This was an idea of Mitch Albom, who got his start in Detroit as a sportswriter for the Freep and has developed into an editorial columnist, radio host, author, writer for plays and film, and one man charity engine. His columns about work missions to Haiti as the Detroit Muscle Crew are touching. I agree with him when his columns are about social issues. The first 100 houses event was held in August and was a great success, especially in terms of community involvement. So Albom organized another one. This time they aimed a bit higher with a goal to board up 150 houses.
Albom is the first to say that boarding up vacant houses is only the first step. It is by no means an ideal solution. Better solutions would be demolition or rehabilitation. It is sad that so many houses in Detroit are vacant and the city (both gov't and general community) doesn't have the money to renovate or demolish them. As I've reported before there are 40,000 vacant houses in the city. They mayor said today that he can afford to demolish only 3,000 a year.
Over 600 volunteers gathered at Cody High School (probably the closest Detroit school to my house) to be assigned to teams. I didn't get a shirt because they ran out (no problem, I have plenty). Then came 45 minutes of speechifying, including Albom and the mayor. So it was after 10:15 before the first crews were sent to the waiting vans to take them to their work sites. And it was 11:00 before my team was called.
Our nametags has a list of houses our team was to work on. I was dropped off at the third one on the list. This was the house as we got started.
I ended up cleaning brush and trash from the house next door (also vacant and well trashed on the inside, but not on our list) and we boarding up that one as well. I think my designated team went on down the street to the next house. I stuck around to help clean the site. This is the result.
For many years up to a decade ago I had been involved in the local Paint the Town events which painted homes, including simple outside repair work. So it didn't seem right to not be fixing up these homes. Alas, we simply didn't have the resources for that.
When we finished the first two I found out the construction guys doing the actual boarding work had been given a different list. Our leader looked at the half dozen still standing around and asked if we would be his crew. Sure, why not?
So he drove us a couple streets over (one block west of the Southfield freeway) and set up his workspace in the yard of one the houses. We did that house and another across the street. My job was mostly to carry the pieces of wood once they were cut to the proper size. Yeah, some were the size of doorways and were heavy.
On this street was another crew doing general clean-up and another team actually hanging the wood. A Dumpster in the street was filled quite full. There were seven vacant houses on each side of the street, a rather dismal thought.
The day was about half sunny but cold. The morning temperature was in the mid-40s and above 50 by late afternoon. That's quite a contrast to a couple days ago when I was on my bike and the temp was in the mid 70s.
Once done with the houses in the middle of the block, we moved operations to the corner and finished off one and did two more. A city refuse truck worked its way down the street. It had a crane on it to grab the huge mounds of yard waste, including large tree branches, that had been hauled to the curb.
We got back to the school at about 4:00 where Albom greeted us and offered pizza. That tasted pretty good since we hadn't had lunch (though I did have crackers with me). Hmm, pizza for 600. We were one of the last teams to finish.
It was back at the school that I learned the whole event boarded up over 180 houses. One of my colleagues, the one who transported the sheets of wood, said the school parking lot had stacks of the stuff covering perhaps an acre. Getting a picture of that would have been more interested that all that speechifying.
My team secured 7 houses. Not bad for a day's work. I heard the team boss got to the site at 8:00 (the event started at 9:30), skipped the speeches and did a couple houses all by himself.
No comments:
Post a Comment