A coop for 13015 Klinger

Mitch Cope recently signed a purchase agreement for the home 13015 Klinger. There was fire damage in the interior, some extensive floor damage, however not unfixable.

Together with Mitch, Toby Barlow and Kerstin Niemann, we're currently setting up a coop for the house based on bylaws inspired by Lafayette Park and Dutch Housing coorporation Ymere.

The ambition to use the house, amongst others, as a residency.




Photos by Mitch Cope

Detroit is our Future: The Detroit UnReal Estate Agency in Windsor

Across the river Detroit's Canadian twin city has been undergoing a comparatively protracted path of economic meltdown. This process is delayed as production in the auto industry reached its peak much later than in the US. Nevertheless the sprawl machine started up in the 1950s and it is still going strong in Windsor where it has spawned three new outlying townships (Tecumseh, Lakeshore, LaSalle) in the last twenty years. Commercial property owners have been busy boarding up and tearing down buildings in the city over the past couple of years, seemingly in final preparations for a funeral for the auto industry.


Henry Ford famously pronounced the demise of the city early on in the history of the auto industry: "we shall solve the city problem by leaving the city". Nowhere is this process more pronounced than in the Windsor neighborhood that bears his name: Ford Town (now Ford City). Drouillard Road is the main street that runs through this neighborhood. It was established around 1910 when Ford began to send auto parts from Detroit across the river for manufacturing in Canada in order to avoid tariffs levied on finished automobiles that were exported to Canada and other parts of the British Commonwealth. The growth and decline of this area was rapid: Ford City had reached its peak population in 1928 and by 1950 had been largely abandoned due to the closure of the main plant and the growth of the new suburbs, strip malls and other auto-related urban shifts.

Chrysler's assembly plant is currently the largest in Canada. The Chrysler complex covers approximately three square kilometers of southeast Windsor and is at the moment up for grabs. The security presence around the factory made it difficult to take pictures near any of the entrances.

Artists, Urban Blight and Gentrification

There's a very interesting discussion of the possibilities and limitations of artists as agents of urban renewal, both in and beyond Detroit, on The Clyde Fitch Report.  The author begins with his admiration for Richard Florida and the notion of  "the creative class," but ends on a more critical and complex note--that he's "all for the creative economy," but "wants a diverse economy as well."

A useful comparison is the Wall Street Journal's wholly uncritical perspective. In a recent piece, "Artists vs. Blight," the Journal re-recruited artists as "leaders of an urban vanguard that colonizes blighted areas."    What's at stake in this recruitment was made clear in a quote from the director of Cleveland's City Planning Commission:  "At first, the strategy was (placing artists in) old warehouses, now it's whole neighborhoods ... The next phase is capitalizing on the presence of artist and art-related businesses and using it as the lever for high-density development."  This is, of course, precisely the sort of development that aims to render the urban vanguard once again homeless...

Detroit in Dutch media

NOVA, a Dutch news program featured Detroit last Saturday, May 2nd 2009. Apparently, Fiat is going to save Chrysler and 'Artists animate Detroit (Kunstenaars bezielen Detroit)' with Scott Hocking and the Detroit Unreal Estate Agency.

Property Sold!

Unfortunately, the bank did not accept our offer. Instead they accepted another offer on this property.

'Euro Invasion Retreats'

Taken from Gina Reichert/Mitch Cope's Power House Report:

What a strange couple of weeks. What a strange month! Gina and I feel like we got run over, beat down, sucked dry. That’s not to say we didn’t enjoy it because we did, were just a little fried out, burnt up and crispy creamed.

Not sure what happened. I think we learned a lesson about having people come and “work in the neighborhood”. Not sure how to explain what happened or didn’t happen, or what we thought should have happened. Not trying to be vague, just confused. That said the fine young men and women of apparently controversial Detroit Unreal Estate Agency were productive in cleaning out a couple vacant lots, painted a building to be painted further and put a down payment down on a building and mapped and photo documented several blocks in the neighborhood!
Somehow the neighborhood seems less friendly this week. Maybe it’s just the warming of the weather that brings out the rats, fires, garbage, and druggists, prostitutes, weirdos or maybe it’s just me. Most disheartening however is that there has been an increase in break-ins, including our good friend John’s house who had His two back doors kicked in and lost some irreplaceable jewelry that he made during his jewelry days. Although he has a beautiful German Shepherd - Lexy, for security, she was of no help. John suspected someone had been feeding her at night for about a week as she stopped being interested in breakfast, but he thought it was the neighbor kids throwing her scraps. In reality someone might have been trying and succeeding to befriend her before the big heist. She is a very sweet dog although she still is young enough that she could be trained to kill future intruders.

I tried replacing his back door, but as usually with these old houses as soon as you take something apart you reveal years of problems. In John’s case it’s the rotting and sinking of the back porch. We discussed jacking it up and sure enough as I crawled under the porch to see what was up, there was already a jack under there with several things wedged in on top of some shaky cinder blocks which are on top of sand. I’m not sure if we can improve on that system in the near future so my idea was to just add to the top of the porch. If it keeps sinking, just add another layer to the floor. Eventually maybe it will become a solid mass and then it will be done! Why fight it, unless a new foundation is poured, which isn’t going to happen. John didn’t want me to finish the job until we fixed the sloping floor so I boarded up the unfinished back door and put a 2×4 behind the other broken back door for security.

With the dissatisfaction of not being able to finish that job I started taking apart the windows and front door of the Power House. Finally getting back to actually doing some physical work on the Power House, although the anxiety of wanting something finished probably is not the best attitude when doing rehab. Today after three days of working on the front door it’s in and it’s level and it works, but still no locks yet. Since everything was built together and hasn’t been replaced since 1924 except for Home Depot door that was slapped on before the bank sold it to us, everything else is dry rotted or too badly chewed up from previous fixes to reuse. I spent half the day carving out a new threshold while the Bosnian brothel across the street looked on and made fun of my constant tinkering and leveling. Finally after much fussing the threshold sat neatly into the spot where the old one laid for 85 years. Now I need spray foam to seal the deal. So I boarded up the door opening and headed back home for a sandwich before getting the spray foam and a beer.

Before I could go though I had to check out the daily neighborhood house fire. Today it was a fire on McDougal. I have always found fires to be strange community events, even as far as they are tragic. Today I just found this tragic even though it was a vacant home. Someone is setting fire to these vacant homes for fun, is all i could think, but the next house is not vacant. I had no desire to talk to anyone of the many who crowded up and down the street to watch and trade information as I usual do.

On my way back I witnessed a weird car accident where a car full of kids getting out of school clipped an SUV tearing off the plastic front of the truck and rolled into a parked car. It seemed as if they had no breaks, they just kept going, hitting things, finally running into a parked car. It was one of those weird scenes where the occupants of the car seemed to be in a trance as their car went out of control.

Back home I sit and write this note and drink beer with the cats, it’s all I can do.

The PHOTO is of Lado, from Georgia, one of the Dutch Art Institute students embarking on his project “What is your Future of Detroit?”