did when I was out of town. I grabbed my cell phone. Maybe Traci was up early for work. At 4 A.M. West Coast time? Not a chance.
I tossed the phone down, got dressed, and ventured outside for what had become my morning routine. Each night, someone unfettered by bourgeois concerns about recycling deposited an empty pint bottle of Seagram’s Wild Grape in the front yard of my temporary residence. For the uninitiated, it’s “Extra Smooth Premium Grape Flavored Vodka.” I dutifully picked it up before breakfast, arranging it with all the others in a corner of the front room, figuring I’d throw them out once the pattern was broken. Years of Catholic school had made me unwilling to depart from ritual.
This was my old hometown. Birthplace of General Motors. The “star” of Michael Moore’s tragically funny Roger & Me, the unexpectedly popular 1989 documentary that established Flint as a place where desperate residents sold rabbits for “pets or meat” to survive. A city that continually challenged the national media to come up with new and creative ways to describe just how horrible things were in a place synonymous with faded American industrial and automotive power.
In 1987 Money magazine ranked Flint dead last on its list of the best places to live in America, and the city’s reputation hadn’t improved much over the ensuing years. Time called it the country’s most dangerous city in 2007. Forbes named Flint one of “America’s Most Miserable Cities” and one of “America’s Fastest-Dying Cities” in 2008. (Alas, the clever editors at Forbes keep no such tallies for magazines.) The next year, Flint was on the magazine’s compendium of “Worst Cities for Recession Recovery” and “Worst Cities for New Jobs.” Though these labels angered locals and Flint expatriates alike, the numbers didn’t lie.
The Flint area had lost more than 70,000 GM jobs since peak employment in 1968. The official jobless rate hovered around 30 percent, but if you counted the people who had given up looking for work it was closer to 40 percent, maybe higher. When the auto factories were booming, it had one of the highest per capita income levels in the country for a city its size; now more than a third of all residents lived in poverty. But given Flint’s dismal high school graduation rate, it might make sense to dispense with the facts and figures and describe the city in more direct terms, the way a guy had summed it up for me the previous night in the Torch, a bar hidden away in a lonely downtown alley that had somehow managed to survive Flint’s socioeconomic swan dive: “What can I say?” he offered with a shrug of his shoulders. “This place is fucked up, man.”
It goes without saying that such devastation has led to population loss. Flint has become the ultimate “shrinking city.” My family moved out, along with what seemed like everybody else, in the mid-1980s. As the B-52s used to sing over the sound system at the Our Lady of Lebanon dances I attended in high school—after overindulging in illegally obtained Boone’s Farm and/or Mickey’s Malt Liquor—“Don’t feel out of place/’Cause there are thousands of others like you.” In fact, Flint has lost half its residents, plunging from 200,000 to just over 100,000 in five decades. As a result, roughly one-third of Flint is abandoned. If all the empty houses, buildings, and vacant lots were consolidated, there would be ten square miles of blight in the city.
The decline has had a devastating impact on local schools, perhaps the most powerful symbols of happier times, the brick and mortar repositories of childhood memories. In 1968, Flint schools had 46,557 students attending kindergarten through high school. By the fall of 2008, there were just 14,056 kids left. Enrollment is projected to dip to 10,432 students by the fall of 2013—a 78 percent decline.
Throughout the city, abandoned schools suffer the same fate as empty houses. They are torched by arsonists and ravaged by thieves, known as scrappers, in search of any metal they can resell—doorknobs, radiators, aluminum siding, but especially copper wiring and plumbing. Despite these indignities, you can sometimes peer through the gaping holes once framed by windows and see old American flags and weathered bulletin boards filled with tattered assignments decorating the classrooms. Four of the schools I attended as a kid are now closed.
It was clear that after fifteen years in San Francisco I had drifted uncomfortably far from the town my grandparents had moved to from the cornfields of Iowa at the turn of the twentieth century. How did I know? I sometimes fretted over the high cost of organic avocados. I went to Belgian beer tasting parties. Once an investigative journalist, I was now a freelancer who wrote meandering travel essays and sappy feature stories in college alumni magazines. I also taught journalism at a Silicon Valley university where the tuition tops the yearly income of many Flint residents and BMWs are easy to spot in the dorm parking lots. After growing up driving a silvery blue Buick LeSabre and a bamboo cream Buick Electra 225—that’s a “deuce and a quarter” in local parlance—I owned a dull gray 1990 Toyota Camry, a car that was once officially banned from the city hall parking lot in Flint and still isn’t welcome on UAW property. Embarrassingly, it’s only a four-cylinder. And then there was the fact that I was so jittery that I was bedding down with a baseball bat.
I had returned to my troubled hometown on a quixotic mission.
I was there to buy a house.
That was the most concrete aspect of my plan. I wasn’t sure if this would be a permanent residence, an improbable “vacation home,” a low-cost rental for a needy family, or a rehab project that Traci and I would give to charity. Those were details I could figure out later. I was worried that if I did too much thinking, I’d talk myself out of all this. And I didn’t want that to happen.
It’s difficult to explain why I would want to spend time away from the quaint little house Traci and I had somehow managed to buy in San Francisco, let alone consider moving to Flint and giving it up forever. Although it’s characterized by what the housing inspector charitably called “light construction”—the place shakes when you walk through it too quickly—our five-room bungalow in the heart of the Bernal Heights neighborhood is just a short stroll from a used bookstore, a wine bar, an organic market, a great Peruvian restaurant with dishes I can’t pronounce, and two taverns with names that wouldn’t be out of place in Flint—Skip’s and Wild Side West. It has a front and back yard, a rarity in San Francisco, albeit only because it is so small at seven hundred square feet that it doesn’t take up much of the city lot. Unlike numerous Flint residents, it’s a safe bet that most of my neighbors don’t feel the need to own firearms or police scanners. Why would I leave the City by the Bay, sometimes described as forty-nine square miles surrounded on all sides by reality, for a city where violence and heartache were all too real? And why would I try to convince Traci to do the same?
It’s complicated.
PART ONE
1
Pink Houses and Panhandlers
I had arrived in Flint in early June of 2009 after listening to the Tigers game in my rental car during the ninety-minute drive up I-75 from the Detroit airport. I thought baseball on the radio would snap me into a Michigan frame of mind, but the legendary Ernie Harwell, whose distinctive voice had mesmerized me as a kid, was no longer calling the games. It wasn’t quite the same. But the game did remind me to stop at a thrift store and buy that baseball bat, a handy accessory for any extended stay in Flint.
I eventually made it to Saginaw Street, the city’s main artery, which roughly divides Flint between east and west. As I crossed the river into what was once the thriving shopping district in the heart of downtown, the first of several black metal arches harking back to the early twentieth century spanned the thoroughfare, announcing that this was the “Vehicle City.” The rumble caused by the uneven, old-timey bricks that still lined several downtown blocks gave me a jolt of nostalgia, a rush of the familiar that tapped into memories of numerous trips down this bumpy street with my mom,
