Wes Janz This Is Flint, Michigan Buick City parking lot, 2010. [All photographs by the author, except as noted.] "Distressed are big chunks of Detroit, Flint, Gary, Chicago, East St. Louis, and Cincinnati." This is what I wrote after completing the weeklong Midwess Distress Tour with my Ball State colleague Olon Dotson and a dozen architecture students in October 2006. "Depressed. Dysfunctioned. Disoriented. Devolved. Dissed. Dissing. How many abandoned buildings should I photograph and take others to photograph before we get the picture? How many houses do you have to see being torn from a city’s fabric before the tearing of one life from another no longer registers? When should you stop, or start, caring?" After "Midwess," I saved an email that Glenn Johnson, a property manager at a local land bank who led our tour of Flint, wrote to one student: "I was born here. I would never leave here for good. All that it is and all that it isn’t," Glenn wrote, "Flint, Michigan, will always be home to me." Flint is a city I return to, its deep decline and the determination I find among its residents haunting me, challenging me. We did a second weeklong driving tour in October 2008 — again with Olon, and with planning professor Nihal Perera and a group of students — to Cleveland and Youngstown, Ohio; Braddock, Harrisburg, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Scranton and Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania; and Camden, New Jersey. This tour, the Distress Too Tour, plus estimates of 10,000 to 12,000 abandoned houses in my home city of Indianapolis, led to more questions. I became convinced that the pain of the Rust Belt has got to be understood, especially by today’s students, by our future architects and designers. This world of central city abandonment, institutional racism, intransigent poverty, unending decline of the physical infrastructure — this is a world they need to know, to come to grips with and maybe get involved with as citizens and as architects. That meant that I had to get involved, had to dig deeper into one place to give dimension and depth to my curiosity. I needed to know more about Flint and its people. Flint is where the American automaker General Motors was founded in 1908. The city grew as a company town, with several generations of workers and families benefitting from the coast to coast appetite for automobiles that followed both World Wars. Forty years ago, Flint was still home to 190,000 people, with 80,000 locals employed in GM plants. When community leaders imagined the future, they did so with confidence, envisioniong a Flint, their "Vehicle City," with 250,000 residents. This was, this would be, a place that mattered. Buick City, ca. 1913. [via Michigan Radio Picture Project] Flint is shrinking. Over time, the hubris of the Big Three, of GM, Ford and Chrysler — evident in the declines in product quality, the inroads made by foreign auto manufacturers and the assaults targeted at unions nationwide — brought down the U.S. auto ind.

1. Wes Janz
This Is Flint, Michigan
Buick City parking lot, 2010. [All photographs by the author,
except as noted.]
"Distressed are big chunks of Detroit, Flint, Gary, Chicago,
East St. Louis, and Cincinnati." This is what I wrote after
completing the weeklong Midwess Distress Tour with my Ball
State colleague Olon Dotson and a dozen architecture students
in October 2006. "Depressed. Dysfunctioned. Disoriented.
Devolved. Dissed. Dissing. How many abandoned buildings
should I photograph and take others to photograph before we get
the picture? How many houses do you have to see being torn
from a city’s fabric before the tearing of one life from another
no longer registers? When should you stop, or start, caring?"
After "Midwess," I saved an email that Glenn Johnson, a
property manager at a local land bank who led our tour of Flint,
wrote to one student: "I was born here. I would never leave here
for good. All that it is and all that it isn’t," Glenn wrote, "Flint,
Michigan, will always be home to me."
Flint is a city I return to, its deep decline and the determination
I find among its residents haunting me, challenging me. We did
a second weeklong driving tour in October 2008 — again with
Olon, and with planning professor Nihal Perera and a group of
students — to Cleveland and Youngstown, Ohio; Braddock,
Harrisburg, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Scranton and Wilkes-
Barre, Pennsylvania; and Camden, New Jersey. This tour, the
Distress Too Tour, plus estimates of 10,000 to 12,000
abandoned houses in my home city of Indianapolis, led to more
questions. I became convinced that the pain of the Rust Belt has

2. got to be understood, especially by today’s students, by our
future architects and designers. This world of central city
abandonment, institutional racism, intransigent poverty,
unending decline of the physical infrastructure — this is a
world they need to know, to come to grips with and maybe get
involved with as citizens and as architects. That meant that I
had to get involved, had to dig deeper into one place to give
dimension and depth to my curiosity. I needed to know more
about Flint and its people.
Flint is where the American automaker General Motors was
founded in 1908. The city grew as a company town, with several
generations of workers and families benefitting from the coast
to coast appetite for automobiles that followed both World
Wars. Forty years ago, Flint was still home to 190,000 people,
with 80,000 locals employed in GM plants. When community
leaders imagined the future, they did so with confidence,
envisioniong a Flint, their "Vehicle City," with 250,000
residents. This was, this would be, a place that mattered.
Buick City, ca. 1913. [via Michigan Radio Picture Project]
Flint is shrinking. Over time, the hubris of the Big Three, of
GM, Ford and Chrysler — evident in the declines in product
quality, the inroads made by foreign auto manufacturers and the
assaults targeted at unions nationwide — brought down the U.S.
auto industry and buckled the day-to-day routines, expectations
and dreams of all Flintians. Between the years following W.W.
II and today, GM eliminated 70,000 local jobs (if not more) and
85,000 people (if not more) moved out. Auto assembly line
worker Ben Hamper, in his autobiographical Rivethead: Tales
from the Assembly Line, described this decline and his own
devolution as a third-generation GM "shoprat" in the ‘70s and
‘80s. "What this place lacks in ambience it makes up in
ambulance," he wrote. [1]

3. Flint is fading. With the loss of so much of its industrial base,
the economic picture for post-industrial Michigan is pitch-dark.
There is less and less governmental support for schools, public
transportation, family assistance. "We can no longer afford to
live outside our means," said the new mayor in early 2010, and
soon enough there were layoffs in the police and fire
departments, the closing of fire stations, and a drop-off in
garbage pick-up from weekly to biweekly. People are at the
brink, ready to act out. On March 25, 2010, the day before the
latest rounds of police and firefighter lay-offs were to be
announced, nine houses were set on fire. According to a report
by WEYI-TV, the fire battallon chief said: "All the fires seem
to have been set intentionally. ... It also seems very suspicious,
since the fires are happening the day before firefighter layoffs. I
think they’re trying to make a point and I think they’re going
about it in all the wrong ways."
In this time of declining and sometimes disappearing city
budgets, it’s likely that the difficult decisions being made in
Michigan today are coming soon to a city near you. Want to see
a preview? Put Flint on your bucket list.
702 & 706 East Third Street, 2009.
Flint is efficient. Scavengers and scrappers watch for
opportunity. Aluminum siding is stripped and resold into the
formal recycling economy. Aluminum windows, hot water
heaters and furnaces are taken, sometimes in daylight, no
problem. Copper pipes too, and new electrical wiring. Well
before the agents of the formal economy negotiate foreclosure
proceedings, what remains is a carcass that was once a home but
soon is less than a house. And it’s not just abandoned buildings
that are targeted. On my first trip to Flint, in 2006, I spoke with

4. a community activist on a summer day. She said, "Sorry the
building is so hot. Our air conditioner was stolen this week.
When I called the cops, they said, 'If we find yours, we’ll
probably find ours.'" The police department’s air conditioner
had been lifted that same night.
Flint is disappearing. Literally. One understandable but
unfortunate dimension of the city’s growth, as pointed out by
Robert Beckley, in "Flint Michigan and the Cowboy Economy:
Deconstructing Flint," was the poor quality of much mid-20th-
century residential architecture and urban design. Back then, he
wrote, "While jobs were plentiful, housing was not and ...
people were sleeping in tents and cardboard shacks. In response,
small poorly constructed housing was quickly erected on narrow
lots, close to the factories that provided employment. This
building cycle was repeated after W.W. II." [2] The houses
served their purposes, but most have outlived their life spans.
Here’s a reality check: 32 percent of Flint’s residential
properties are abandoned and the average single-family house
sells for $16,400. Three to five houses are torn down every
working day. The chief of the City’s demolition crew told me
that there are approximately 20,000 abandoned buildings.
The good news? The number of house fires per week is down,
from 12 to 15 several years ago to 8 to 10 most weeks today. In
Flint, that’s one way to measure progress.
A house fire on the front porch leads to demolition, 2006.
Flint is elusive. It’s like this for me now, after twenty-plus
visits: Buildings once there are now gone, replaced by lawns, by
weeds, maybe by gardens. Buildings I photographed are now
charred rubble or have disappeared. I knew something once, but
now it’s changed; or maybe my memories are faulty, maybe I’m

5. at the wrong intersection, expecting to see a building that is a
block away. That happens. People I knew have left. They lose
jobs, lose interest, lose their way. I lose touch with them. That
happens, too. I think I know somebody, and on my next trip to
Flint, find out they’ve vanished. [3]
Flint is without us. Which is to say — influenced by Alan
Weisman and his recent book The World Without Us — the
question arises: What would Flint be like without people?
Weisman writes: "Suppose that the worst has happened. Human
extinction is a fait compli. ... Look around you, at today’s
world. ... Leave it all in place, but extract human beings. Wipe
us out, and see what’s left." [4] The parking lot for the 235-acre
Buick City, where thousands of shift workers docked their GM
cars, is a prime "without us" site. One of the country’s largest
brownfields is being reclaimed by nature, trees grow through
cracks in the paving, this will be a great forest, again, if we
leave it alone. Next door, the Oak Park playground is overgrown
with tall grasses, its swingsets idle. On the site of what was, in
my lifetime, one of the world’s most productive assembly lines,
the only sounds you hear are the crickets. On every visit to
Flint, I think of The World Without Us.
And the idea that there is benefit to this line of thinking —
here's Bill McKibben's blurb on the front of the book jacket:
"This is one of the grandest thought experiments of our time, a
tremendous feat of imaginative reporting!" — sounds important,
sounds edgy. Weisman and McKibben need to come to Flint.
Imagination? There’s no need. Experiment? It’s life in Flint.
Grand? Try everyday. Tremendous? Think commonplace.
Weisman wrote the book on Flint, he just doesn’t know it.
Oak Park playground, 2010.

6. Flint is an inspiration, at least for some of my students. One
group joined me at Ball State’s Virginia Ball Center for
Creative Inquiry in Spring 2007, taking a 12-credit seminar-
plus-studio titled “One Small Project: Seeking Relevance in the
Lives of Leftover People." Among our experiences: A day in
Flint, where we visited the Land Bank, had dinner with local
poet-photographer-police officer Brian Willingham (Brian’s
books include Thunder Enlightening and Soul of a Black Cop),
and watched as two houses were demolished.
Our main end-of-semester activity was a public show at the
Dean Johnson Gallery in downtown Indianapolis. Each student
produced an installation; two are worth noting here. In one,
Diana rethought the experience of finding a dirty and in-use
mattress in a squat set up in an abandoned house. To cover the
squatter’s body, she crafted a quilt made from materials found
on site. In Diana’s words: “The house was to be torn down and
reduced to a pile of scraps ... leftovers of this place from which
everyone wants out. Scraps, pieces, and piles, all formerly part
of a home, that once were part of a bigger idea. My intention
was to provide shelter, warmth, and security, constrained by the
materials that composed it. By stitching the pieces back
together, these scraps can once again create a composition, if
only to document the destruction.”
For her project, Katie collected the doors from several houses
about to be demolished. She wrote: “A door can be open or
closed, either allowing or preventing passage across its
threshold. In this same manner, one is allowed or denied access
to opportunities throughout one’s lifetime. Pushing through one
door may be done with ease, but the next might require much
more effort, and even that might not be enough. Closed door
after closed door establishes a barrier that one might never
overcome. This collection of doors represents numerous
barriers, whether it is getting accepted into graduate school,
resolving differing cultures, finding a place to sleep for the

7. night, or obtaining a green card. The unbiased character of the
barrier makes it universal and therefore unavoidable for people
of many backgrounds.”
Top: Katie Petersen, "Hindrance," Dean Johnson Gallery,
Indianapolis, 2007. Bottom left: Diana Short, "Cut and
Plugged," Dean Johnson Gallery Indianapolis, 2007. Bottom
right: The author (at right) and architecture students from Ball
State University talk with Marvin, a private demolition
contractor, on the Midwess Distress Tour, 2006. [photo by
Mickel Darmawan]
Flint is a role model. With other cities and regions suffering
their own sustained downturns, people are looking to Flint for
advice, ideas and hope. Among the main resources is the
Genesee County Land Bank. Founded in 2002, and based in
Flint, the Land Bank works to prevent tax foreclosure on area
homes and encourages reinvestment in the 6,000 residential,
commercial and industrial properties it manages or has acquired
through the foreclosure process. [5] Large-scale programs
include Demolition, Housing Renovation and Rental, and
Foreclosure Prevention. Smaller initiatives, often inspired by
the actions of individual citizens or neighborhoods at the scale
of one lot, one homeowner, and very small sums of money
(maybe no money) include: Adopt-a-Lot, in which neighbors
take over the maintenance of nearby lots; Clean and Green, in
which locals convert vacant Land Bank-owned properties into
gardens; and the Side Lot Transfer program, by which home
owners can purchase vacant Land Bank property adjacent to
their lots for less than $75 plus the foreclosure year’s taxes. [6]
Flint is home, a place that matters not only to academics
studying post-industrial urban shrinkage, but also to many
people ... especially people in Flint. It’s obvious, but not so

8. easy to remember: 110,000 people still live in the city; 5,000
GM jobs remain. I’ve met people who will never leave, a few
who have returned. Ties are strong here, multi-generational
families stick together. Those who choose to stay speak of their
unbreakable ties to the city, of growing up and growing old
where they were born. I hear this a lot: “I’ll never leave Flint.”
Of all the insights that I’ve gained in the Rust Belt, maybe that
one — that people choose to stay — is the strongest and holds
the most potential. At least for me. I’ll write about a few of
these people.
Flint is, or was, Keith. I’m not sure where he is now. On one of
our early trips with students, we were told that a squatter was
being evicted from the front porch of an abandoned house where
he had lived for a week. Hung blankets were his walls, the front
steps his kitchen. He wasn’t “home,” so we walked on in,
stepping around a couch and chair, loaded cardboard boxes,
table covered with his belongings, several posters including one
that read: “I AM ME ... I AM OKAY.” Later I thought: Who the
hell did I think I was? Why was I so comfortable walking
around, looking at his personal stuff? Maybe the “personal
stuff” of squatters is not so obvious. Then, suddenly, Keith
appeared. We talked. He talked with my students. That day he
was moving to another squat a couple of blocks away. He said
he had several possible places in mind, was always on the
lookout for new places. In some ways, Keith’s city was a
network of connected camouflages, small unseen places to make
his home, if even for a day or a few weeks. Keith had been
squatting for three years, said he knew where to get food and
water. He knew “how to hunt.” A student said to me, “Perhaps
this is like living in the wild.”
As we departed, Keith said to us: “You can get as much as you
want out of life. I believe in being positive.” I didn’t anticipate
a pep talk from a squatter. A life lesson.

9. Keith and his squat on Second Avenue, 2006. [left photo by
Mickel Darmawan]
Flint is Adam, living ten blocks northwest of Keith’s squat in
the Carriage Town Historic District, next to in an abandoned
house notable for the hand-painted signs hammered to its side:
HUMAN SACRIFICES NEEDED
INQUIRE INSIDE
I’ve photographed the signs, the house, and a backyard adorned
with plastic skulls wrapped in barbed wire and plastic skeletons
swinging from tall posts. During one snow-swept stop, I heard a
bleating goat. Others warned me about the man who lived next
to the house, and seemed to be the author of the scary signs:
“He took after somebody with a chain saw.”
On one of my visits, he’s there, Adam. We talk. I’ve got
questions, he’s got answers. Skulls and skeletons? They’re gifts,
he’s a Halloween baby. Signs? He put them up to discourage
others from messing with the house or with him or his stuff. It
worked. Other tactics? Using a searchlight to harass hookers,
hustlers, meth users and sellers. Gorilla-gluing a nearby public
telephone to stop deals. Filing lawsuits against the City and the
hospital nearby for dereliction of responsibility. Expanding into
the backyards to the north and south. Chain saw? Sure, he did
walk, not run, after city officials while holding a chain saw, but
it wasn’t turned on and was facing backwards. “Who could
possibly be threatened?” Later, when I mentioned Adam at the
Land Bank, I’m told that they believe he is a long-term squatter.
They can’t find any record of his legal claim to the house and
he’s not provided them with one. It’s “his house” to the extent
that no one wants it, no one is paying attention, and no one
wants to mess with him.

10. For nearly everyone (police, zoning officials, prostitutes, the
Mayor, thieves, newspaper editors), Adam is trouble,
unpredictable and a nuisance. I see that. But I also see Adam as
an urban pioneer committed to a place most leave. He’s
demanding that the "top" reflect the "bottom," even as he takes
advantages of the gaps between him and them. He’s claimed
property no one wants and rides surveillance on a neighborhood
even the cops have written off.
Top: Adam's squat. Bottom: Adam talks with architecture
professor Olon Dotson, 2009.
Flint is Wendy, leading a meeting of Metawanene Hills
Neighborhood Association in the summer of 2006, at a church
about one-third of a mile north of Adam’s signs. Wendy,
formerly a program officer at a foundation, led the discussion
that evening about what to do about the awkwardly shaped
traffic island just outside the church. "What was best," the
neighbors asked each other: "Potted or planted landscaping?
Geraniums or arborvitaes? Who would organize volunteers?
Who had tools? Who might donate plants?" To see the group
take on this responsibility was a revelation. It shouldn’t have
been. But I say, full disclosure, it was. Four years later, in June
2010, I returned to the area, expecting the worst. You come to
expect the worst on the north side, at a crazy-quilt intersection
that serves as the forecourt of a "corner store," a neighborhood
grocery where you can buy sugar and fat in all their consumer-
friendly forms, along with (reading from the sign) food, wine
and lottery.
But I found a thriving place, planted with irises, junipers,
black-eyed Susans, lilies, yaro, coral bells, red leafed Japanese
barberry, ornamental grasses, and Russian sage, as the

11. neighbors‘ material and color palette. I found one of the most
compelling examples of the privatization of public space that
I’ve ever seen. An asphalt place that is a growing place, a piece
of connective tissue in a city of many generations, of shared
understandings of difficult lives, of lives lost and lives possible.
If your eyes and ears and heart are open, Flint changes you.
Being encouraged by Keith does that. Questioned by Adam.
Pulled in by Wendy and an awkward intersection that blooms
year after year after year.
Traffic islands at the intersection of MLK, Oren and Welch,
2010.
It changes what you think needs to be done. What you think you
should be doing. What you think of another human being. In
time, you might forget the lessons. Insights might fade. That
was not and is not the case for me. To say this differently: there
is Wes pre-Flint and Wes post-Flint.
Post-Flint, I’m asking: How do we prepare our students for the
multiple realities of the world they are about to enter as young
professionals and will inherit as global citizens? How might
such contemporary issues be introduced to our students? How
should architectural education acknowledge the breakdown of
the Rust Belt? Is it time to be more engaged not only with the
failed policies and falling infrastructures of our shrinking cities,
but more importantly, with the remaining residents? I
remember, daily, a woman in East St. Louis who said to me:
“Professor, we don’t need to be studied. We need help!” How,
then, are we to help?
Post-Flint, I’m wondering: What is the place of an architect in a
setting where few building permits are issued, where many more
buildings are being demolished than designed? What can

12. architects work on if “development," “next phase," "expansion,"
"anticipated growth," “better tomorrow," and “recovery" are
stripped from our day-to-day? Or, if the conversations are about
developments in scavenger activities, the next phase of federal
demolition funding, expansion of landfill holdings, anticipated
growth among local salvage yards, a better tomorrow for
demolition contractors, or the recovery of urban animal
populations? To put this differently, can we shift away from the
overwhelming, and suffocating, economic and legalistic
frameworks that dominate our profession, our university
programs, and our lives?
Post-Flint, I’m searching out "small" initiatives, curious about
local progress made by individuals who toil beneath, in spite of,
and without knowledge of the larger plans and recovery
prospects imagined by trained professionals. I wonder if our
work should begin not with development or expansion, not even
with a charrette. Might we start with an individual, someone we
know on a first name basis? Is this, in a place like Flint, more
appropriate? Is this a way, finally, to humanize our profession?
To begin with Keith, with Adam, with Wendy? As I move
through these moments and ask these questions, I do my best to
resolve the contradictions between what I thought was the case,
what authorities tell me needs to be done, and what I find. Flint
churns as a deepening inconsistency for me, beset by problems,
scarred by solutions, and alive with ... well ... alive with lives.
Flint is. And that’s important to remember.
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