Detroit Hustle : : a Memoir of Love, Life & Home

Locations
Call Number: 977.434 Ha
On Shelf At: Downtown Library

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	977.434 Ha	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	977.434 Ha	4-week checkout	On Shelf

"Journalist Amy Haimerl and her husband had been priced out of their Brooklyn neighborhood. Seeing this as a great opportunity to start over again, they decide to cash in their savings and buy an abandoned house for $35,000 in Detroit, the largest city in the United States to declare bankruptcy. As she and her husband restore the 1914 Georgian Revival, a stately brick house with no plumbing, no heat, and no electricity, Amy finds a community of Detroiters who, like herself, aren't afraid of a little hard work or things that are a little rough around the edges. Filled with amusing and touching anecdotes about navigating a real-estate market that is rife with scams, finding a contractor who is a lover of C.S. Lewis and willing to quote him liberally, and neighbors who either get teary-eyed at the sight of newcomers or urge Amy and her husband to get out while they can, Amy writes evocatively about the charms and challenges of finding her footing in a city whose future is in question. Detroit Hustle is a memoir that is both a meditation on what it takes to make a house a home, and a love letter to a much-derided city."--provided by publisher.

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An Outsider's Look at Detroit submitted by SurfGrape on July 26, 2016, 1:05pm Haimerl and her husband bought a house they couldn't afford, in a neighborhood they knew little about, whose renovation costs were 3x what the house was worth, and would almost guarantee they wouldn't be able to sell the home later. All in the midst of Detroit's bankruptcy.

What could possibly go wrong?

Meh. submitted by Susan4Pax -prev. sueij- on June 18, 2021, 10:41pm This was a quick and easy read that falls far more under “memoir of author and a house” than “cool read about Detroit.” The Detroit that Haimerl loves and meets and explores is almost exclusively a White, gentrifying, privileged, wealthy one. She talks about the financial troubles that the city faces, and names that Detroit is 83% Black, but we almost never (that we know) encounter Black residents or see their neighborhoods or look at their schools and we certainly never hear their voices. It’s a book about White privilege.

And Haimerl knows it. She struggles with this. She spends the first 25% of the book telling about her down-home, struggling roots, I would guess to give credibility to the idea that she *isn’t* one of those clueless gentrifying White folks. And she eventually comes to the conclusion that she is “gentrified and gentrifying.” But I have utterly no idea what that means. That her hometown that she no longer lives in has been gentrified? That doesn’t mean she has. That she escaped a life of high-school-diploma-work-at-the-convenience-store-get-married? That’s not “being gentrified.” No one came in, gussied her up in the middle of her down-and-out community, and left her there. When you’re a person, moving up the economic ladder is simply called “moving into the middle class,” not gentrifying. Haimerl’s attempts to deny the absolute truth of her actions (she sure makes it sound like everything changed RIGHT as she got to Detroit, as if nothing was changing before she, personally, arrived) denies the truth of all the ground-level local activists who have been there forever and whose stories she declines to tell.

If Haimerl had simply decided to tell the story of renovating a house in Detroit, I would have liked this better. I do understand it needed the context of Detroit’s financial woes. But either include a contrasting story just as in depth of a Black resident who has been there all along, or own that you are a wealthy White childless couple who are part of the gentrifying of Detroit. You can even own that Detroit needs this kind of capital. But don’t ignore the advantage you have and bring with you by pretending that owning a pit bull instead of a golden retriever makes you someone else.

The house story was fun and well written, which was why I gave this 3 stars. I didn’t enjoy the perspective on the rest.