Teardown

After living in San Francisco for fifteen years, journalist Gordon Young found himself yearning for his Rust Belt hometown: Flint, Michigan, the birthplace of General Motors and the "star" of the Michael Moore documentary Roger & Me. Hoping to rediscover and help a place that had once boasted one of the world's highest per capita income levels but had become one of the country's most impoverished and dangerous cities, he returned to Flint with the intention of buying a house. What he found was a place of stark contrasts and dramatic stories, where an exotic dancer could afford a lavish mansion, speculators scooped up cheap houses by the dozen on eBay, and arson was often the quickest route to neighborhood beautification.

Skillfully blending personal memoir, historical inquiry, and interviews with Flint residents, Young constructs a vibrant tale of a once-thriving city still fighting-despite overwhelming odds-to rise from the ashes. He befriends a ragtag collection of urban homesteaders and die-hard locals who refuse to give up as they try to transform Flint into a smaller, greener town that offers lessons for cities all over the world. Hard-hitting, insightful, and often painfully funny, Teardown reminds us that cities are ultimately defined by people, not politics or economics.

Autorentext
Gordon Young grew up in Flint, Michigan, the birthplace of General Motors, where his accomplishments included learning to parallel park the family's massive Buick Electra 225. After reaching an uneasy truce with the nuns in the local Catholic school system, he went on to study journalism at the University of Missouri and English literature at the University of Nottingham. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Utne Reader, and numerous other publications. Young has published Flint Expatriates, a blog for the long-lost residents of the Vehicle City, since 2007. He is a senior lecturer in the Communication Department at Santa Clara University and lives in San Francisco.


Inhalt
Prologue: Summer 2009

Part One
1 Pink Houses and Panhandlers
2 Bottom-Feeders
3 Bourgeois Homeowners
4 Virtual Vehicle City
5 Bad Reputation
6 The Road to Prosperity
7 Bar Logic
8 Downward Mobility
9 Black and White
10 The Forest Primeval
11 The Naked Truth
12 The Toughest Job in Politics
13 Urban Homesteaders

Part Two
14 Quitters Never Win
15 Burning Down the House
16 Emotional Rescue
17 Get Real
18 Living Large
19 Fading Murals
20 Gun Club
21 Bargaining with God
22 Psycho Killer

Part Three
23 Winter Wonderland
24 Home on the Range
25 California Dreamin'
26 Thankless Task
27 Joy to the World

Epilogue: Summer 2012

Updates
Acknowledgments
Notes
Sources and Further Reading
Index

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