Detroit Hustle: A Memoir of Life, Love, and Home

by Amy Haimerl

Overview

Journalist Amy Haimerl and her husband had been priced out of their Brooklyn neighborhood. Seeing this as a great opportunity to start over again, they decide to cash in their savings and buy an abandoned house for 35,000 in Detroit, the largest city in the United States to declare bankruptcy.

As she and her husband restore the 1914 Georgian Revival, a stately brick house with no plumbing, no heat, and no electricity, Amy finds a community of Detroiters who, like herself, aren't afraid of a little hard work or things that are a little rough around the edges. Filled with amusing and touching anecdotes about navigating a real-estate market that is rife with scams, finding a contractor who is a lover of C.S. Lewis and willing to quote him liberally, and neighbors who either get teary-eyed at the sight of newcomers or urge Amy and her husband to get out while they can, Amy writes evocatively about the charms and challenges of finding her footing in a city whose future is in question. Detroit Hustle is a memoir that is both a meditation on what it takes to make a house a home, and a love letter to a much-derided city.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780762457359
Publisher:	Running Press Book Publishers
Publication date:	05/03/2016
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Amy Haimerl is a professor of journalism at Michigan State University and covers small business and urban policy for Fortune, Reuters, and the New York Times. She was the entrepreneurship editor at Crain's Detroit Business, where she covered the city's historic bankruptcy trial. She is an alum of Fortune Small Business, CNNMoney, and USAA Magazine, as well as a former Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan. She lives in Detroit with her husband, Karl; two pitbulls, Maddie and Beaubien; and stray cat, Jack, who is the boss of everyone.

Editorial Reviews

01/25/2016
Haimerl (reporter for Crain’s Detroit Business), her husband, and beloved pets relocate from a quaint neighborhood in Brooklyn to Detroit, where they purchase an abandoned 1914 Georgian historic house. In this charming narrative, Haimerl chronicles the ups and downs of rehabilitating the house, with its 42 windows and lack of plumbing, in a city burdened by bankruptcy and widespread neglect. Haimerl sees herself as part of a zeitgeist, with other newcomers headed to the city in hopes to purchase an affordable home. She soon learns how tough it is. With humor and incisiveness, Haimerl shares the journey of turning a house into a home, lovingly called “Matilda.” She builds relationships with others trying to revitalize the city, befriending her new home’s contractors and getting to know her neighbors. As a financial journalist, she adeptly reports on the city’s financial situation and its newest entrepreneurial efforts—from a grassroots recycling center to pop-up vendors of all sorts working “with very little capital… to test the waters.” Haimerl traverses the new and old that define Detroit’s unique and resilient character. She is discerning and hopeful about the challenges to becoming a Detroiter as a “gentrifier,” while also reflecting on growing up on the outskirts of working class Denver, where her parents were impacted by gentrification. This book is about more than the blight of Detroit; it is also about making a new home and community in a rapidly changing city. (May)

Publishers Weekly

2016-02-09
A journalist's account of how and why she took a chance on a new life and home-rehabilitation project in the down-and-out city of Detroit. When former Fortune Small Business senior editor Haimerl and her husband, Karl, decided to leave their increasingly unaffordable Brooklyn neighborhood of Red Hook, it was with the idea of going somewhere that, unlike such trendy cities as Portland or Seattle, "was forging its future." The couple eventually chose Detroit, which appealed because of its "powerful lure of its cheap real estate." They made their first move away from New York after Haimerl received a prestigious journalism fellowship from the University of Michigan. When a post-graduation job offer at a Detroit newspaper came through, she and her husband took their entire savings and bought an abandoned 1914 Georgian Revival in a revivifying neighborhood. Though listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the house, which the couple bought for just $35,000, was a "3,000-square-foot box of fuckedupedness" that had no electricity, running water, or heat. Friends and longtime Detroit residents urged them to walk away from their investment, but they refused. Armed with an initial remodeling budget of $100,000, they befriended a genially quirky contractor and committed Detroiter who told them that the house would need more than three times that amount to simply become livable. Risking their financial futures on real estate in a city struggling to find its way out of bankruptcy, the pair cast their lot with others like themselves who took Detroit for what it was and didn't attempt to "make it over into what they left." Haimerl does not ignore how her place in the middle class made homeownership possible for her, nor does she forget the problematic nature of Detroit's recovery. At the same time, she also concludes that the "key to the city's future" is investment by people and banks willing to believe in Detroit's value as a place to call home. An engaging and cautiously optimistic memoir of making a new life.

Kirkus Reviews

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