Read Online You Don't Have to Live Like This by Benjamin Markovits - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Benjamin Markovits
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took on a lot of short-term debt. You needed someone willing to play God, or king.
This, as Clay liked to say, was Robert’s job.
He had a dry, cordial host-at-a-cocktail-party TV manner, which wasn’t entirely humorless. Let me introduce you to a few ideas, very dear friends of mine.
“This city,” he said, posing for the cameras in front of Michigan Central Station, in his tasseled loafers and holding lightly onto his linen tie, to keep the wind from blowing it in his face, “lies at the center of so much of what America is talking about and worrying about today: the death of the middle class and the rise of social inequality, the collapse of the real estate market and the decline of manufacturing, the failure of the American labor movement and the entrenchment, almost fifty years after Martin Luther King led the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, of a black underclass. Detroit at its peak had a population of almost two million people—it is now roughly a third of that, which means, let me put it this way, that for every family still living here, their neighbors on either side of them have moved away. And their houses—you can see this for yourself because we’re going to show them to you—sit either empty or boarded up, or half burned down, or they’ve been destroyed altogether, and grass and trees are growing in their place. What we are about to witness is a small experiment in regeneration—an attempt to repopulate these neighborhoods, to rebuild these houses, to revive these communities. It is, by its nature, a very local solution to some of the deeper and broader problems America faces today. But if you can fix it here, you can fix it anywhere.”
In practice what all this meant is that Robert and a consortium of investors were buying up a section of the city—about two thousand houses, six hundred acres’ worth of empty plots and a handful of derelict industrial sites. A few hundred homeowners refused to sell. Even a landgrab like this was small potatoes compared to the scale of the problem. Part of what’s wrong with Detroit is that it’s too big. Physically, I mean. Almost 140 square miles big. So five square miles don’t add up to much. At best Robert hoped to add ten thousand economically active residents to a city that had lost almost a million in the last forty years. Which is why the business model needed to be profitable, so that it could be reproduced in Cleveland, Buffalo, Erie, Milwaukee, East Baltimore, etc.
The consortium planned to rent out the houses, business units, and land very cheaply, not just to individuals but also to groups of people who would organize themselves over the Internet and put in bids. Starting-from-Scratch-in-America was the name of the site—it showed houses and plots of land like an airline check-in chart. Of course, part of what he was selling was just the organizational tools. People who wanted to start over might hesitate to go it alone. But if they stayed long enough, and the neighborhood went up, they also got a share of the profit. That was the other part of the deal, a right-to-buy scheme.
Robert worried that no one would bite, but in fact Beatrice kept having to add capacity to the server. At its peak, Starting-from-Scratch-in-America received a hundred thousand fresh hits a day, from all around the world. Mayor Bloomberg in New York had just suggested opening up Detroit to international immigration. Robert had his lawyers talking to the ICE as well. A bid was “full” when every house and plot in a particular neighborhood had been spoken for by the members of a group. This is when it came to us in committee.
In other words, we sat around all day looking at Facebook, deciding who would get to join our village. Like a bunch of assholes,as Tony kept reminding us. There were Beatrice and Tony, Clay Greene and me, Robert himself sometimes, Johnny Mkieze and Bill Russo. Johnny was living in Grosse Pointe, three blocks away from his childhood
This, as Clay liked to say, was Robert’s job.
He had a dry, cordial host-at-a-cocktail-party TV manner, which wasn’t entirely humorless. Let me introduce you to a few ideas, very dear friends of mine.
“This city,” he said, posing for the cameras in front of Michigan Central Station, in his tasseled loafers and holding lightly onto his linen tie, to keep the wind from blowing it in his face, “lies at the center of so much of what America is talking about and worrying about today: the death of the middle class and the rise of social inequality, the collapse of the real estate market and the decline of manufacturing, the failure of the American labor movement and the entrenchment, almost fifty years after Martin Luther King led the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, of a black underclass. Detroit at its peak had a population of almost two million people—it is now roughly a third of that, which means, let me put it this way, that for every family still living here, their neighbors on either side of them have moved away. And their houses—you can see this for yourself because we’re going to show them to you—sit either empty or boarded up, or half burned down, or they’ve been destroyed altogether, and grass and trees are growing in their place. What we are about to witness is a small experiment in regeneration—an attempt to repopulate these neighborhoods, to rebuild these houses, to revive these communities. It is, by its nature, a very local solution to some of the deeper and broader problems America faces today. But if you can fix it here, you can fix it anywhere.”
In practice what all this meant is that Robert and a consortium of investors were buying up a section of the city—about two thousand houses, six hundred acres’ worth of empty plots and a handful of derelict industrial sites. A few hundred homeowners refused to sell. Even a landgrab like this was small potatoes compared to the scale of the problem. Part of what’s wrong with Detroit is that it’s too big. Physically, I mean. Almost 140 square miles big. So five square miles don’t add up to much. At best Robert hoped to add ten thousand economically active residents to a city that had lost almost a million in the last forty years. Which is why the business model needed to be profitable, so that it could be reproduced in Cleveland, Buffalo, Erie, Milwaukee, East Baltimore, etc.
The consortium planned to rent out the houses, business units, and land very cheaply, not just to individuals but also to groups of people who would organize themselves over the Internet and put in bids. Starting-from-Scratch-in-America was the name of the site—it showed houses and plots of land like an airline check-in chart. Of course, part of what he was selling was just the organizational tools. People who wanted to start over might hesitate to go it alone. But if they stayed long enough, and the neighborhood went up, they also got a share of the profit. That was the other part of the deal, a right-to-buy scheme.
Robert worried that no one would bite, but in fact Beatrice kept having to add capacity to the server. At its peak, Starting-from-Scratch-in-America received a hundred thousand fresh hits a day, from all around the world. Mayor Bloomberg in New York had just suggested opening up Detroit to international immigration. Robert had his lawyers talking to the ICE as well. A bid was “full” when every house and plot in a particular neighborhood had been spoken for by the members of a group. This is when it came to us in committee.
In other words, we sat around all day looking at Facebook, deciding who would get to join our village. Like a bunch of assholes,as Tony kept reminding us. There were Beatrice and Tony, Clay Greene and me, Robert himself sometimes, Johnny Mkieze and Bill Russo. Johnny was living in Grosse Pointe, three blocks away from his childhood
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