A handsome 100-year-old, two-flat in North Corktown for under $1,000 looked like such a deal at a Wayne County tax auction Jon Zemke couldn’t resist buying it on the spot. He was a third-generation home-rehabber and landlord, already flush with six properties in his Detroit portfolio. What could possibly go wrong? Practically everything, he says […]
Margarita Barry, a renter and entrepreneur extraordinaire, bought her Land Bank and County Auction house to gain a stake in the city on the move. She bought cheap and dug deep into her savings to make it home. “I bought my property for $6,000 in 2012 near Old Redford, on the northwest edge of the […]
The neighborhood that patrols together stays together. That’s how James A. Ward, volunteer commander of the Green Acres Citizen Patrol since 1992, accounts for the steep reduction in crime and a spike in neighborhood stability. At least 115 volunteers patrol the slender Green Acres neighborhood that’s a half mile wide and a mile long just […]
After a night of revelry in the Grande Ballroom, dancing under psychedelic lights cast by colored vegetable oil, playing Twister and skipping merrily around the perimeter while Ted Nugent and the Amboy Dukes sang of the journey to the center of the mind, I gathered my girlfriends and headed for my dad’s Galaxie. The asphalt […]