The massive twelve-wheeled demolition truck rumbles down the street and lures the neighbors out to gripe. It's not that the truck or the driver, Lorenzo Coney, are unwelcome. The people here just want to know what's taken them so long.
On this June morning, with the heat and humidity rising, residents emerge from their homes one by one: mostly women, mostly older, mostly taking care of their mothers and grandkids. They've been calling the city, they say, for years without response and feel as abandoned as the houses that surround them—the foreclosed, devitalized structures that require immediate wrecking. They have questions for Lorenzo. Comprehensive to-do lists for this man who has powerful machines and, so, they figure, actual power. They ask when the dead trees are coming down. They want to know when the drug dealing will stop. Does Lorenzo's boss have a job for their sons, by any chance? Or for their nephews? Or what about for themselves? They can still work, they say. They can lift things. Handle a shovel. Run a hose. They pointat any number of vacancies on their street: "You tearing down this one? What about this one? How about this one?"
When they find out Lorenzo's only there for one house, they seethe. "But those are drug houses," they demand, imploring the crew to tear them all down, imploring me to somehow tear them all down. "That one," they say, "somebody got raped in. You're not taking that one down? Are youserious? I called about that one. I called. And called. When are you doing that one? You should be here all day. All week. All year."
Lorenzo explains he's only a wrecker; he's not the mayor. He's simply following orders, knocking down houses as fast as he can.
"I can do twenty a day," says Lorenzo, standing outside a Craftsman-style bungalow at 18058 Joann. This house took the better part of 1926 to build. Crews of men dug a hole, poured a foundation, assembled floor bridging and ceiling joists and a truss for the roof. Shingles were laid down, one at a time. Wooden siding was hung. Mortar was spread and bricks were stacked. By the time the house was completed, it boasted a gable roof, central dormer windows, and generous eaves shading a balustraded veranda. Covering 1,300 square feet, it had a couple of bedrooms, a bathroom, a small kitchen, and a light-filled parlor facing the street. It was priced for a worker—less than $4,000 new—and meant, for a family, a future.
It will take Lorenzo and his two-man crew from Farrow Demolition Incorporated thirty-six minutes to destroy it. It will be their fourth wreck of the day. By 9:30 a.m., 1718 Field, 3911 Beaconsfield, and 13103 Canfield have all been reduced to rubble, having met the mechanized violence of the CAT 330D L excavator. From house to garbage in the time it takes to do a load of laundry. Soon one of Farrow's drivers will collect the remains and haul them to the landfill—eighty-year-old houses, each ground down into a hundred tons of trash and dumped from the back of a truck. In the end, the house is just one more useless thing.
Thirteen local wrecking crews have been hired to demolish 10,000 of these forsaken houses, riding up and leveling them with brute hydraulic force. Detroit had erected itself as a city of freestanding single-family homes: Victorians, neo-Gothics, boxy Foursquares, Greek and Tudor Revivals. But mostly it's a city of small, sweet, low-slung bungalows like the one on Joann that's about to be demolished so that Detroit might thrive again.
···
In 1950, with nearly 2 million people living within its boundaries, Detroit was the fifth-largest city in America. Over a forty-year period, the auto industry had boomed in a way that changed the country, and Detroit's population more than sextupled. But starting in the '50s, the city fell into decline. Factories closed. Jobs vanished. In the wake of the 1967 riots, race relations collapsed and the city became increasingly segregated. By 1980 the population had dwindled to 1.2 million. With far fewer Detroiters to shelter, many of the city's houses were orphaned, threatening the existence and safety of everything around them. Blight metastasized across town, leaving much of the housing stock better suited for crackheads and squatters than for legitimate investors, possible gentrifiers, or working-class families with any remaining desire to stay. Today only 700,000 souls call Detroit home, and nearly a fourth of the city's houses—a number approaching 72,000 units—are empty.
In March 2010, after ten months in office, Detroit's mayor, Dave Bing—former Piston, NBA Hall of Famer, multimillionaire founder of Bing Steel—gave his first State of the City address. In it, he made residential blight public enemy number one. "Tonight," he said, "I am unveiling a plan to demolish 3,000 dangerous residential structures this year and setting a goal of 10,000 by the end of this term." The de-blighting started immediately. The city had averaged only about 1,000 annual residential demolitions over the previous five years, and the mayor knew he had to pick up the pace. This was his problem now.
Detroit politicians have been delivering Save Detroit sermons for as long as I can remember. (I was born there in 1978.) But there was something different about Bing's speech. The mayor talked about the city as a whole, not just the nugget of Downtown that local leaders have been cradling, coddling, and polishing since the '70s. The notion of "bringing Detroit back" has always focused on several square miles of partially occupied office buildings, luxury-boxed sports stadiums, and casinos—and on keeping solvent the city's most iconic contemporary-era building, the Renaissance Center, which looks like seven stacks of obscenely waxed tires. (It has been the headquarters of both Ford and General Motors.) Meanwhile the neighborhoods, the places where the people actually live, have been almost uniformly scrubbed from public awareness. This neglect left everywhere but Downtown withered and has long set the rest of the city up for a comeback.
···
Though we're technically in the middle of the morning rush, there's hardly anyone on the road. Lorenzo, 49 and a twenty-six-year demolition vet, maneuvers his Kenworth, and the 80,000-pound excavator he's towing behind it, with ease. The temperature in the cab is calibrated to freezing. There's a plastic bag of water bottles and Amp Energy drinks sitting behind the gearshift on the floor and a smaller bag filled with oranges on a ledge behind Lorenzo's seat. "We don't stop long enough to eat anything else," he says, widening his sleepy eyes. "Sometimes I bring bananas."
Lorenzo heads up Gratiot, one of Detroit's main roads, one of six arteries that emerge from Downtown like the spokes of a wheel. It's a stretch of the city that once teemed with retail and restaurants. Life. Now, with its faded signage and trashed storefronts, it's wasted in a way that will prompt this story's photographer, Tim Hetherington, who lived in West Africa for almost a decade, and who was tragically killed Misurata, Libya on April 20th, to call me when he lands at the airport—just off the Gratiot drag—and ask whether he's somehow touched down in Kinshasa or Monrovia.