man-made disaster has only just begun.

International Students Find the American Dream — in Flint

In the summer of 2009, I met a group of Kettering and UM-Flint students from India playing cricket at Mama Calvo Field near Whittier and Central. It got me thinking about just who is coming to Flint during an era when many residents are leaving.

My recent story in the New York Times chronicles the international students from more than 40 countries who are coming to Flint in record numbers. Here's how it begins:

A few months after Abhishek Y. Utekar left Mumbai, India, to start an M.B.A. program at the University of Michigan campus in Flint, his landlord gave him a driving tour of his new home. Dennis Brownfield watched out for his tenants, and he wanted Mr. Utekar to understand the dynamics of a city often defined by deindustrialization and decay. His car provided the first lesson. It was a Honda Civic with a license plate that read “GM LEFT,” a commentary on the 70,000 automotive jobs that have disappeared over the years in this birthplace of General Motors.

They rolled to a stop in the empty parking lot between the main library and Central High School, an imposing brick building shuttered because of falling enrollment and budget cuts. “Now make sure you’ve got your seatbelt on because I’m going to show you an American custom,” Mr. Brownfield said. He shifted into reverse, cranked the steering wheel hard to the right, gunned the engine and popped the clutch. The result was a dizzying, deftly executed series of backward 360s. For a final flourish, Mr. Brownfield yanked the emergency brake to abruptly change directions.

“That’s called a doughnut,” he said when they had skidded to a stop. 

“It’s how we have fun in Michigan.” 

Rattled but impressed, Mr. Utekar realized: This was going to be a lot different than India.

Read the rest of the story here.

Zeitgeist and "Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City" by Gordon Young

Several readers have asked about Zeitgeist, the San Francisco bar where the dream of reconnecting with Flint really took shape. Here are a few photos of the dive that promises "Warm Beer/Cold Women" and an excerpt from Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City.

It’s fitting that the notion of buying a house in Flint began to take shape in a bar, like so many other ill-formed and potentially disastrous ideas. I played basketball every Saturday morning at the Mission Playground in San Francisco. A collection of players would retire after the game to the grimy gravel patio of Zeitgeist, a dumpy bar that has the trappings of a tough dive without the credentials to back it up. Yes, people who ride motorcycles hang out there, but so do aging punk rockers, bike messengers, assorted hipsters, uninhibited pot smokers, and the occasional yuppie types slumming from the more upscale Marina District, all united in the desire to start drinking at 1 p.m. on a Saturday or as soon as the morning fog burns off. The Zeitgeist motto showed that it didn’t take itself too seriously: “Warm Beer / Cold Women.”
 

Although our gang of mediocre basketball players was a mixture of native Californians, Midwest transplants, and a few Texans, we were all conditioned by the exorbitant cost of local real estate, even in the midst of the Great Recession. In 2008, a few players were unsuccessfully trying to buy houses, and they were frustrated by the fact that a down market meant a two-bedroom house in a decent San Francisco neighborhood was now going for $775,000 instead of $800,000. The minor drop in price was offset by stiffer mortgage requirements that demanded 20 percent down. “Can you imagine writing a check for $160,000?” one of my friends asked. It was a big shift from the easy-
to-find, no-money-down, interest-only loans that were prevalent just a short time earlier. The kind of loans that enabled Traci and me to buy our house and pushed the planet to the brink of economic collapse.
 
After a few beers, I inevitably began regaling the Zeitgeist crew with tales of Flint gleaned from my blog, both depressing and uplifting. There was the one about the family who posted a “No Ho Zone” sign in their yard to ward off the neighborhood prostitutes. Or the retired blues musician who was nurturing a huge garden on the vacant lot near his home. And of course there were stories about all the Flint houses going for pocket change on eBay with the option of buying them by the dozen, like the jelly rolls I used to love at Dawn Donuts. With a little cocktail napkin math, we determined that I could own a Flint house for the cost of our bar tab. Wild speculation ensued. I could snap up a house in Flint, quit my job, and survive on the freelance income Traci and I could generate once we were freed from San Francisco’s exorbitant cost of living. I would be embarking on a grand adventure and helping Flint at the same time. Or I could buy a few Flint houses, rehab them, then rent them out—stabilizing the local housing market and making a modest profit at the same time. Or I could improve the city by transforming a junker into a summer house, allowing me to reconnect with Flint without abandoning San Francisco. Or instead of giving money to charity, why not buy a house, make it livable, and give it away to a needy family? The ideas came fast and furious, and the possibilities were intoxicating, perhaps because we were often intoxicated.
 

My friend M.G. understood the appeal of a Flint house. He grew up in a small town in the suburbs of Los Angeles, the kind of close-knit place where you could return books to the police station if the library was closed. He had no desire to ever live there again, but he liked the idea of it enduring more or less as he remembered it. Being a homeowner meant something to M.G. His father had immigrated from Iran, where property symbolized wealth and success. His mother was on her own at an early age, paying rent in San Francisco when she was only sixteen, so a house equaled stability and security. While I was still parsing my feelings about Flint, my motivation was fairly obvious to M.G., regardless of how many pitchers we’d finished off. 

“I think you’re selling yourself on something,” he told me one Saturday after he’d bummed a cigarette off three women at a nearby table. “You’re selling yourself this ideal of small-town America being feasible in a world that’s constantly changing. It’s a real possibility that the kind of towns we grew up in are going to disappear. They aren’t going to exist anymore. A house in Flint is your way of trying to hang on to something from your past that’s important to you.”
 
Leave it to a tipsy Persian-Irish guy from LA who had never been to the Midwest to sum up my feelings about Flint. As I unsteadily rode my old Schwinn home that day, I started to believe a house would be the best way to forge a connection with Flint and do my part to preserve the city I remembered, or what was left of it. I could make this happen. I could go home again.

— Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City

Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City by Gordon Young

On Sunday, Mark and I toured his grandparents’ old neighborhood. We slowly rolled up and down the street. There were a few abandoned houses and the charred remains of a big two-story that was probably the victim of an arsonist. We stopped in front of the house where Mark’s mom grew up, and I jumped out to take a picture. A neighbor’s door immediately flew open. A big white guy stepped out onto his front porch.
 
“What the fuck are you guys doing?” he asked, sounding more exasperated than angry. He looked tired.
 
“We’re just taking a picture of the old neighborhood,” I yelled back, embarrassed that I’d needlessly alarmed another nervous Flint resident.
 
He turned and walked slowly back inside his house. As we were driving away, I looked back and saw him watching us through his front window. An encounter like this might have angered me the previous summer, prompting me to declare that this was still my city and I had a right to be here. But I understood the place better now. I didn’t blame the guy. He was probably just trying to unwind on a Sunday morning, hoping for a chance to let his guard down. I wondered if he ever wanted to quote Bukowski and just say “Life, fuck it!” and escape to California for a few weeks of relaxation in an apartment overlooking the Pacific, like Jan and Ted.
 
It seemed like a good time to end our Sunday drive in Flint. Mark needed to get back to his wife and young son in Grosse Pointe. “I’m really glad my grandparents aren’t around to see this,” he said as we passed another burned-out house, turned the corner, and drove away.

— Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City

Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City by Gordon Young

From Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City by Gordon Young:

Delarie was the only one of six children still living in Flint. “I’ll stay here as long as my mom stays,” she said. “I see this block as the soul of the neighborhood. Every night you hear shots from the other streets, but not on our street. But I still don’t leave home without my gun. I just feel better carrying it.”

She showed me her nine-millimeter handgun, a black Taurus Ultra Slim she kept loaded with hollow-point bullets. She carried it in a small holster on her waist. The gun shattered the reassuring sense of normalcy that had enveloped me, the feeling that Civic Park wasn’t that far removed from the place where I grew up, a neighborhood where three people could spend a pleasant afternoon sitting on the porch and talking without the need for firearms. She left the gun on the table, and it was distracting. I kept glancing at it.

“She’s concerned about my safety,” Betsy explained, sensing my
discomfort.

“I’m concerned about my safety, too,” Delarie added.

Listen to the Teardown Podcast

Now's your chance to determine if I still have my Michigan accent after 20 years in California and learn about Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City at the same time. Listen to the Teardown podcast here.

Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City by Gordon Young

Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City by Gordon Young will hit bookstores in June 2013. It's available now for pre-order. Go to teardownbook.com for photos, excerpts, reviews, links to online stores like Barnes & Noble, and more.

At the height of the real estate bubble, Gordon Young and his girlfriend buy a tiny house in their dream city, San Francisco. They’re part of a larger influx of creative types moving to urban centers, drawn by the promise of fulfilling jobs, bars that offer a dizzying selection of artisanal bourbons, and the satisfaction that comes from thinking you’re in a place where important things are happening. But even as Young finds a home in a city sometimes described as 49 square miles surrounded on all sides by reality, a vital part of him still resides in industrial America in the town where he was raised: Flint, Michigan. It’s the birthplace of General Motors, “star” of the Michael Moore documentary Roger & Me, and a place that supplies the national media with never-ending fodder for “worst-of” lists.

Filled with nostalgia and compelled to help his struggling hometown, Young hatches a plan to buy a house in Flint. He embarks on a tragi-comic odyssey to rediscover the city that once supplied the country with shiny Buicks and boasted one of the highest per capita income levels in the world, but now endures a real unemployment rate pushing 40 percent. What he finds is a place of stark contrasts and dramatic stories, where an exotic dancer can afford a lavish mansion, and speculators snap up cheap houses on eBay by the dozen like jelly donuts. There are desolate blocks where only a single house is occupied, and survivors brandish shotguns and monitor police scanners. While the population plummets, the murder rate soars. Throw in an arson spree and a racially motivated serial killer and Young wonders if Flint can be saved.

And yet, he discovers glimmers of hope. He befriends a rag-tag collection of urban homesteaders and die-hard residents who refuse to give up on the city. Dave Starr, a well-armed shop rat who logged 14,647 days in a G.M. plant, battles cancer and economic decline as he joins forces with his neighbors to preserve a lone block surrounded by decay. Pastor Sherman McCathern negotiates with God in his heroic effort to transform an abandoned church and improve the lives of his congregation. Mayor Dayne Walling, a Rhodes Scholar in his thirties who spent his adult life grooming himself to run Flint, has the toughest job in politics — one that sometimes necessitates police protection for his family. And Dan Kildee, a local politician and urban planning visionary, grabs international attention — and trades jabs with Rush Limbaugh — by arguing that Flint and other troubled urban areas should manage decline instead of futilely trying to stop it.

Young’s insights, hard-hitting and often painfully funny, yield lessons for cities all over the world. He reminds us that communities are ultimately defined by people, not politics or economics. Teardown reveals that the residents of Flint are still fighting, in spite of overwhelming odds, to reinvent their city. In the end, Young learns that you can go home again. But the journey is likely to be far more agonizing and rewarding than you ever imagined.

 

Praise for Teardown

There must be a thousand good reasons to flee Flint. I can't assume there are many reasons to return. Gordon Young's Teardown supplies a few of these answers. A humorous, heartfelt and often haunting tale of a town not many could love. Fortunately for us, a few still do.

- Ben Hamper, author of Rivethead: Tales From the Assembly Line

Teardown is the tragic and somehow hilarious tale of one man's attempt to return to his hometown of Flint, Michigan. Gordon Young is a Flintoid at heart, and his candid observations about both the shrinking city and his own economic woes read heartbreakingly true.

- Novella Carpenter, author of Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer

Armed with an aluminum baseball bat and a truth-seeking pen, Gordon Young returns to the post-industrial wasteland of his hometown — Vehicle City, aka Flint, Michigan — in search of a derelict house to buy and restore. At least that's his cover story. Young's true mission is to reclaim his past in order to make sense of his present. If you're bewitched by the place where you grew up, you'll find comfort and a sense of home in the pages of Teardown.

- Jack Shafer, Reuters columnist and a former Michigander

Teardown is a funny and ultimately heartbreaking memoir. The travails of house hunting are skillfully interwoven with Gordon Young's attempt to reconcile life in his adopted city of San Francisco with his allegiance to Flint, Michigan, the troubled city of his childhood. The result is an all too contemporary American story of loyalty, loss, and finding your way home.

- Tom Pohrt, illustrator and author of Careless Rambles by John Clare, Having a Wonderful Time, and Coyote Goes Walking

Like so many other Flintites, I visit my hometown with a mix of sadness, repugnance, and anger. Flint is too easy to criticize, but I look back in gratitude for the values Flint instilled and the bonds I made that remain with me to this day. You can take the boy out of Flint, but you can't take Flint out of the boy.

- Howard Bragman, author of Where's My Fifteen Minutes?

Teardown Website

The website for Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City by Gordon Young is now up and running. It features photos, excerpts, online pre-order information, and other details about the book, which will be available in stores in June.

Check it out here.

Detropia: The Past, Present, and Future of Detroit

If you haven't had a chance to see Detropia, you should check it out. I reviewed the documentary for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette newspaper:

The filmmakers capture the haunting beauty of Detroit as it transitions from an industrial powerhouse to a demimonde where the rural and the urban intermingle. A pheasant crosses a snowy city street at night, illuminated by flickering streetlights. A rusting jungle gym is surrounded by a sea of grass gently swaying in a summer breeze. You can feel the silence that engulfs the once-bustling corners of the city. There’s an otherworldly quality to the film.

Read the entire review here.

Flint Photos: Travels to Vehicle City

Over the past three years I've traveled to Flint numerous times and taken a lot of photos while I was writing about the city. Here's a small sample, in no particular order. Some of these have appeared on Flint Expatriates in the past, some are new.