A while back, I placed my tongue squarely in cheek and suggested that people buy second homes in Detroit, where the average price of a house is now just $7,500.
Well, it’s actually happening. In fact, opportunistic couples are buying up entire blocks and turning them into little urban oases. From the New York Times, via Ryan Avent:
A local couple, Mitch Cope and Gina Reichert, started the ball
rolling. An artist and an architect, they recently became the proud owners of a one-bedroom house in East Detroit for just $1,900. Buying it wasn’t the craziest idea. The neighborhood is almost, sort of, half-decent. Yes, the occasional crack addict still commutes in from the suburbs but a large, stable Bangladeshi community has also been moving in.
So what did $1,900 buy? The run-down bungalow had already been stripped of its appliances and wiring by the city’s voracious scrappers. But for Mitch that only added to its appeal, because he now had the opportunity to renovate it with solar heating, solar electricity and low-cost, high-efficiency appliances.
Buying that first house had a snowball effect. Almost immediately, Mitch and Gina bought two adjacent lots for even less and, with the help of friends and local youngsters, dug in a garden. Then they bought the house next door for $500, reselling it to a pair of local artists for a $50 profit. When they heard about the $100 place down the street, they called their friends Jon and Sarah.
“Detroit right now is just this vast, enormous canvas where anything imaginable can be accomplished,” says the Times author, Toby Barlow. “In a way, a strange, new American dream can be found here, amid the crumbling, semi-majestic ruins of a half-century’s industrial decline.” I find this fascinating. Politicians talk all the time about the ingenuity and resilience of the American people. We all know that rhetoric can feel empty at times. But as this country begins its climb out of this recession, real life examples of that fighting spirit will abound. And the places that were hit the hardest will and already are seeing them first.
