day, after about five months, I called and was told that Wells Fargo had no record of our modification request. “Oh,” I said, deciding it was best to simply hang up rather than let loose on the phone. I stood in the living room, working my way through the list of profanities in my repertoire, most of them old standards introduced to me in Flint. Then I forced myself to try out some breathing techniques I had learned at the San Francisco Zen Center. I threw in a Hail Mary just in case. I invoked Saint Jude, the patron saint of lost causes. Apparently, there are no atheists in foxholes or the San Francisco real-estate market. Then I called Wells Fargo back and got a different representative. No problem. They had my request. They simply hadn’t made a determination yet. At that point, a visit to Zeitgeist seemed the logical next step.
Finally, a letter arrived saying we’d been approved for a three-month trial period with reduced payments. Apparently, it was like a tryout for a final modification, a chance for the bank to see if we could even handle a smaller payment. We were halfway home. Or, more accurately, halfway to staying in our home. We made the three payments and were rewarded with a letter from Wells Fargo indicating that because we were not paying the full amount on the mortgage, they might “have no choice but to pursue other options, up to and including foreclosure.” I called and was told to just ignore the letters. “Those generic letters go out automatically,” Brian in Des Moines told me. “You’re in the trial modification period, but you’re viewed as someone who’s four months behind on his mortgage.” Very reassuring. I ran a credit check and sure enough we were getting dinged for missing mortgage payments, even though we were paying the amount Wells Fargo told us to pay. I called again to see if they could fix our credit. No dice, Janet told me. That was the price of going through the process. If we didn’t want our credit damaged, we could have simply paid the mortgage and not asked for a modification. She had a point. It was a reminder that banks aren’t in the business of helping you stay in your home. We’d get a modification if it made sense for them, not us.
But what was I complaining about? A mere eight months, 406 phone calls, and $378 in fax and FedEx fees later, Wells Fargo modified the loan. The principal stayed the same, but the interest rate plummeted to 2.75 percent before returning to 6.625 percent after six years. At that point, we’d be required to make the full principal and interest payments for the last twenty years of the loan. We’d save more than $100,000 on interest payments. And with payments down to around $1,200 a month, we could start whittling away at the principal right away.
I greeted this news with a huge sigh of relief, but at the same time I felt guilty and ashamed that it had come to this. I took no real satisfaction in beating the system when I read about other families who were denied modifications and lost their homes. But maybe the modification wasn’t just a lifeline for me and Traci. I saw it as a way to help Flint. I now had some extra money to buy a house in the Vehicle City, even if it would have been more wisely spent paying down my San Francisco mortgage.
I’d joked with Traci for months about the two of us getting a house in Flint, but a few weeks after the modification I presented a serious proposal. She has a skillful technique for dealing with my latest Big Idea, like the plan to rip out the ceilings of the entire house to expose the attic space above, an idea that was also hatched at Zeitgeist. She had feigned mild enthusiasm before pointing out a few minor sticking points: The attic is framed with ancient, discolored two-by-fours. Do we want to look at that? I’d have to remove all the rat-turd-infested insulation even though I’d been too squeamish to crawl up there to investigate a possible leak a few months back. I’d be dumping five hundred square feet of old drywall onto the floors, so we might have to relocate for a few days. I’d have to rewire the ceiling lights, and I didn’t know anything about electrical work. Yeah, yeah, whatever. I toyed with her trivial concerns for a few weeks before announcing that the time probably wasn’t right for the ceiling project. I managed to do it in a way that made it seem like it was her idea all along, and I was reluctantly saying no.
To my surprise, Traci didn’t reject the idea of a Flint house in its broadest form. After losing her job, she was suffering through the indignities of freelance journalism in the Internet age—low pay, intense competition, and the necessity of taking lame assignments because we needed the money. It was hard for her to get inspired writing about “Twenty-Five Fun Things to Do with Your Kids” when she didn’t happen to have children. “I feel sort of like an autoworker,” Traci said. “The job I’ve done my whole life is disappearing.”
The stock image I have of a shop rat—the sobriquet for autoworkers in Michigan—is Ben Hamper on the cover of his book Rivethead. He’s a solidly built guy with a mustache, a trucker’s hat, and an expression that asks, “What the fuck are you looking at, asswipe?” Traci is five feet three and weights about 110. She has thick dark hair and beautiful eyes with impossibly long eyelashes. She’s very calm, able to talk me down when I start ranting about double-parkers or the guy who keeps letting his dog poop in front of our house. It’s hard to equate her with an autoworker in any way, but I knew what she meant. She was open to new possibilities. We were both ready for a change.
I hatched a plan. I’d travel to Flint in June of 2009 as soon as classes ended at the university to rediscover the city and look at houses. Given that any money I spent on the trip would cut into my house-buying budget, I thought I should try and scare up some freelance writing work to finance the excursion. I didn’t have high hopes when I started calling various Flintoids in search of story ideas. I came up with about a dozen and spent the spring pitching to various newspapers and magazines. I was a little stunned when Slate, an online magazine published by the Washington Post Company, wanted a feature on my search for a house and a story on the special election for mayor of Flint in August. Then, shockingly, the New York Times approved a piece on the uneven and unexpected revival of Carriage Town. Apparently, the fickle world of journalism—so averse to my brilliant ideas in the past and experiencing an economic collapse of its own—found a downtrodden city like Flint as compelling as I did.
8
Downward Mobility
I spent a rainy morning driving around Flint with two real-estate agents in the cramped confines of a lime-colored Jeep Rubicon. Jennifer, a forty-seven-year-old who had grown up in the city but now lived in the suburb of Fenton, was at the wheel. Ryan, who had purchased his first Flint home ten years earlier, when he was just seventeen, was folded into the backseat. It was a queasy mix of nostalgia, tanking property values, and mild motion sickness.
I had determined that my budget for buying and fixing up my dream house in Flint was three thousand dollars. But I was purposely vague about my price range with Jennifer and Ryan, happy to let them assume someone who owns in San Francisco must have some real buying power, in order to get a close look at the range of Flint real estate. I wanted to understand the entire market before I made any decisions. As we rolled out of Carriage Town, I asked about the infamous eBay houses going for pocket change online, curious about their reaction to a city effectively being auctioned off in cyberspace.
“You probably wouldn’t want to live in those houses or those neighborhoods,” Ryan said without hesitation. “Most of those places are scrapped out or burned out.” Jennifer joked that I would probably want a house that still had plumbing, wiring, and windows, preferably one located in an area where you could venture outside after dusk without a sidearm. The day had just begun and I was already a little worried. If the eBay houses were that bad, maybe my budget wasn’t realistic. Stop worrying, I told myself. They were probably just doing a little upselling. They were real-estate agents, after all.
We arrived at a 1,524-square-foot house on Cartier Street in the Mott Park neighborhood near Mott Golf Course along the Flint River. (It’s nearly impossible to escape the legacy of Charlie Sugar in Flint. There are reminders everywhere.) My friends and I had regularly played at the public course in grade school. We spent most of our time goofing off in the woods in search of errant drives. My first high school party took place a few blocks away, and I still picture the house on Nolan Drive where it transpired
