That's My Moon over Court Street: Dispatches from a life in Flint by Jan Worth-Nelson.

The essence of Flint is too often defined by outsiders. Journalists, politicians, and policymakers love to swoop in, make dire pronouncements and tenuous promises, then skip town faster than General Motors. My friend Jan Worth-Nelson is just the opposite. She moved to Vehicle City for a job, put down roots, and made it her home. That doesn't happen too often these days. Her highly nuanced relationship with a place that's hard to love is captured in these pages. She details Flint's struggles with compelling, clear-eyed prose but still manages to pinpoint what makes it unique, admirable and, yes, appealing despite all the heartache attached to this troubled spot on the Michigan map.

Here is the introduction to her new collection of essays, That's My Moon over Court Street, which is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand Flint and everything it represents.

When I arrived in Flint at the start of the '80s, I was already 30, never married, a broke social worker and former journalist, desperate for evidence my life wasn't wasting away. 

I never, ever, thought I would still be here 42 years later. But here I still am.

I lived in a walkup on Avon Street, which crosses Court Street, the main east-west
artery through the heart of the city. It was a down-at- the-heel old neighborhood, tucked
between an ugly freeway and artifacts of Flint’s glory days: sprawling brick high school,
library, art museum, planetarium. On the other side of Court, a big green park and a
fancier neighborhood which seemed unreachable.

From my upstairs dormers many nights I used to see a mysterious bearded man on a
bike slink out in the moonlight and disappear.

I eventually found out that figure was Gary Custer, founder and publisher of the little magazine that appeared on my own doorstep every month. East Village Magazine is a
scrappy little black-and-white publication that has been landing on the doorsteps of
homes, shops, and restaurants in Flint, Michigan, since 1976. Some of us rudely called
it the “East Village Idiot.” But as I learned over the years, Custer was anything but.
A Vietnam-era Navy veteran, Gary had graduated in photojournalism from the
University of Missouri. He often cited ideas about the Global Village -- he was crazy
about Marshall McLuhan. For him, that meant a passion for neighborhood preservations
efforts, and, while he sometimes seemed reclusive, he had a commitment to train
volunteers and students in community journalism.

He never married and never had any kids. His untamed long white beard made some
people wonder if he was homeless -- but he wasn’t. His apartment in a big Victorian
house was a short bike ride to the office -- a storefront owned by his brother that bore
no sign, no hours, and was frequently locked.

Sometimes, nursing a pipe, he worked at the office all night, hammering away in the
midst of a firetrap tunnel of piled-up folders, books, old copies, on a succession of hand-
me-down computers, piecing together the eight-page product that was, I think it is pretty
safe to say, his whole life.

East Village Magazine focuses on the kind of journalism that matters to every citizen
who cares about what is happening in their town. Over the years that included news
from City Hall, city council meetings, the school board, zoning issues, blight elimination,
crime, healthcare, local politics, and neighborhood associations. And, because it is in
Flint Michigan, the abandonment of Flint by General Motors, the State-appointed
“emergency manager,” and, of course, the Flint water crisis.

But Gary always included a story that described everyday life in Flint. He showed us
that no matter what was going on at City Hall, people continued to live their lives. He
called it “Village Life” as a nod to McLuhan.

Eventually he found some of my writing here and there and, after another back page
columnist left, he asked me to join in. I said no for several years.

When Gary finally snared me to write the column, I was already well into middle age,
and the inexplicable survival of the little magazine had become almost legendary. By
then I lived in my own house, miraculously in that leafy historic neighborhood on the
south side of Court I had envied decades before. I am still there.

These are not the essays of a young person, though I was often playful. I didn’t feel my
age; I was furiously emerging from a long- failed marriage and launching a new one,
and I was half-pissed all the time at not getting enough respect in my university job.
Writing the column was freeing and cathartic.

Gary was a cantankerous editor, and he and I used to fight about words. He was a
subject-verb-object man. I liked words like lachrymose and duende -- not to be a
showoff, I insisted, but for the pleasures of it. I was teaching my poetry students to write
sestinas and pantoums, for chrissake. He stood for simple sentences and he worried
about the reader. I wanted to take the reader along with me. The job was to write “local,”
and he liked best when I observed my daily life - the kind of sensory detail, beloved or
troubled specifics, that kept us both going through our ups and downs.

In the end, he let me write pretty much whatever I wanted. That was the gift of it. At first
he told me to write 800 words so it would fit on the back page. But when I had more to
say he didn’t fight me much -- he said, “Write until you’re done and then stop.” When I
came in, usually on Sunday afternoons, to proof my column, he poured me Bushmills in
a chipped mug, and we would talk about everything -- repeating gossip and legends of
the city, sometimes with the door wide open to the scent of it -- acrid and redolent with
ghosts. A wild rosebush twisted around the fence outside. I have repeated all this so
many times: I cherished those Sunday afternoons.

I never got paid for it, except for the Bushmills. Once in a while he’d send me an email:
“good work.”

Gary Custer died suddenly in 2015, just weeks after he’d learned he got a five-figure
grant from the C.S. Mott Foundation -- enough to keep the magazine going for least
another year. I’d just retired from teaching writing, and so I was free.

For the next five years, I was the editor. I didn’t really want to do it, but I got roped in,
and hacked away grumpily at the financial and technical thickets. My husband, an LA
transplant, faithfully pitched in. We got renewal grants each year. I wrote far fewer few
Village Life columns from then on, getting other people to join in. We expanded the
magazine to 12, then 16, and now often 20 pages.

In 2020, after a series of personal crises, burned out by the Trump era and smothered in

the worst of the pandemic, I stepped back. Though I’ve contributed several columns
since, as I have stated, I was tired of words. I handed the editorial reins to Tom Travis,
who has been ably guiding East Village Magazine ever since.

For years, my second husband and I also commuted back and forth from an apartment
at the LA Harbor, but always, always, I came back to my home in the old house off
Court Street, where my life, familiar and beloved, proceeds. What I wrote about it, even
when I was perched on the lip of the Pacific, always seemed to turn to Flint. My roots
have gone down deep.

I have a lot of friends here, people as enmeshed in complex life journeys as me, and I
love that so many of them have tolerated appearing in my columns.  If you are looking
for evidence of advocacy or political analyses, this collection is not for you. Throughout,
my inclination was not to "promote" Flint or offer arguments or solutions to its repeated struggles.  What I had to offer, instead, were my eyes and ears and my heart, put together in collages of what I hope are decent sentences and respectful stories -- a palette of dramas, small and large, collected one by one, from my own life in this place. 

In 2018, I got myself my first (and only) tattoo. It’s a semicolon – to me, a powerful
reminder that there is so often so much more to a story – certainly true in my life, and
absolutely true in Flint, Michigan. At about the same time, I inherited a Buddha from the
back yard of my beloved friend, the late poet Grayce Scholt. The Buddha is missing its
right hand. I don’t know the story of how that damage occurred, but I do know that the
broken Buddha, who now sits quietly in my own back yard, still retains a big broad
smile. It has become a cherished symbol, for me, of incongruous joy and of the
community that has become my home.

My adult life in Flint has had some dark times, and I haven’t been spared from hard and
stupid things. These essays describe the improbable happiness I have found so often
here. How could that happen in a town like this, even through some of its toughest
times? These columns, one by one, represent a kind of answer, the vindication of
claiming my life in this complicated city: to look at it, to love it, sometimes to despair
about it, and to write it into the cornucopia of our collective human lives.

— Jan Worth-Nelson

The Infrastructure Solution for Struggling Cities Like Flint, Michigan

Dan Kildee on Jane Avenue in Flint in June 2010. (Photo by Gordon Young)

In the newly released revised and updated edition of Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City, U.S. Rep. Dan Kildee endorses a massive infrastructure project to help troubled cities like Flint. 

The water crisis is the latest egregious symptom of the punishing global economic forces, along with misguided Federal and state policies, that penalize places like Flint. It will take a  monumental national effort to turn things around. That means an investment of federal and state money that gives Flint a chance to prosper but might not pay dividends for years.

 

Dan Kildee, Flint's Democratic congressman, has championed downtrodden cities for decades. He believes he has the solution to achieve this seemingly impossible goal. We both grew up in the Civic Park neighborhood at a time when the city was slipping but still had a lot to offer. Neighborhood kids had to decide which of the dozens of free summer programs to attend. It was a far cry from today’s Flint.

 

Kildee believes a massive program that devotes several trillion dollars to rebuilding the country’s infrastructure has the greatest chance of someday getting support in Washington. And if special emphasis is given to Flint, Youngstown, Gary and cities like them, it could function as a new Marshall Plan to “reset” these troubled areas, much the way the U.S. helped rebuild Europe after World War II.

 

“I don’t think we can chip away at the problem,” he told me. “We need a big, bold, and very significant effort to help areas where you have chronic poverty. Until we fix the fundamental problems, we are really just managing the decline.”

 

Kildee envisions clearing away the thousands of abandoned structures in distressed cities. Extra funding would be used to rehabilitate abandoned factory sites and provide tax credits for developers to build on them. Cities would also get resources to right-size their aging, inefficient water and sewer systems. Because these projects would take years to complete, job programs could train the chronically unemployed to complete some of the work.

 

It’s a clear-eyed plan that doesn’t downplay the problems facing Flint. I want to believe this could all come to pass, but I also know that Flint is a place where optimism gets its ass kicked on a regular basis.

 

Kildee didn't try to reassure me. He simply pointed out that there aren’t very many alternatives, other than tinkering around the edges. “It may well be that this does not happen anytime soon,” he said,” but it will never happen if we don’t define what the real solution is for Flint. And it will never happen if we don’t try.” 

I agree, but I was skeptical Washington would ever approve such an initiative on the scale needed to make a real difference. But Biden's recent proposal — and its positive reception from the public — has left me cautiously optimistic.

White House officials said the proposal’s combination of spending and tax credits would translate into 20,000 miles of rebuilt roads, repairs to the 10 most economically important bridges in the country, the elimination of lead pipes from the nation’s water supplies and a long list of other projects intended to create millions of jobs in the short run and strengthen American competitiveness in the long run.

Flint offers many lessons. One of them is that small, scattered solutions to monumental problems seldom result in real progress. An ambitious infrastructure initiative can change the fortunes of places like Flint across the country. Let's hope it actually happens.

Order the updated paperback edition of Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City

The revised and updated paperback edition of Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City is available now at Amazon and other booksellers. Or order directly from the University of California Press here and get a 30% discount. Just use coupon code 17M6662 at checkout.

PRAISE FOR TEARDOWN

“One can read Teardown and go 'My, my, my! What a horrid town! Thank God I don't live there!' Oh, but you do. Just as the 'Roger & Me Flint' of the 1980s was the precursor to a wave of downsizing that eventually hit every American community, Gordon Young's Flint of 2013, as so profoundly depicted in this book, is your latest warning of what's in store for you — all of you, no matter where you live — in the next decade. The only difference between your town and Flint is that the Grim Reaper just likes to visit us first. It's all here in Teardown, a brilliant chronicle of the Mad Maxization of a once great American city.”
– MICHAEL MOORE, FILMMAKER, AUTHOR, ACTIVIST

“A poignant, often funny look at an iconic Rust Belt city struggling to recover.”
– VANESSA BUSH, BOOKLIST

“Young shines a spotlight on a broken city and the efforts of those desperate to save it, but this is also the story of a man confronting a crisis of identity and finding hope where there seemed to be none.”
– PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

“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, POLITICO

Flint Water Crisis: From Homes to Schools

Erica L. Green of The New York Times reports:

Five years after Michigan switched Flint’s water supply to the lead-saturated Flint River from Lake Huron, the city’s lead crisis has migrated from its homes to its schools, where neurological and behavioral problems — real or feared — among students are threatening to overwhelm the education system.The contamination of this long-struggling city’s water exposed nearly 30,000 schoolchildren to a neurotoxin known to have detrimental effects on children’s developing brains and nervous systems. Requests for special education or behavioral interventions began rising four years ago, when the water contamination became public, bolstering a class-action lawsuit that demanded more resources for Flint’s children.

Read the rest here.

Remembering the Flint Sit-Down Strike

Journalist, author and all-around great guy Ted McClelland, who has written extensively about Flint and the Midwest, is working on a much-anticipated book about the Flint Sit-Down Strike.

Ted is interested in connecting with family members of strikers to hear their stories and memories.

Please feel free to contact Ted directly at 312-608-5665 or via email at tedmcclelland@gmail.com

The Fading Murals of Civic Park: An Excerpt of "Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City" by Gordon Young

Gordon Young attempts to enliven a family photo of his mom, grandparents, and older brother in front of his Civic Park home on the day his brother graduated from high school in June of 1972.

In honor of the centennial of the Civic Park neighborhood in Flint, Michigan, this is an excerpt from "Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City" by Gordon Young, who grew up in Civic Park on Bassett Place.

Fading Murals

I had a plan for figuring out if it made sense to buy a house in Civic Park. My goal was to discover someone who was maintaining a home despite the challenges facing my old neighborhood. A holdout. A dreamer. I needed to find inspiration. My friends John and Christine were obvious examples of residents who hadn’t given up hope, but I wanted to know if there were more people like them, other diehards fighting to ensure that the neighborhood had a future.I would drive through Civic Park until I spotted a house in good condition. Then I’d just go up, knock on the door and try to talk with the owner. If there was no answer, I’d track down a phone number and call to set up an interview. I figured this was the best way to get the unvarnished truth about life in the neighborhood. Numerous friends pointed out that this was not the safest plan, but I figured if I couldn’t find people who felt comfortable having a conversation with me, then Civic Park was no place to buy a house.

Like the rest of Flint, Civic Park had an elaborate history. Only a few miles northwest of downtown, it is one of the country’s first subdivisions and one of the largest districts listed on the National Historic Register. The development began in 1917 as a private venture to create housing for autoworkers and their families flooding the city. After World War I, the project was taken over directly by GM, which formed the Modern Housing Corporation to avoid the embarrassment of shop rats living in tents and tar-paper shacks surrounding the factories. The company had real concerns that substandard living conditions would hurt its ability to recruit and retain workers.

The creation of Civic Park shows how fast and loose life was in an industrial boomtown. This was not an era that required elaborate environmental impact reports or a time-consuming public approval process for a massive housing development. It also provides yet another illustration of Charles Stewart Mott’s power and influence.

One morning in 1917, a survey crew headed by a twenty-six-year-old named Charles Branch was preparing lots for new houses on the far East Side. The workers were surprised when a well-polished automobile cut across the empty field, stopping near the surveying equipment, and none other than Charlie Sugar stepped out and started a conversation with Branch.

Mott: “Did you read in the paper last night that we were going to put 10,000 men to work at Buick and Chevrolet?”

Branch: “Yes, I did.”

Mott: “When I woke up this morning I thought of something. Where are we going to put them? How soon can you start building ten thousand houses?”

Branch: “I can send out a surveying crew in the morning to make a boundary survey if I know where to send them.”

That’s how Branch was hired to create the initial plat and street design of Civic Park. A more modest goal of one thousand houses was soon established, but they needed to be built as quickly as possible. A work camp that would rival many small towns was created to accommodate 4,600 workers. There were ninety-six bunkhouses and two commissaries that could feed 1,500 at a single sitting, along with barbershops, shoe repair shops, and several open-air theaters. A railroad line was built to carry two thousand tons of materials from the Chevy plant to Civic Park. At one point, trains left the supply station every six minutes, twenty-four hours a day. Five sawmills cut hemlock and yellow pine around the clock. In just nine months between 1919 and 1920, GM built 950 houses of varying design on 280 acres of farmland, a staggering accomplishment that rivals the pace of new construction in places like Las Vegas and Phoenix during the more recent housing bubble. It was not unusual for a new home to be completed in seven hours from start to finish.

More than two dozen variations on eight different models were available to homeowners, including the New England Colonial, the Civic Park Saltbox, and the Urban Traditional. “A typical home had five or six rooms, a slate roof, an open porch and a basement,” reads the historic-site marker. “Curved streets, planned park areas and tree-lined boulevards added to the attractiveness of the community.”

Bassett Place, named after a former Buick president, is one of those curved streets. My childhood home sits midblock. It was not built until the late twenties, after the initial Civic Park construction spree. It faces a sprawling park, one of the last projects completed by GM’s Modern Housing Corporation, with baseball diamonds, tennis courts, and a stretch of woods once filled with trails perfect for BMX bike riding and illicit cigarette smoking.

I hadn’t intended to start my search on my old street. It was probably just muscle memory that led me back to Bassett Place. Over the winter, I had checked the property records and connected with the current owner to try and arrange an official visit. The phone conversation had been awkward. “You’re from California and you want me to let you inside of my house?” she’d asked. “I’ll have to call you back on that.” She never did. Who could blame her? I had given up on ever seeing the inside, but now I noticed there was no car in the driveway. I called the number that was saved in my cell phone. No answer. I parked across the street and stared at the house. Thanks to the dull utility of aluminum siding, it was surprisingly unchanged since the day we moved out twenty-five years earlier. I noticed a familiar chip in the wood steps leading to the screened-in front porch. I called the number again. Still no answer. There didn’t appear to be anyone home.

I had a sudden urge to see the small square of lawn in back where I played football as a kid, the chain-link fence I jumped in the winter to save time getting to the Dupont Street bus. I wondered if the tree where I used to read my Encyclopedia Brown books nestled in the comfortable crook of two big branches was still standing. I wanted to catch a glimpse of the Flint I remembered. I knew this was probably a mistake. I was bound to be disappointed. I was starting to regain my sense of familiarity with Flint, shedding some of the trepidation I’d felt the previous summer. I wasn’t sure if that was such a good thing. I hesitated, then got out of the car and headed for the driveway. I’d just take a quick look.

Lingering uninvited in the yard of a house in Flint is not a wise move, but it was all so instantly familiar that my nervousness disappeared in the June heat. There was the tree. There was the fence. There was the pint-sized, makeshift football field with a flowerbed doubling as the sideline. But I was surprised to see something I had completely forgotten—the peeling remnants of a mural on the side of the neighbor’s garage. My sister had painted it in the midseventies, an escapist desert landscape with an orange sun setting over a purple mesa surrounded by golden sands and the occasional cactus. It was similar in style and temperament to the airbrushed scenes adorning many customized vans in Flint at a time when Earth, Wind & Fire was battling the Eagles for supremacy on car radios and eight-track tape decks throughout the city, another reflection of Flint’s racial divide.

The garage, listing badly and engulfed in shrubbery, hadn’t been painted in more than three decades. It once belonged to our neighbor, a stylish elderly woman named Mrs. Procunier. I played gin rummy with her on Tuesday nights when I was a kid. We would sit at a little table in her kitchen, taking turns dealing while she worked her way through a pack of Parliaments and I polished off the Brach’s candy she supplied. I also mowed her lawn, shoveled her snow, and bought her cigarettes at the nearby Double D Market, now a vacant lot dotted with fast-growing ghetto palms across the street from the recently shuttered Civic Park School. To allow me to procure smokes at such a tender age, she wrote a note on a piece of scrap paper in her perfect cursive: “Gordie Young has permission to purchase cigarettes for me. He is my employee.”

Mrs. Procunier also signed off on my sister’s plan to paint the mural. She didn’t seem thrilled with the idea, but she was kindhearted. After all, she had forgiven me for almost burning the garage to the ground during my extended flirtation with pyromania. (Take a lighter and a can of Lysol and you’ve got yourself a flame thrower.) She didn’t live long after the mural was completed. She enjoyed a cigarette the day she died of pneumonia, perhaps one purchased by me. She bequeathed our family two thousand dollars and a light blue Buick LeSabre in her will.

Dan Kildee’s younger brother Mike and his wife then moved into the house. They drove a Renault Alliance and made out in their backyard, which made them seem wildly exotic. As if to counteract Mrs. Procunier’s unhealthy smoking habit, Mike was an avid runner who put up a basketball hoop on the garage. I remember him telling me once when we were shooting baskets that he thought the mural was pretty cool.

In one of my recent conversations with Dan, I had asked for his verdict on Civic Park. He’d spent the bulk of his childhood just five blocks away on Genesee Street. “That neighborhood was at the tipping point about eight years ago, and it tipped,” he said, frowning. “The wrong way,” he added unnecessarily.

My old neighborhood was clearly in the crosshairs of a revolutionary urban-planning experiment. The shrinking-city concept is a rational approach for a punch-drunk municipality with few options, but standing in my old backyard in a neighborhood on the edge of extinction, despite its historic status, I felt the emotional reluctance of many to embrace the new approach. As I looked at the decaying mural my sister painted in the twilight of Flint’s glory years, I understood how agonizing it was for a city to cut its losses and let go of the past, to walk away from so many memories. It felt like accepting defeat.

Back in my car, I drove the streets of Civic Park, window down to better appreciate the beautiful weather, passing familiar landmarks, or what was left of them. My pal Jerry’s house on Delmar Avenue was now a vacant lot. Another friend’s home on the same block was abandoned, but the railroad ties his dad used to define their flowerbeds in the seventies were still visible. The two-story on the corner of Humboldt and West Dayton—known as “the bachelors’ house” because four young guys who were very popular with the ladies lived there—looked like it had been hit by a tornado. The windows were broken, and the front door was wide open, affording a view of the living room where numerous parties had raged. A couple of blocks away, Rivethead author Ben Hamper’s old house had seen better days. I slowed down for properties that seemed promising, only to discover that they were gutted, nothing more than shells. This was going to be harder than I thought. Blight was in abundant supply; a well-maintained Dutch Colonial defying time, the elements, and complex global economic trends was not.

But while the perfect house was difficult to spot, I was certainly attracting a lot of attention. Judging from the icy stares I got from the few people I passed on the street, I was a highly suspicious character. White guy, short hair, Ray-Bans. There were two obvious possibilities—cop or misguided suburbanite trolling for drugs. The pessimistic might add a third option—a random, crazy muthafucka. I felt the urge to yell out the window, “It’s okay, I used to live here.” After all, I regularly covered these same streets by foot, bike, and skateboard as a kid. I knew these houses. I’d scouted all the shortcuts and gaps in backyard fences. I still remembered where the unfriendly dogs once lived.

I didn’t get too excited when I spotted an impressive wooden sign in the yard of a corner house proclaiming, “Welcome to Milbourne Avenue Block Club / Working Together for a Better Neighborhood.” I knew that well-intentioned block clubs frequently couldn’t compete with the forces of decline in Flint. These signs were scattered around the city, often acting as tombstones for blocks that didn’t make it.

But Milbourne between West Dayton and West Hamilton wasn’t dead yet. The curbs lining the street were painted white. Many residents had planted red flowers in the parkway between street and sidewalk. Closer inspection revealed that the flowers were fake, indicating a thrifty pragmatism, a realism that might ensure long-term survival. There was only one vacant lot. A few houses were abandoned, but only a couple were boarded, burned out, or obviously empty. The occupied homes were painted and well kept. Yards were mowed. The random trash that littered so many other blocks was nowhere to be found. A TV news crew looking to capture the decline of Civic Park wouldn’t shoot on this block.

And there were actual people visible on the street.

An older black couple sat on lawn chairs in the driveway of an immaculate yellow house. A statue of the Virgin Mary looked out over the front yard. The walkway to the steps was covered in black Astroturf and flanked with running lights. The front of the house was decorated with black shutters and one of those eagles you’d expect to find in an Ethan Allen catalog. If not for the bars on the first-floor windows, it looked like a typical suburban house. Down the street, a woman on her hands and knees was planting flowers. Real ones. At another house, a man on a tall ladder was trimming a tree with a handsaw.

I drove slowly down the street, wondering if I was engaging in magical thinking. Was I looking so hard for signs of hope that I was inventing them? I checked out two adjoining blocks just to make sure; they were shabby, abandoned, and empty. They resembled a movie set after production had shut down.

I looped back around to Milbourne. Instead of a single house, I’d stumbled on almost an entire block making a stand against seemingly inexorable decline. I stopped the car and basked in a little of the useless nostalgia I’d vowed to avoid. With the humidity building as the afternoon stretched toward evening and the birds chirping from the trees above, this could have easily been a typical Civic Park street on a hot summer day in the seventies. It could have been the Flint I remembered.

I noticed two black women—one older and holding a small dog, the other younger with short, bleached hair—watching me from the side porch of the gray house with the block-club sign in the yard. Though I was excited to find their street, they didn’t seem thrilled to discover me surveying the situation. I walked over, introduced myself, and asked if they had time to talk. They agreed with a shrug.

I checked out the house as I walked up the driveway. The shingles needed a fresh coat of paint, but the planters near the forbidding wrought-iron security door were filled with healthy flowers. There were

new eavestroughs on one section of the roof. It seemed like a house owned by people who still cared but were short on funds.

I took a seat at a glass-top patio table with Betsy, who was just shy of her seventieth birthday, and her forty-three-year-old daughter, Delarie. Betsy had tinted wireless glasses and was wearing a black T-shirt. She looked comfortable on the shady porch, holding a little black Yorkipoo named Quasi on her lap. “There’s a lot of drugs and gangs in the neighborhood since you lived here,” Betsy said, sounding tired and touching the silver cross she wore on a chain around her neck. “But our block is a lot quieter.”

Delarie had a beautiful smile and seemed ten years younger than me, but we had both graduated from Flint high schools in 1984. We ran though a list of people we might know but failed to find a connection, illustrating the gulf between a white Catholic school kid and a black public school student. But like many conversations I had with Flintoids, the initial, practical suspicion quickly evaporated. Once they trusted you, Flint residents were anything but guarded. Betsy and Delarie seemed somewhat bemused by my enthusiasm for the block, agreeing that Milbourne was better than most in the neighborhood but tempering my exuberance with the perspective that comes with being an actual resident. “Civic Park has really gone downhill, but I have hope,” Delarie said. “This street is trying to help make up for the rest of the neighborhood.”

Betsy and her family ended up here almost by accident. She was living about a mile to the east when she spotted a rent-to-own sign in the yard of the house on a trip to the Double D Market to buy groceries in 1991. She liked the oversize lot—a perfect place for her eleven grandchildren and five great-grandchildren to play. “I prayed to God to give me this house with a big yard, and it worked out,” she said. “I like my corner.”

The house became a gathering spot for family and neighborhood kids. There was room for an above-ground pool, a swing set, a trampoline, and a badminton net. Betsy was known as “Granny” to the children; Delarie was “Mama,” regardless of whether they were relatives or not. But the kids grew up, and then the board of education closed Civic Park School in response to dwindling enrollment and budget cuts. “I really miss hearing little kids in the neighborhood,” Betsy said. “Sometimes I feel lost and alone without them.”

Delarie added, “They made it seem normal.”

Delarie raised two boys in the neighborhood. She rented a house across the street—now abandoned—for several years before moving in

with her mom. The boys were eighteen and twenty-three now and still lived with them. The youngest was working on his GED, hoping to join the army. If all went well, he would be in boot camp at Fort Bennington in July. “He had some trouble in school,” she explained. “I’m trying to save him, because if you stay around here you can get bitter.”

Betsy had moved to Flint from Mississippi in search of opportunity when she was thirty-five. She joined her sister, who had already migrated north. Betsy’s time in Flint had not been easy. She was working at a restaurant and lounge on New Year’s Eve many years ago when she slipped while carrying a container of hot grease and suffered severe burns. She underwent five skin-graft surgeries on her neck and face. Although she won a $2.5 million judgment against the restaurant, she was never able to collect. “The restaurant didn’t have that kind of money,” she explained.

Betsy’s husband had died in 2007, not long after he retired from GM. The day of the funeral, she was sitting with Quasi when the puppy put its paws on her chest and Betsy felt a sharp pain. After a visit to the doctor, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Betsy had children in North Carolina and Georgia who wanted her to move in with them, but she was undecided. “I’m a survivor, but I’m not sure I can take care of this house,” she said. “Then again, I’m used to having a place of my own. All I’d have is a room at my kid’s house. I’m not sure which direction I’ll go. I’m just not sure if I’ll stay in Flint.”

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.

I asked what they thought of Dan Kildee’s shrinking-city concept. It got a cold reaction, even from two residents who might leave the city to escape its problems. “There are parts of Flint where you can sit on your porch and see empty lots for two or three blocks,” Betsy said. “I don’t want that to happen here. That’s not going to help me. That’s just going to make me an easier target.”

Delarie repeated a persistent rumor. “You know the land bank is burning down houses all over the city to get rid of them.”

As so often happened in Flint, the glimmer of hope I had felt just twenty minutes earlier was fading away. Betsy and Delarie exhibited the contradictory feelings I discovered practically everywhere in the city. They defended their block and the memories they had created there. They were proud of this place. But they were also weary, and it was clear that it might not take all that much for them to join the Flint diaspora, to head to North Carolina or Georgia or Mississippi and leave the challenges of Civic Park behind.

“But what’s happening on this block to make it better?” I asked, trying to get back to a positive topic. “Why’s Milbourne different from all the other blocks?”

Betsy told me that a black congregation had taken over the once all-white church just around the corner. Community Presbyterian had given way to Joy Tabernacle. The pastor was named Sherman McCathern. “He’s doing everything he can to help,” she said. “And Dave Starr runs the block club. He’s trying hard, too. You should meet both of them.”

It turned out I was in luck. There was a block-club meeting scheduled for the next day.