Isak

Waterless

 

Detroit borders the Great Lakes system, containing 21 percent of the world’s surface freshwater. The lakes are the source of the city’s water supply, but a growing number of residents can’t turn on the tap.

Longtime subscriber, first-time writer. I've been tearing up periodically since this op-ed was published in The New York Times on the Fourth of July. It is a strange feeling: the story itself is a sad and difficult and maddening one. And yet, the telling of it in this space is a dream come true for me.

One thing I appreciated: the rigor of fact-checking an opinion piece. This took a lot of hustle, because there's an enormous amount of misinformation out there. It is actually pretty depressing how slippery many activists and people writing for media ("reporters") are with the specifics of this story. For example, the statistic that the city is shutting off water for 3000 people a week keeps getting thrown around. But it's just not true. It's a mangled fact: actually, the water department prepared in June logistically to do 1500-3000 shutoffs per week, but that is not the number of shutoffs that actually happened. It's a distinction that is important, but I think has been willfully blurred in some cases to emphasize the urgency of the situation. Of course, the situation is urgent. But it drives me nuts when people trust rhetoric and hyperbole, rather than facts, to make their case. There seems to be something darker at hand than plain old laziness and sloppiness and a misunderstanding of what a credible source is. It seems to demonstrate a lack of faith in the real world to be enough, as it is.

In a second article, one for Next City, I had more room to expand on the lived experience of the water story.

For (Nicole) Hill, friends have invited her over to shower or fill jugs. She uses a trashcan as a rain barrel. She recycles dishwater to use again as mop water, or to pour into the toilet to make it flush. When she uses the bathroom without water, she says, “I literally try to do it military style in my small trash can: Bind it up and throw it out.”

Her kids, spread out in different homes around the city, are worried about their mother. Her son, staying around the corner, checks in on her frequently. Her 14-year-old daughter filled a backpack with two liters of water and rode them over on her bike. “They feel like they have to protect me,” Hill said

This Day

 

Well, then.

Life brims.

As I've taken a breather from this little corner of the internet, so much has filled up. I don't even know how to begin telling the story of how much work and community has been threaded through the days. It has been breathless and exhausting. The past six months, I have worked harder than I ever have before.

But the past few mornings, I woke up feeling glad. There is power and joy in making things, you know?

One of the things made: A Detroit Anthology, published this month. Tonight is our book launch. I am proud of this book, and feeling a little bewildered that it now, finally, exists. I want to tell you stories about its making -- what surprised me in what people did and didn't submit from this, what I learned about this uniquely collaborative form of narrative -- but for now: let's just pause, breathe, and celebrate. I want to remember this day.

 

 

I'm just beginning to pivot into the tenderness of hearing what people think of a book you made. It's such a vulnerable thing! But this is what it means for the book to live in the world. For all that I could control in the making of this book, the relationship between it and readers is beyond me. But I'm listening.

• WMUK, public radio out of Kalamazoo, said the anthology "allows writers to control the narrative about their city."
• From Motor City Muckracker: "The newly published 'A Detroit Anthology' is a refreshingly well-packed collection of compelling essays, stories, poems and photographs of the city and its resilient, diverse residents."
• From Detroit Ink Publishing: "It's about time for A Detroit Anthology ... If you want to know what my neighbor thinks about me, then ask my neighbor. But if you want to know who I really am, then pull up a chair. This is gonna take some time."
• The Detroit Free Press featured us in a gorgeous Sunday spread, making it the cover story of the Entertainment section. The paper excerpted the work of Shannon Shelton Miller, Matthew Olzmann, Jen Leija, and Shaka Senghor.

 

 

In my introduction to the anthology, I wrote this:

I don’t expect you to read this book straight through, any more than I expect you to explore the city by walking straight up Woodward, notching each essay and poem as if it were a mile marker. But if you do move page by page through this book, you will see a collective narrative emerge. This is a story of leaving, and of being left. It is a story of not having enough money, and of having much more than your neighbors. It is a story of fires. Of inventing music. Of trying to get from one part of town to another—by bike, car, bus, foot, or sheer force of will. A story of sports, play, and the heart-thrust of fandom. Of shame and wonder. Of laughter and self-deprecation. Of remembering and misremembering history. Of fear. Of skyscrapers and gardens. Of suburbs—little towns in their own right. It is a story of having more power than we know.

This anthology is loosely arranged like a stage play (overture, two acts, and an intermission) not because there is anything false or costumed about the writing here, but because theater is a uniquely collaborative art form; so, too, are cities. Theater stitches together prose and poetry, music and oratory; so do cities. Comedy and tragedy are the two archetypal forms of theater; likewise, I’ll venture to say that no place stages comedy and tragedy better than Detroit. And while it’s hard to shake the feeling sometimes that the spectacle of this city is defined more by the distant “audience”—watching us from their safe seats in the dark as we improvise our way through an epic drama—in the end, it is thrilling to realize that we are all players here, each with the power to impact our shared story. On this stage, each choice we make matters.

However you navigate this book, you will find the dissonant chorus of people so often tasked with justifying themselves because of where they live, no matter which side of 8 Mile they are on. A watchfulness comes forth that I have rarely seen in other places I have lived or visited. Detroiters notice the details. As a result, you will not find “positive” stories about Detroit in this collection, or “negative” ones. But you will find true stories.

My hope is that the pieces in this Detroit anthology will ignite recognition: not (just) for our similarities, but for our differences. Our experiences are not the same, after all. Sometimes our search for connection leads to the washing away of our distinctive shapes, as if difference equals conflict and futility. But it needn’t be so. Friction creates energy, and it is our choice how we use it.

We are a city moving through the fire of transformation. We are afire. There is no place I would rather be.

 

There are more stories I want to share with you, hammered out over the past month or so. But one thing at a time.

The Heirs of Steinbeck

 

 

I wrote for the good folks at Pacific Standard about the 75th anniversary of The Grapes of Wrath -- such a fierce and fearless novel. As the magazine's intro text puts it, "The Grapes of Wrath is still a staple in most American classrooms. Is that because we haven’t yet written anything that does a better job of portraying the devastation of not having enough?"

The 1939 New York Times review of The Grapes of Wrath called it “as pitiful and angry a novel ever to be written about America … it reads as if it had been composed in a flash, ripped off the typewriter and delivered to the public as an ultimatum.”

It’s hard to imagine similar words describing today’s fiction (and not just because of that typewriter). Despite our recession-era reckoning with economics and inequality, fiction that examines both the macro and micro experience of poverty is all too rare. Of the writers who do venture forth in the tradition of John Steinbeck, many are finding new and riveting approaches to an age-old subject. But there are crucial gaps, still. And as brilliantly as Steinbeck wrote about poverty, we cannot rely on him to comprehensively tell today’s story.

{...}

Steinbeck was a moralist—he wrote of the Depression in Biblical terms, after all—but he was not a polemicist. That’s a tricky balance to strike ...

At the height of the Depression in 1933, Dorothy Day co-founded the Catholic Worker movement. She often wrote that the defining feature of poverty is not the lack of money; it is precarity—of not being sure if tomorrow you will be fed, sheltered, and safe. There is a lack of security. Will this leaking roof collapse? Will my kid eat breakfast tomorrow? Will the money I’m owed arrive before I have to pay the rent? Will I get picked to day labor today?

Today’s best fiction about poverty is brilliant about tracing the nuances of precarity—how to survive when there is nowhere else to go. But there is another story about poverty that deserves to be more fully developed for our twenty-first century: It didn’t have to be this way.

Detroit, We Have An Anthology

 

 

I've had my head down the last few months working on an anthology about and from the city I love. And now it's actually taking shape. It is going to be a real thing. And seeing it just takes my breath away.

We debut our cover today, with design by Haley Stone and photography by Amy Sacka of Owen Was Here.

We scheduled our Detroit book launch and you and everyone you know is invited! Think: drink, food, stories, music, bonfire.

Saturday, May 31
7pm
Practice-Space
2801 14th Street
Detroit, MI 48216

And most importantly, we've released our table of contents. These are the extraordinary makers behind this book. I assure you, they will bend your mind, break your heart, make you laugh, and leave you amazed.

 

Overture

Introduction
Anna Clark

 

Act I

We Love Detroit Even If You Don’t
Aaron Foley

Notown
Thomas J. Sugrue

I’m From Detroit
Shannon Shelton Miller

Turner Ronald Carter the Third
Kat Harrison

Gas Station on Second Avenue
Matthew Olzmann

Hommage à l’avenir: Desire Lines
Michael Eugene Burdick and Francis Grunow

Things I Lost in the Fire
dream hampton

Letter from Detroit
Ingrid Norton

Infernal
Tyehimba Jess

Greektown 1983
John Counts

Coming Soon
Nichole Christian

what you’d find buried in the dirt under charles. f. kettering sr. high school (detroit, michigan)
francine. j. harris

Fort Gratiot
Steven Pomerantz

Sketches of Eastern Market
Nina Misuraca Ignaczak

When the Trees Stop Giving Fruit
Shaka Senghor

Hungry Days in Detroit
Tracie MacMillan

There Are Birds Here
Jamaal May

Per Fumum (After Smoke)
Jamaal May

Desolation Angel
John Carlisle

Detroit: A City of Superheroes
Ingrid LaFleur

Hommage à l’avenir: Streetcar Tracks
Burdick / Grunow

Legally Blind In The Motor City: A Pedestrian’s Lament
Pamela Sabaugh

On the Automobile
Rachel Reed

Carlessness
John G. Rodwan, Jr.

The Line
Maisha Hyman Sumbry

January in Detroit
Ken Mikolowski

Trembling in the Temple of Tears at the Feet of Buddha
M.L. Liebler

 

Intermission

For the Long Haul
Desiree Cooper

still of it
adrienne maree brown

In the House Where Poetry Lives
Peter Markus

Belle Isle Song
Nandi Comer

The Imam I Knew
Omar Syed Mahmood

The Fixer
John Carlisle

The Next Move
Ryan Healy

Hommage à l’avenir: Ghost Shops
Burdick / Grunow

The Fauxtopia’s of Detroit’s Suburbs
James D. Griffioen

 

Act II

My Detroit
Joseph Lichterman

By the Time This Reaches You
Deonte Osayande

Music As The Missing Link
Keith A. Owens

Awakening
Maisha Hyman Sumbry

Game Not Over
Veronica Grandison

Misguided Faith
Karen Minard

Leaning To Roll Our Tongues, Detroit 1986
Nandi Comer

Up in the Morning & Off to School in Detroit
Tracey Morris

Hommage à l’avenir: Apartments v. Houses
Burdick / Grunow

Stand
Steve Hughes

SOBs and Dummies
Karen Minard

Down in Detroit
Terry Blackhawk

Playing Ball
J.M. Leija

Night, Briggs Stadium, 1960
Gail Griffin

Lost in Hockeytown
Matthew Lewis and Aaron Mondry

Hommage à l’avenir: Street Lights
Burdick / Grunow

Lily-Livered New Yorker Seeks Lion-Hearted Detroiters
Jaclyn Trop

Motown Atlantis
Chantay “Legacy” Leonard

Strange City
Chantay “Legacy” Leonard

The Detroit Virus
Shaun S. Nethercott

Detroit’s Good-Food Cure
Larry Gabriel

Planting Seeds of Hope
Grace Lee Boggs & Scott Kurashige

The Kidnapped Children of Detroit
Marsha Music

 

With photography by David Clement, James D. Griffioen, Kofi Handon, Patricia Lay-Dorsey, Aaron Mondry, Kevin Robishaw, Gabriela Santiago-Romero, Amy Sacka, Melanie Schmitt, Joseph Smedo, Megan Snow, and Aaron Waterman.

Lone Star Progressive: Annise Parker and Brass-Tacks Urbanism

 

Houston is one of the most strange and fascinating places I've ever reported on. (That's its Art Deco city hall, above.) In Next City, I wrote about all the surprises I found there -- namely, about how practical progressivism plays out in this old-school climate, a city that basically exists through sheer force of will.

Here's a collection of a few passages from the piece:

Annise Parker, mayor of Houston, is hurt. She’s limping when we meet in her third-floor office at City Hall, wearing one black shoe and one tan leather slipper fitted around a bandage on her sprained left ankle. Another bandage circles her sprained wrist. “I tangled with a City of Houston trash can,” she says from behind her polished wood desk. “One of those big black boxes.” A staffer in the room suggests that Parker needn’t mention that it was specifically a City of Houston trashcan. But Parker does anyway. Several times.

After all, it’s not as if Parker is easily beaten. We’re speaking on a Tuesday morning at the beginning of her third term as leader of the nation’s fourth-largest city. She has tackled the most provoking and most mundane of urban challenges and now, because of term limits, she has only two more years serving Houston as an elected official. She’s already hearing from people who want her to run for state office.

Parker made headlines in 2010 by becoming the first openly gay mayor of a major U.S. city. Shortly after her third inauguration, she flew to California to marry her longtime partner. Parker’s ascent spurred what she described as “lots and lots of frankly unearned media attention” that had the attitude of, “How could this have happened in Houston first, and not all these other places?”

Her reply: “It’s because you don’t know Houston.”

Houston is strangely under-chronicled for a city that could fit the entirety of Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia and Baltimore inside its 600-square-mile footprint. While the city’s sprawling reach makes Los Angeles look dense, its population of 2.1 million makes it the fourth most populous city in the nation, following New York, L.A. and Chicago.

 

Julia Ideason Building: Houston Public Library

 

Elsewhere:

Houston is a profoundly international city. Twenty percent of its residents are foreign-born, with nearly as many Asians and Africans as Latinos. It’s the fifth most popular city for American immigrants. As a result, Houston developed a reasonable immigration policy that those squabbling elsewhere might learn from. ...

The city’s dependency on oil and gas has dimmed in the last three decades, and it is investing seriously in sustainability: Transit, green space, renewable energy and a dense urban core. Parker created the position of sustainability director for the city and recruited Laura Spanjian, from San Francisco, to run the new office. Her marching orders? “Shake things up,” Parker says. In addition to investing in rail, bus and bike infrastructure, the city launched the massive Bayou Greenway Initiative, a $480 million public-private project that will transform the relationship between city residents and the bayous.

Houston is also making progress on inequality. Parker restructured the city’s Office of Affirmative Action and Contract Compliance into the newly christened Office of Business Opportunity to help minority- and women-owned small businesses compete for municipal contracts. She instituted one of the most expansive anti-discrimination ordinances in the country. And Houston was first in the nation to solve its rape kit backlog, a horrific problem plaguing most major cities. Standing next to Parker to mark the achievement was another up-and-coming Lone Star Democrat: Sen. Wendy Davis. The senator — a fellow female politician with a media-friendly personal story — helped secure $11 million in state funding for Texas’ 20,000 untested rape kits. Houston combined the state dollars with federal and city money to not only eliminate its backlog, but also improve evidence management in the long term.

Finally, there’s Parker’s stance on economic inequality. While homelessness in cities is ubiquitous to the point where it is almost accepted as a natural part of the urban fabric, Houston is working eliminate chronic homelessness. The mayor, whose son was homeless when she adopted him, dedicated her last two terms to the issue. Her inaugural reception, after all, was held at the Houston Food Bank.

None of these accomplishments were done by template, as there’s no mold fit for the city’s brass-tacks culture. In Houston, reform must happen on decidedly local terms. If visionary policies catch on, it’s because they are useful — not because they are visionary. Here, you have to make the business case for what you do.

“We’re not going to purchase renewable energy because it’s great for the planet — although it is great for the planet — but because it’s good for business,” Parker said. “Obviously, we want to save taxpayers money when we can.” Against all odds, Houston is the largest purchaser of renewable energy in the country.

Houston has become a case study for the practicality of progressivism. The city’s radical transformation over the last three decades, and its finely tuned evolution under Annise Parker, speaks to the nuts and bolts of intelligent urban policy. Ideals are not the fuel here; utilitarianism is. The main mode of reform incentivizes change rather than regulates it. (This is still small-government Texas, after all.) Yet the new Houston looks far more idyllic than the old.

 

Downtown Houston, with rail line

 

And finally:

Parker calls herself a “thoroughly conventional mayor.” By epitomizing the practicality prized by Houstonians, she is credible when she ventures into more classically progressive territory.

Comparing Parker with Wendy Davis, the mayor’s occasional partner in the statehouse, is a study of contrasts. Davis’ 11-hour filibuster in the Texas legislature won her the national spotlight, inspired a groundswell of progressive activism and propelled her gubernatorial campaign — but did not ultimately stop the abortion ban she was protesting from becoming law. Parker’s managerial brand of progressivism doesn’t incline her to take show-stopping risks, and her rhetoric often sounds decidedly straight-laced, even conservative. But, as she tells me, she has a list of things to accomplish, and one by one, she’s checking them off.

The trick, though, will be for Parker to not let the brass tacks keep her from dreaming big and taking risks — with or without a coalition. After all, the energy for progressivism that Davis catalyzed marked a turning point for state politics in Texas. And Parker is in her final term as an elected official in Houston. As her former professor, Steve Klineberg puts it, “This is her chance to be a visionary.”

 

Gordon Quan, who I interviewed for the story, with Irma of the famed Irma's Restaruant

 

You can see an excerpt of the story here. The piece happens to be the 100th Forefront feature, which is pretty great.

Writing Through the Weeds

 

 

Here are things that happened over the last three weeks:

• I turned in the 74,000-word manuscript of the Detroit anthology to the publisher
• I went on a homemade 4.5 day reading/writing retreat in Charlevoix, Michigan (up at the northern tip of the Lower Peninsula: that's Lake Michigan frozen over in the above photo), which included good food and an epic incident involving snow, vehicles, strangers, and being trapped for six hours
• Through Literary Detroit, I helped host the debut of our new Motor Signal Reading Series, and an unusual book event involving anonymous family secrets and art (and we are hosting Bill Ayers tomorrow evening!)
• I talked about why Americans don't read (barely any) translated literature on Wisconsin Public Radio
• I had a happy weekend visiting family in my hometown, St. Joseph
• I wrote, revised, and went through the rigorous fact-checking process on a 5,000-word article about Houston that comes out next week
• I reviewed Hannah Arendt's last interview for Waxwing
• I wrote about the epic newsroom drama in Cleveland, and about how journalists are and are not benefiting from a push for government transparency in Wisconsin
• I talked about why Obamacare is awesome for freelancers
• I taught poetry and drew pictures with high schoolers two mornings a week through the InsideOut writing residency program (weather permitting!)

Here are things that did not happen over the last three weeks:

• Sufficient exercise
• Balanced eating (which is not to say that there weren't great meals in there, especially up in Charlevoix)
• Sufficient sleep
• Email
• A great deal of friend time
• Regular cleaning of my apartment
• I had been making a ritual out of reading for at least 20 minutes, first thing each morning, as a sort of meditation practice. I completely lapsed on that.
• Editing

The things on the "not done" list are only palatable to me if they are temporary conditions, not a practice. I'm proud of the work done over the last few weeks, but it felt breathless and out of joint.

You know that Charlevoix retreat? It only happened because we were intentional about it. We planned ahead. We got to joyfully look forward to it for months. While there, we kept ourselves offline. And it was a perfect trip -- I experienced those days as a proper de-icing. My itch to get things done relaxed, and I basically did nothing that anyone expected or needed me to do; only things I felt like doing. (Mostly reading, as it turned out.)

Over dinner just before Charlevoix, a friend shared an exercise that she went through (in a much more involved way) on a facilitated retreat. It basically goes like this:

Step 1: What is a strength of yours?
(I picked that I'm not afraid to work hard.)

Step 2: What is a pitfall of your strength? That is, what happens if you have too much of it?
(I get too busy, and I don't leave time to care for myself or for the other meaningful parts of my life that are not work. I mis-value things: if time isn't spent "productively," I fret that I am wasting it.)

Step 3: Given your pitfall, what is your challenge? That is, what is an action to take to keep you calibrated right, so that you're acting from your strength, and not your pitfall?
(I can intentionally create space for things that are not "productive" but have meaning and delight for me. I can catch myself trying to strain, say, a lazy afternoon with a friend into something that is "useful," or when I try to problem-solve things that are not a problem I need to solve. Basically, I can learn to be attentive, to slow down, to pivot more easily into other ways of being. I can work less.)

Step 4: Who is your trigger person? Or, what is your allergy persona? That is, what is the persona that drives you mad? This is your shadow self. You know you got it when just thinking about this person/persona starts working you up! (No naming names here, but my trigger persona is people who have time and resources -- but no will or passion. People who have a lack of curiosity about the world: I just do not understand that. People who opt out. Lazy people. People who say they will do things and don't follow through. People who can't be counted on. People who skirt the edges. People afraid of effort, or snobbish about what kind of "work" is worth their time. In my experience, it is the same persona who has all these traits! And it reveals a lot about my shadow self -- the side of me that I repress, that I'm afraid of, that I'd be horrified to be known as.)

I was really struck by this exercise, because it crystallized the fluidity of our strengths and pitfalls ... and it gave me a stern look at how my irritation at my shadow self/trigger persona (Step 4) has me overcompensating, leading me straight into my pitfall (Step 2.) Once that was revealed, I started seeing it everywhere.

Our Charlevoix retreat was a way of creating space that intervenes on those old well-worn emotional patterns. I was starved for it, and am seriously and happily considering making my annual writing retreat into a twice-a-year ritual, or maybe even a seasonal one. The somewhat spontaneous decision to travel three hours each way to visit family this weekend was part of that same instinct to disrupt the habits that incline me to spend my time "accomplishing things."

But that's still not enough. I am alive every day, and I want to learn how the "creating space" model can get outside the vacation set-up.

I've been in the weeds, and I've gotten a lot done. I'm proud of it -- especially this anthology. But I'm ready to experiment with more ways of measuring worth than in output. I will try. It is hard for me to not work hard -- constantly -- because I fear that I will go hungry if I don't accept every possible assignment, and because I fear I will disappoint people, and because I've grown very accustomed to conflating my worth as a person with the worth of my work. I was a good student in school, and this came to seem like a moral good, you know? And I want to be a good person.

It's tiring, though. And while my ability to work hard is indeed a strength, it is not my only one, even though it's the one that gets all my attention and trust. Vulnerable as it feels to let go of concrete markers of value of usefulness, I'm ready to pay more attention to my shadow persona instead -- the side that says no, that lays down, that wanders, that takes great joy in not working -- to see what power she has. Writing isn't the only way to get through the weeds that choke up the days, after all. What if I relax through them instead? What if I skip rope through them, or do nothing through them? What if I just laugh?

Let's see.

We Are Literally Giving Away Houses...

 

 

...and I want to ask the people in my community to join us!

Or, let me be more blunt: I need your help.

 

I'm proudly on the board of Write A House, which is giving away houses in Detroit to writers, for keeps. It's a radical way to cultivate literary community, support artists, and develop Detroit neighborhoods. It is also a vocational ed program, training city youth in a trade. All skilled writers -- novelists, poets, playwrights, journalists, and both well-published and emerging -- are welcome to apply, and we have a preference for low-income applicants.

You couldn't do this anywhere but Detroit. And we've gotten bigtime media attention for it.

 

The New Yorker called us "a literary twist on old homesteading incentives."

 

In Next City: "What Write-A-House really gets at is not only sweat equity, but simple equity at the neighborhood level."

 

Model D: "We look forward to following the progress of Write A House and the continued development of this neighborhood into one of Detroit's cultural capitals."

 

On The Takeaway, former national poet laureate Billy Collins (one of our judges) spoke about our groundbreaking project.

 

And in The Michigan Daily, which gave me the chance to talk to the paper that had once been my haunt: “'You couldn’t logistically do this anywhere else,'” Clark said. 'I’ve only been here for six years, and it’s amazing to see how the energy has changed over time. It’s a place where the creative community is very engaged, and writers want to be around that strong creative force.'”

But we need your help to meet our fundraising goal. We have 18 days to hit $25,000 (at least!) on IndieGoGo, and I'm turning to my community for help! Here's what you can do:

 

Donate to our fundraising campaign (and get amazing bookish rewards in return!). 

Spread the word to your networks!

• Sample tweets: 
• A revolutionary way to support writers, Detroit, and youth: let's make it happen! http://tinyurl.com/l33r8qs
• I just helped @WriteAHouse in its groundbreaking effort to support writers. You should too. http://tinyurl.com/l33r8qs
• Join me and other artists, writers, organizers, and more to create the literary ecosystem we deserve. http://tinyurl.com/l33r8qs
• In a hard-hit American city, something extraordinary is happening. Join us: http://tinyurl.com/l33r8qs
• Sample Facebook update: 
• Write a House's dream: to cultivate literary culture in a great American city. It is literally giving away houses to writers -- for keeps. Writers, and the city of Detroit, deserve to see this happen. Join me in helping to launch this groundbreaking project! http://tinyurl.com/l33r8qs

Write about us in your blog or other media platform: we'd be honored by it, and we have a good responsive team of people who are available for any question or background that you might need.

I can't thank you enough for whatever help you can offer.

Burning: Art in Detroit

 

 

My first story for NBC News is a dark one. I feel the stakes of this one, and won't pretend I didn't cry during the reporting. Here's how it opens:

The air on Heidelberg Street reeked of smoke one recent morning. Char and ash darkened the snowy sidewalks. But the color remained: shocks of red and yellow and blue that polka-dot this blighted east side neighborhood, making it one of the city’s leading tourist attractions.

For 27 years, The Heidelberg Project, founded by artist and Detroit native Tyree Guyton, has arranged found objects — tires, televisions, toys — with artful grandeur, transforming vacant homes and lots along more than two blocks into an outdoor art museum unlike any other. “It’s true to the city,” said executive director Jenenne Whitfield. “Detroit is a city of originality.”

But The Heidelberg Project is under attack.

Eight arsons since May — the most recent on December 8 — resulted in four of the seven main Heidelberg houses being burned to the ground. One of them, known as the War Room House, was the former home of Motown legend Wilson Pickett. There is a $30,000 reward for information that leads to the conviction of anyone responsible for the fires, but to date, there are no suspects.

The Heidelberg staff is mystified as to why they are targeted. Lisa Rodriguez, chief curator, takes a philosophical look: “Throughout history, art has always had that impact: Someone has to remove it, steal it, vandalize it. So while the fires are a horrifying and terrifying thing…that art was burned down because of how powerful it is. That’s a big statement.”

Rodriguez added that while her first concerns are for public safety and for the culprit to take responsibility, she feels empathy for whatever pain may be behind the fires. “I mean, you can throw a rock through a window and make your statement. But to burn it flat, you must be really hurt.”

And elsewhere in the story:

Meanwhile, the remains of burned houses linger: blackened foundations, steps that lead nowhere, and ominous circles of yellow police tape.

“We have what we believe is a new canvas. It requires a new vision,” said Whitfield.

It also requires help: The arsons are an ongoing threat. Detroit, which is in the midst of America’s largest-ever municipal bankruptcy, struggles to protect its citizens. Fire is one of the most infamous hazards, as chronicled in the new documentary Burn; even a four-minute response time from firefighters wasn’t enough to save the most recent Heidelberg house that was set alight.

This leaves the community to fight for itself, and to protect this symbol of community resilience. The Heidelberg Project, which is managed as a nonprofit with 12 staff members and an expansive corps of volunteers, has resorted to crowdfunding on IndieGoGo for complete security of the neighborhood in a campaign called “Art from the Ashes.” The security system, involving improved patrolling, lighting and surveillance cameras, will cost a little over $50,000.

Money raised beyond that will help repair the home of a neighbor that was damaged by the second fire. Even further funds will help replace the House of Soul, one of Heidelberg’s famed art pieces. It was a two-story house with more than 2,000 records attached to it. When it burned, melted and cracked discs were strewn across the block.

The Heidelberg Project is Detroit’s third most popular tourist destination, behind the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. Visitors come from 140 countries and 49 states, as well as from across the city, according to guest book records kept by the Heidelberg Project.

“We’re an art project in the heart of a war zone, so to speak, and people are coming from all over world,” said Whitfield.

Fun fact: I visited The Heidelberg Project during one of my earliest visits in Detroit, and the first visit that was neither a show nor a baseball game. It was on a field trip with my Art of the African Diaspora class my junior year of college. I don't think I closed my jaw the whole time; I'd seen nothing like this, ever. It is extraordinary.

A Rockefeller Center for Detroit?

 

I wrote it up for Architect Magazine:

For the firm's first-ever project in Detroit, SHoP Architects is aiming for nothing less than a Rockefeller Center for the Motor City. Detroit billionaire Dan Gilbert is giving the New York team the opportunity to build just that for an historic two-acre downtown site on Woodward Avenue.

“We’re interested in making a building that’s both a catalyst for Detroit’s revival and an iconic addition to the cityscape,” said SHoP principal Gregg Pasquarelli, AIA. “We want it to be a big civic presence.”

Besting top-level firms in a global competition, SHoP was hired by Rock Ventures, part of Gilbert’s family of companies and a major engine for reshaping Detroit. Rock Ventures owns or controls more than 8 million square feet in forty downtown Detroit properties and has invested more than $1.3 billion in developing them. For the mixed-use project, SHoP Architects is partnering with Detroit’s Hamilton Anderson Associates (HAA), whose past projects in the city including the North Terminal at the Detroit Metropolitan Airport, the Wayne State University Welcome Center, and the Detroit School of Arts. Jeff Cohen, CEO of the real estate arm of Rock Ventures, celebrated the two firms for being “known urban catalysts.”

In this site, Pasquarelli says, he sees an echo of the Rockefeller Center—how it was built during the Depression but intended as a “grand civic gesture,” a signature gift to a city during hard times that promises a vibrant urban life in the future.

“A successful investigation creates its own beat.”

The investigative reporting team at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is one of the best you'll find anywhere. Since it was organized in 2006, it won two Pulitzer Prizes. (The paper also won a third for explanatory reporting with a piece edited by a watchdog team member.) It regularly inspires celebratory notice from the likes of AJR, Nieman Watchdog, and Nieman Lab.  And its revolutionary reporting has helped the paper achieve one of the highest rates of market penetration in the country.

“You’ve got to do stories that matter and you’ve got to have impact," is how the mandate goes. But I got curious about the second part of that: impact. It's a slippery concept. I dug into it in a piece for the Columbia Journalism Review. An excerpt:

... reporters anywhere can spend weeks or months grinding out investigative stories on worthy subjects. But once published, how do you measure what influence they had—which stories are effective, which fall flat, and why? How does one of the most celebrated investigative newsrooms in the country measure impact—and how does it achieve it?

The question doesn’t have a simple answer. Ellen Gabler, an investigative reporter and assistant editor, is part of the team that spent the last five months immersed in “Deadly Delays,” the newborn screening story. To some extent, all that work is an act of faith—that the information, once public, will create change, even if she can’t see what it is. “I’m not sure there is any true test for tracing the impact,” Gabler told me via email. “There are lots of ways to effect change: raising awareness, holding people accountable, changing laws—although that’s not always the best measure of success.”

[...]

(But) accountability reporting, at its best, is pivotal.

“This is about real people. We’re not doing this for fun,” (reporter Raquel) Rutledge said. “People are struggling in the world, sometimes needlessly. If we can bring justice and make the world just a bit better, that’s important. This is the kind of work that improves people’s lives.”

That’s the optimism that the Journal Sentinel’s brand of investigative reporting hinges on: Solutions exist. To measure the impact of a story is to measure whether or not the community has moved closer to finding them.

This is the Midwest.

 

Here in the beach-lined Rogers Park neighborhood, Chicagoans are activating an experiment in democratic governance: participatory budgeting. A simple yet radical departure from traditional city budgeting processes, the participatory system allows residents of a given area to directly vote on how government money is spent within their community. Rogers Park’s Ward 49 can call itself the first place in North America to put it into practice. “We were the first one. We beat New York. They emulated a lot of what we did,” said Alderman Joe Moore, who called the system a profound deviation from the status quo “in a city like this, where so many decisions are made from the top down.”

Five years after Moore’s district first tried participatory budgeting, three other wards have followed its lead, picking up a practice pioneered 25 years ago in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Since 2011, nine city council districts in New York adopted it. The city of Vallejo, Calif. did the same last year, as did one council district in San Francisco. The results are promising, with participation levels relatively strong and zero scandals to date.

{...}

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel said in late October that he’s interested in taking participatory budgeting citywide. And this isn’t just talk: Emanuel’s 2014 budget includes funds for a manager of such a program, who would provide technical support to bring the process into each of Chicago’s 50 wards. Other U.S. cities will be watching, potentially opening to the door for mainstreaming a practice that has struggled to gain legitimacy beyond the provinces of the left.

 

In my latest story for Next City, reporting live from Rogers Park, keep your eye out for the parakeet, the hidden paperback, and the lady who leaves early for a scotch... and is caught in the act!