[DrBubb]

Detroit - The $100 House
Artists are transforming a neighborhood, as friends buy
==========================

REBUILDING A NEIGHBORHOOD: "abandoned house by abandoned house"
Represents a "blank canvas" uponn which they can do their own things.
Not a place for "Ozzie and Harriets" (do UK members know what this means?)

Taking a Chance on $100 House.
Watch '20/20' Friday Nights at 10 p.m. - ABC News : Watch VIDEO



(This isnt crazy.
What matters here, is not the price, it is: WHO ARE YOUR NEIGHBORS.
And if you can bring in your friends, you can create an "oasis"- a liveable
neighborhood in a tough city.)

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.



/more: http://www.powerhous.../updates/press/

MAP: http://powerhousepro...10_maphood2.jpg

= = = = =
LINKS:
Power House Project.. : http://powerhouseproject.com/
More on this story...... : GE thread

This post has been edited by DrBubb: 13 April 2009 - 09:43 AM

[DrBubb]

For Sale: The $100 House
By TOBY BARLOW
Published: March 7, 2009

RECENTLY, at a dinner party, a friend mentioned that he’d never seen so many outsiders moving into town. This struck me as a highly suspect statement. After all, we were talking about Detroit, home of corrupt former mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, beleaguered General Motors and the 0-16 Lions. Compared with other cities’ buzzing, glittering skylines, ours sits largely abandoned, like some hulking beehive devastated by colony collapse. Who on earth would move here?

Then again, I myself had moved to Detroit, from Brooklyn. For $100,000, I bought a town house that sits downtown in the largest and arguably the most beautiful Mies van der Rohe development ever built, an island of perfect modernism forgotten by the rest of the world.


Lafayette Park : Mies van der Rohe Residential District : more

Two other guests that night, a couple in from Chicago, had also just invested in some Detroit real estate. That weekend Jon and Sara Brumit bought a house for $100.

Ah, the mythical $100 home. We hear about these low-priced “opportunities” in down-on-their-luck cities like Detroit, Baltimore and Cleveland, but we never meet anyone who has taken the plunge. Understandable really, for if they were actually worth anything then they would cost real money, right? Who would do such a preposterous thing?



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.

Admittedly, the $100 home needed some work, a hole patched, some windows replaced. But Mitch plans to connect their home to his mini-green grid and a neighborhood is slowly coming together.

Now, three homes and a garden may not sound like much, but others have been quick to see the potential. A group of architects and city planners in Amsterdam started a project called the “Detroit Unreal Estate Agency” and, with Mitch’s help, found a property around the corner. The director of a Dutch museum, Van Abbemuseum, has called it “a new way of shaping the urban environment.” He’s particularly intrigued by the luxury of artists having little to no housing costs. Like the unemployed Chinese factory workers flowing en masse back to their villages, artists in today’s economy need somewhere to flee.

But the city offers a much greater attraction for artists than $100 houses. Detroit right now is just this vast, enormous canvas where anything imaginable can be accomplished. From Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg Project (think of a neighborhood covered in shoes and stuffed animals and you’re close) to Matthew Barney’s “Ancient Evenings” project (think Egyptian gods reincarnated as Ford Mustangs and you’re kind of close), local and international artists are already leveraging Detroit’s complex textures and landscapes to their own surreal ends.

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. The good news is that, almost magically, dreamers are already showing up. Mitch and Gina have already been approached by some Germans who want to build a giant two-story-tall beehive. Mitch thinks he knows just the spot for it.

/see: http://www.nytimes.c...n/08barlow.html

[Garry AKA Pod]

Good on them.

Here's hoping it's not ruined by investors. I think the crack addicts have more right to ruin the idea to be honest.

[renterbob]

When will we see........

Fulham, the 1k two bed flat



I know, it can't happen in the UK, 'cos we're special.

[DrBubb]

They are trying to convert the neighborhood "from Crack, to Art".

And I wish them every success... back in my hometown

[DrBubb]

DisposableHeroes, on Apr 13 2009, 10:46 AM, said:

It sounds like a good idea. If it doesn't work out, it's not as though they have lost much (especially in a house price down turn). Difficult choice if children are involved though.

Children may well come later... when the neighborhood is safer

I am actually thinking it may be interesting to interview them (for Commodity Watch Radio),
so I am wondering what questions people would ask.

"What do you do with children in this neighborhood?" - is a good one.

[renterbob]

DrBubb, on Apr 13 2009, 11:52 AM, said:

Children may well come later... when the neighborhood is safer

I am actually thinking it may be interesting to interview them (for Commodity Watch Radio),
so I am wondering what questions people would ask.

"What do you do with children in this neighborhood?" - is a good one.

How does it feel to own your home outright and have no mortgage?
Can you now, finally, plan for the future?
Are your friends/family planning on moving here?
What made you come here, knowing the potential crime rates?
Are you scared?

[DrBubb]

renterbob, on Apr 13 2009, 10:54 AM, said:

How does it feel to own your home outright and have no mortgage?
Can you now, finally, plan for the future?
Are your friends/family planning on moving here?
What made you come here, knowing the potential crime rates?
Are you scared?

Good questions ! -
Though I wonder why some think that it might be easier for some to "plan for the future"
when they have a huge mortgage, compared with those that rent.
I would have thought that renting, with a decent bank balance was a far stronger position.

[Bardon]

Jimothy, on Apr 13 2009, 08:13 PM, said:

Good on them.

Here's hoping it's not ruined by investors. I think the crack addicts have more right to ruin the idea to be honest.

By buying next door they have become investors themselves.

[Bardon]

DrBubb, on Apr 13 2009, 08:52 PM, said:

Children may well come later... when the neighborhood is safer

I am actually thinking it may be interesting to interview them (for Commodity Watch Radio),
so I am wondering what questions people would ask.

"What do you do with children in this neighborhood?" - is a good one.

How much is the property insured for is it replacement value and if it burned to the ground tomorrow would you bild a new one there and would the insurance company cough up to do so given that it will devalue big time as sson as the new build is completed ?

[Grime- skint wouldbe ftb]

Detroit
BY RACE, 2000
White 12.3%
Black 81.6%

[majestic whine]

Dr. B

its not like you to be so far out of the loop

http://www.housepric...p;#entry1748318

[DrBubb]

Bardon, on Apr 13 2009, 11:14 AM, said:

How much is the property insured for is it replacement value and if it burned to the ground tomorrow would you bild a new one there and would the insurance company cough up to do so given that it will devalue big time as sson as the new build is completed ?

(from the GEI version of this thread):

From Harford’s “The Logic of Life”:

QUOTE
But the quintessential emblem of urban misery is surely Detroit, a city that has lost more than half its people since 1950 and whose population has declined faster than anywhere else in the United States…it seems that land in Detroit’s city centre is so valueless that it might as well be left fallow.
…Why didn’t everyone leave? The answer is that houses in Detroit and other fading cities are cheap. (A real estate economist) estimates that a house that would cost 80,000 dollars to build could be picked up for much less that that in much of Detroit, where the typical house price is around $60,000 and many homes are cheaper still. There is no builder that would build those today…

But because the houses last for many decades, the price can fall and fall until it is low enough to suck people into failing cities…
It is not hard to see what kind of people is rationally attracted by a city with cheap houses but no good jobs: people who have already retired or people with few skills or people whose skills have fallen out of favour. For those people, the likely alternative to a cheap house and no job is an expensive house in a more dynamic city, but still no certainty of a good job…
The result is yet another rationally self-reinforcing trend, this time a vicious circle: struggling cities attract people with low skills, which means that they are unlikely to create the sort of exuberant innovation seen in more successful cities…
UNQUOTE

[Grime- skint wouldbe ftb]

Detroit, there goes the neighbourhood!

Coming to a town near you...