December 12, 2011
Occupy Detroit occupies abandoned homes
Nowhere in America needs to be occupied more than the Motor City.
When cars were still largely an American-made phenomenon, there were some 2 million people living here. Now, there are only slightly more than 700,000. The population of this once-thriving city has shrunk by 25 percent in the last decade alone, leaving a wasteland of real estate in the wake.
The mass exodus of people has provided Occupy Detroit, which last month took over a downtown park with the same kind of tent encampment as seen in other cities, with a new mission.
“We’re moving into the next phase of our occupation,” said Lee Gaddies. “We’re reoccupying our neighborhoods.
The idea sprung from two occupiers who started sleeping in an abandoned home on Golden Gate Street in northeast Detroit, where at least half the homes have been literally abandoned. Not even boarded up in many cases. Just left for the taking.
So that’s what Occupy Detroit did.
They helped the occupiers move a wood stove in, and fashioned a makeshift chimney. Then they replaced the boarded up windows with glass bottles, held in place with a mixture of mud and straw.
Then they repeated the process at six other abandoned homes on Golden Gate. Now there are some two dozen people occupying homes that were previously abandoned. Some of the abandoned homes are occupied by young people with the time and gumption to work on a fixer-upper. But others are members of Detroit’s homeless community.
A window made from recycled bottles held together with a mixture of mud and straw on Golden Gate in northeast Detroit.
Occupiers say the police don’t mind that they have essentially squatted in the vacant homes.
“They’re trying to solve murders and robberies,” said Eric Shelley, a local audio engineer with handy man skills who has helped teach the other occupiers how to swing a hammer and fix dry wall. “They don’t have time for this.”
The area is a hotbed for drug dealing and prostitution, and oftentimes abandoned homes become either crack houses or brothels.
To that end, Shelley said, “what we’re doing is beneficial to the neighborhood.”
“Our community service became our protest,” he said. “We’re doing what our government is supposed to be doing: providing a social safety net.”
If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the RSS feed to have future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Like the Goldgate Restoration Project on Facebook
http://www.facebook.com/?ref=home#!/pages/Goldengate-Restoration-Project/304549609568112