Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City by Gordon Young (review)

Teardown is as much a love letter to Flint, Michigan, as it is a memoir, propelled by nostalgia and the seemingly overwhelming desperation, struggles, and strength that are integral to daily life in spaces of decline. Gordon Young joins a growing list of journalists returning to their childhood hometown with aged eyes and years of experience elsewhere in an attempt to understand where they came from and divine what those places have become, focusing intently on the material conditions in a place where the depth of decline surpass the early conditions glossed over by the fuzzy warmth of youth.

Though treading many of the worn tropes of the authors that have come before – crime and the incapacity of public safety organization to the inefficiency of the municipality, the physical changes of neighbourhood remembered through childhood experience amplified by an exodus of people and jobs, the rhythms of a city disrupted by idled assembly lines punctuated by intermittent and marginal employment and unknowable depths of each subsequent crisis. No autopsy, Young’s ability to weave his family history into the rise and fall of Flint is an earnest and sympathetic examination of a declining city avoiding the fabulism of Charlie LeDuff’s Detroit: An American Autopsy (New York: Penguin, 2013) and the write-by-hype style of Mark Binelli’s Detroit City is the Place to Be: The Afterlife of an American Metropolis (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2012).

Young’s strongest contributions in Teardown connect the housing and land markets of San Francisco and Flint through his own experience. It is this transition in the economy from production to financialization that offers some of the more interesting ways to understand the production of conditions Young catalogues in Flint, conditions produced in varying scopes throughout the United States. Though Young does not explicitly breakdown the local boundaries often drawn around real estate markets, he illustrates how spaces of decline draw a variety of speculators: some dreamers seeking a return home, others with altruistic intent but little capital perpetuating and accelerating decline.

For decades academic research on declining cities has focused either on what is absent or lost in these places once heavily defined by industrial production. The declining number of jobs and people, the growing number of vacant and abandoned houses, the dwindling opportunities for residents that remain, and the explosion of municipal deficits often made on the back of promises to municipal workers struggling to maintain services. When researchers have not focused on loss, they often navigate the complexity of urban decline through narrow case studies focused on conditions and outcomes in finite areas. Young deftly engages with both of these approaches particularly in his retelling – and telling off – of General Motors and its role in the civic largess, such as the free harp lessons he took advantage of as a child, and the civic peril overcome and worked around on a daily basis by the residents he gives voice throughout. Just as Young steps back to examine the scope of the auto industry in Flint and the ways in which it touched the lives of his family and those of his childhood friends, Teardown burrows into the neighbourhoods that become central in Young’s quest for real estate. The preservation and gentrification, a fraught concept in declining cities as the slow pace and perpetual do-it-yourself process mask the consequences of displacement and ad hoc securitization, of the Carriage Town neighbourhood to his childhood subdivision of working-class tract housing collapsing in a sea of vacancy and abandonment.

What Young captures in his former neighbourhood is the imagined balance that is often the focus on neighbourhood intervention in municipal policy circles – a tenuous stability that could be lost to another vacancy or an open and abandoned structure. Young captures much of this detailing the work of Dan Kildee at the Genesee County Land Bank, a project that morphed into the Center for Community Progress, one of the largest policy think tanks developing interventions for shrinking cities. The organization...