I can think of two types of person that might enjoy this book. People who don’t live in Flint and want to understand the place, and people who do live in Flint and want to understand how people on the outside see our fair city. Author Gordon Young is part of an increasing number of people that fall into both camps; he grew up in Flint and, like so many Flintstones, left the place for greener pastures.
Now a San Francisco journalist, Young is best known in Flint for his Flint Expatriates blog. It’s an extensive, wide-ranging, and evocative collection of anecdotes, archive, history, and armchair analysis, and many of us have been hoping for years that Young would share his own observations in a full-fledged book.
Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City does not disappoint.
The book is a memoir, following Young’s personal quest to buy a house in his hometown, fueled in large part by fond and complicated memories of his own childhood there.
Despite his extensive blogging, Young is surprised by a Flint that has changed drastically in the almost thirty years since he left. Budget shortfalls and public safety cuts coincide with skyrocketing crime. Many blocks are filled with abandoned houses, and hundreds burn down in arson sprees. Defiant homeowners in Carriage Town pump many times their house’s value into renovation, while equally determined holdouts in the impoverished Civic Park neighborhood fight to keep a single block from falling into decay. The city is in crisis, and has been for decades. Most of Flint’s residents live in a perpetual state of damage control as one calamity follows another.
Now I should pause for a moment, because the above paragraph could really describe any number of accounts of Flint.
Ben Hamper’s Rivethead, written in the midst of decline, well conveys the sense of a town’s psychological disintegration. Various academic studies portray depopulation and poverty in stark numbers. The Flint Journal and many others have provided illuminating histories of Flint, enhanced by photos and primary sources. And Michael Moore’s “Roger and Me,” released in 1989, still expresses abandonment vividly (even if the number of abandoned homes has since multiplied many times). So in several ways, Young is operating on well-trod territory.
Here is why Teardown is unique among all the others:
Despite being framed by the very personal narrative of Young’s home-buying quest and his own memories, Teardown is by far the most balanced and circumspect encounter with Flint that the world-at-large is likely to get.
First, among the characters he encounters — from well-connected politicians, to frustrated homeowners, to a determined clergy, to young parents trying to make a fresh start in the midst of entrenched poverty, everyone is given a moment to speak, and their views are presented eloquently and sympathetically. So when would-be town-downsizer Dan Kildee encounters an Eastside resident on Jane Street (where Kildee’s own family had once lived), the man says, “somebody needs to fix these houses up, not just let them fall down!” ‘”Fix them up!” he yelled without looking back, pointing into the air for emphasis as he waded into the shadows.’
Young allows his characters dignity in their crises; the very element missing from Forbes’ “worst cities” lists, and uniting Flint’s citizens despite their many issues and disagreements.
Second, following even deeper veins, Young manages to capture the paradoxical current of both hope and despair so many express about life in Flint. Other accounts have hinted at this contradiction, but none have ever come so far in bringing it to life.
“It’s impossible to spin, sugarcoat, or sanitize Flint’s fate,” he writes toward the end of Teardown. “Flint demands mental compartmentalization, the ability to absorb bad news while simultaneously ferreting out encouraging signs.” And so his quest begins with Rich, a California real-estate agent who happily jeopardizes his own finances by buying up houses in Flint, under logic that seems increasingly shaky as time goes by. Michael and Dave and Judy and Jan and Sherman all look to the future with a feverish determination that could be called impassioned, even if it is not optimistic. And Young himself, drawn back toward the neighborhood where he grew up, and discovering it blighted and empty, is encouraged in his search by the sight of a faded mural his sister had painted decades before. All the while, bad things keep happening: serial homicide, arson, falling revenue, and failing services. Flint is a desperate place, and a weird place, but it is a place that somehow draws intense loyalty and even obsession from those who live there by choice and necessity. Young has expressed this contradiction in a way that no one else has.
Teardown is a couple hundred pages long, but with short chapters and focused episodes, it’s also a quick read. In many ways, Flint is a small town; Flintstones reading Teardown will recognize many characters (Disclaimer: Indeed, a neighbor of mine features, and is part of the reason I was asked to read and comment on an early manuscript of the book), but the anonymous characters are just as compelling, in some cases appearing naked and threatening, or in others simply asking obvious and unanswerable questions. One man, arriving unannounced at the mayor’s office, simply says: “I’ve given up on Flint, and I wanted to see if he could give me a reason not to give up on it.”
Considering all this, you should read Teardown.
That is:
If you don’t live in Flint and want to understand the place, then read it.
If you do live in Flint and want to understand how people on the outside see Flint, then read it.
And if you don’t know a thing about Flint, and don’t know why so many words and thoughts would be spent on a place filled with such evident misery, you should read it too. We all confront crises in our lives, and accounts of the confrontation of crises are both universal and timeless.
Buy Teardown at Amazon or Barnes-and-Noble.com or, better, at your local bookstore.