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

Is Flint, Michigan Home to "Genuine Citizenship?"

Randall Mawer of the Lost Coast Review writes:

"The style of Teardown is Rolling-Stone-style journalism, relatively informal, strongly first person, loosely organized. But there is modern history, too, and wide-ranging inquiry into economics and (especially) politics. The strongest narrative interest, though, springs from Gordon’s contacts with Flintites old and new, people doing what he is contemplating. They are attractive, enthusiastic, clearly willing to help Gordon with his project. The heart of the writer’s ambition is not the hypothetical house, effective symbol of the whole--the city, the citizenry--though it may be. This rather is the friendships of the house-holders, who provide one another expertise, save one another cash, and embody the genuine citizenship represented by loyalty to one’s block, one’s lawn, one’s “residence” in the largest sense of the word. The small, locally owned coffee shop, market, and bar are thus extensions of the homes, and the lack of waste ground between them shows quite literally how such residences fuse into real community."

An Interview with the Author of "Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City"

Scott Atkinson of The Flint Journal profiles Teardown: Memoir of a Shrinking City and interviews me in a story that came out today. He writes:

Readers are introduced to a variety of characters who show that Flint can't be defined by just one person or neighborhood. Early on, we meet a shirtless panhandler claiming it's his birthday before screaming obscenities. Throughout the book there several people trying to save their neighborhoods from blight and crime, others just wondering if it will ever stop.

Through all the people, he offers these contrasting views of the city — the evidence of its decline as well as its hope for its future. The most telling example might be when a well-to-do couple hosts a fancy dinner party in their Carriage Town home and has to close their curtains to block the guests' view of their next-door neighbor holding a knife to a man's throat and screaming, "Don't you know I love you?"

Yes, I'm now blogging about myself being interviewed by someone else. Seems weird. Soon I'll be referring to myself in the third person. Since I've already gone this far, I might as well quote myself: 

FJ: One thing that stood out to me throughout the book was the way you balanced the different sides of Flint. You wrote about some of the humorous and charming aspect of Flint, but those always seemed counterbalanced by some of the very real problems here. Was that a conscious effort?

GY: Flint requires the ability to compartmentalize. You have to be able to evaluate the good and the bad and keep it all in perspective. I don't think it does anyone any good to sugarcoat what's happened to the city. It's in a socioeconomic freefall, and things could still get worse. At the same time, there are a lot of positive things happening in the city. And I met so many people who have not given up. They love Flint. They're still fighting to make it a better place. It's important to remember that the city is more than a collection of economic stats. It's a collection of people, and I wanted to tell a story about those people. Life in Flint can be sad and funny and heartbreaking and inspiring. I tried to capture all of that. It's the opposite of the kind of shoddy slideshow journalism that Forbes does when it produces those endless lists of America's most miserable cities and all of that. I think that's a complete waste of time. I don't think it's journalism. I don't think it's informing anybody of anything. So what I tried to do was provide something that was accurate yet heartfelt.

Nothin' But Blue Skies

Chicago journalist and Lansing native Edward McClelland has a new book that chronicles the "story of how the country's industrial heartland grew, boomed, bottomed, and hopes to be reborn."

Nothin' But Blue Skies covers various cities in the Great Lakes Region, including Flint, which gets two separate chapters. I just finished an advance copy, and McClelland provides an insightful and sympathetic take on the people and places that make up the Rust Belt. In particular, he captures the agonizing contradictions of trying to run a shrinking city.

"The emergency manager law was written to rescue cities from corrupt or incompetent mayors," McClelland writes. "[Dayne] Walling, a cross between a Webelo and a West Wing policy wonk, was not corrupt. Nor was he incompetent. It would have been impossible to balance the budget of a city that's lost half its people and over 90 percent of its middle-class jobs without making it look even more like the set of Escape from Flint. If a city is too poor to afford democracy, it's not a city anymore." 

 Nothin' But Blue Skies is a must read for anyone trying to understand the forces aligned against cities like Flint. Thankfully, it also presents compelling, heart-felt portraits of the people fighting to save the city.

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?