The Unreal Estate Guide to Detroit

Radical Hospitality

Boggs Center

The Boggs Center was founded by friends and colleagues of Grace Lee Boggs and James Boggs, prominent community activists in Detroit, as a place to “honor and continue their legacy as movement activists and theoreticians.” The Center is located at the Boggs home on the Eastside of Detroit. This location formalizes the status of that home as a community center and activist think tank, as well as exemplifies the unimportance of drawing firm boundaries between private and public space in the context of unreal estate.

The Center's positing of Detroit as a “city of hope” as opposed to a “city of despair” draws upon a conception of crisis as an opportunity to create new conditions of community, new forms of livelihood and new ways of thinking—a conception that also underlies the theory and practice of unreal estate. Among the many activities, programs and projects that take place at the Center are the Freedom Schooling Project, in which students, parents, teachers and community activists are brought together to discuss and create new models of education; the annual Detroit Summer, in which youth volunteers plant community gardens, paint public murals and participate in inter-generational dialogues with community elders; and the Detroit Asian Youth Project, in which Hmong and other Asian-American youth develop greater awareness of identity, community and social justice issues. The staff at the Center also lead study groups, to learn from and about those involved in “transforming themselves and Detroit”; monthly conversations to “struggle around theory, vision and ideas, as well as…ongoing practice”; and tours of Detroit that, in opposition to the prevalent blight tourism, focus on the city as site of activist labor and creative survival.

Catherine Ferguson Academy

The Catherine Ferguson Academy is an alternative high school for pregnant young women and young mothers on the Westside of Detroit. Named after a freed slave who became an important promoter of education for impoverished children in New York City despite her illiteracy, the Academy allows its students to attend classes and care for their babies and young children in a single environment. Attending to both education and parenting, the Academy is a hybrid institution whose agenda has been transformed by the needs of its students.

As well as teaching a high-school curriculum, parenting, and college preparation skills, the Academy also makes prominent use of an urban farm. The farm is located on the site of property formerly used for high-school sports. The farm was initiated and is overseen by Paul Weertz, the Academy's science teacher, who also organized the farming community on Farnsworth Street. Each student involved in the farm program tends her own plot in a vegetable or flower garden; students also work collectively in fruit orchards, beekeeping, and the raising of chickens, ducks, rabbits, goats and horses. Residents of Farnsworth Street, some of whom also teach at the Academy, raise feed for many of the farm's animals.

As well as reinforcing the teaching of parenting skills, work on the farm yields products such as goat milk, eggs, and honey, as well as fruit and vegetables, all used in the Academy's meal programs. But work on the farm also intersects with many other aspects of students' lives, from the reinforcement of familial traditions of gardening and cooking to the formation of new networks of friendship and community.

In the spring of 2011, as part of a large-scale corporatization of public services in Michigan, the Catherine Ferguson Academy and seven other Detroit-area schools were slated to be closed, along with the sale of 45 other Detroit-area schools to for-profit charter companies. Attempting to process unreal estate into real estate, this proposal represented a typical but wholly dysfunctional response to economic crisis.

Block Clubbing

Block clubs exist throughout Detroit; they index the city's low level of municipal services and the corresponding need for city residents to provide those services themselves. They also reflect the high capacity for the self-organization of collective groups in a city where such organization is loosely supervised, if it is officially registered at all.

Block clubs often comprise organized systems to watch over neighborhoods where violence is frequent but police surveillance is low. As such, a large part of the block club's work is announcing its presence through signs and other visual media. Block clubs also often function as collective agents of blotting; many vacant lots in neighborhoods with block clubs have been appropriated and used for such collective activities as gardening, barbequing or socializing. The accommodation of these activities by block clubs indicate how these clubs exceed any specific mandate they are formed to carry out and thereby enter into unreal estate speculation.