The House in the Wrong Part of Town
Detroit, Michigan
The house was in the wrong part of town, and William Garrett knew it. A middle-aged barber with his own salon, William had sized up the house on Pierson Street in far Northwest Detroit. It was a dark brick single-story home, with a pitched shingled roof and small square windows. The front of the house was set back and angled away from the street. It looked hand built, like the majority of houses on the street. The neighborhood seemed quiet, though it looked a little rough around the edges. But the best part was the house’s yard: a full 1.2 acres, big enough for the gardens and family parties that his wife, Bertha, loved so much. The only thing was, how could he convince Bertha, whom he feared would dislike the neighborhood? He knew how stubborn she could be, and he knew that if he went about it wrong, they might just spend the rest of their lives in that stupid little subdivision downtown.
Foolishly, William decided to try to outwit his wife. He coaxed her into the car in the middle of the night and drove her out to Pierson Street, hoping the cover of darkness would obscure the distance and the block. He wanted her to fall in love with the house before the neighborhood scared her away. The move was conniving, but can anyone blame him? It was 1990 and William was a grown man, a successful professional, itching for a home of his own.
The next day, Bertha called her eldest daughter, Michelle, who already lived on her own.
“Your Dad thinks he’s slick,” she told her daughter.
Nothing got past Bertha Garrett.
An elegant and deeply religious woman, Bertha grew up running through the backwoods of Alabama. Her father had been a farmer, and she loved wandering through the tiny trails behind their land as she picked through the underbrush. In Bertha’s world, land was something that men toiled over and yearned for. For decades her father had tamed the fields, but when his daughter went back for a visit, years after she had migrated to Detroit, her homeland had once again become wild.
“My father stopped farming,” she remembers. “So the animals had taken over the path. The animals know when humans are no longer here.”
Bertha knew that her husband also wanted land. They were both cramped and crowded in their downtown subdivision, a place where families rented small subsidized houses with the assistance of a federal program called “Section 8.” Although Michelle was grown, they had three young children in the house—and maybe, if they were lucky, more on the way. Bertha missed the land and nature. She loved flowers and gardening; they reminded her of Alabama.
Despite her husband’s fears, Bertha was taken with the house and its surroundings on Northwest Pierson Street. The neighborhood was a solid, middle-class community. Across the street from the house that Bertha and William wanted lived an electrician; on their right was a paralegal. But something more powerful than class tied this block together. The neighborhood was an “enclave from the South,” as Bertha describes it. The majority of the block’s residents were, like Bertha and William, middle-class, Alabama-born African Americans who had fled north throughout the twentieth century as part of a massive movement called the Great Migration. Inspired by visions of freedom from Jim Crow, safety from the racial violence, and jobs that paid dollars rather than cents, six million African Americans journeyed north in what is perhaps the greatest dream-fueled migration in U.S. history. It was more than just a physical movement. It was also, as Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson explains, a collective, psychological liberation through migration—“the first big step the nation’s servant class ever took without asking.”47
Tens of thousands of Southern-born African Americans came to Detroit during World War II, when the city was literally bursting with well-paying manufacturing jobs. For many Southerners at that time, Detroit was a legendary, even mythical, city, a place where massive factories churned out planes and guns at all hours of the day and night, and there were so many jobs that newcomers tripped over them the minute they stepped off the train platform.48
As new residents settled into the city during the 1940s and 1950s, racial tensions inscribed physical lines and divisions into the city’s landscape that are still apparent today. The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) had the policy of redlining African American neighborhoods, meaning that the agency literally took maps of the United States and drew red lines around minority neighborhoods to mark where the government would not lend to families seeking a mortgage. Even white neighborhoods bordering the redlined areas were suspect, since the FHA worried that the areas might soon fall victim to “infiltration of inharmonious racial or nationality groups.”49
As Yale University urban studies professor Dolores Hayden explains in Building Suburbia, Detroit is home to one of the nation’s most iconic examples of housing segregation: a physical, concrete wall erected in 1940 to protect a white-only community. Initially, the FHA had refused to lend to the developer because his proposed subdivision bordered on an African American neighborhood. Only after he proposed building a six-foot-high concrete wall “running for a half-mile on the property line separating the black and white neighborhoods” did the government agree to provide federal loans and mortgage guarantees.50
Although physical walls were uncommon, this type of purposeful racial segregation, enforced by the federal government, was the norm in the housing industry throughout the majority of the twentieth century.
“A place like Levittown that made the dream of homeownership accessible to working-class families explicitly excluded Blacks,” housing scholar Chris Bonastia said in an interview, referring to Levittown, New York, one of the largest planned suburbs in the nation, which houses more than fifty thousand people and prohibited all non-white residents until 1960.51
The economics of home prices incentivized segregation and even racial violence, Bonastia explained, because the value of properties plummeted when neighborhoods became integrated. And the Federal Housing Administration, as the nation’s largest mortgage insurer, was often the driving force behind the segregation.52
“The Federal Housing Administration was a conservative business, especially racially,” explained Bonastia. “It saw itself as an ally to the private sector, and what it did was based on the stamp of approval from private industry.”
In other words, if a concrete wall was what the market demanded, it was what the FHA required.
The home that Bertha and William hoped to buy was only a few miles away from this iconic wall, but Bertha wasn’t put off by the fact that the house was on the “wrong side” of town. She was well accustomed to the city’s racialized nature. She’d arrived during the riots of 1967 and 1968, and throughout her decades in Detroit she’d watched the white residents’ steady, anxious flight to the suburbs.
Yes, Bertha was quite taken with the neighborhood. There was only one problem: The house itself was not for sale.
The home’s owner was a stubborn and eccentric writer named Ms. Ween. She was very possessive of the house because she and her husband had built it by hand in 1951. They had laid the bricks, dug up the yard, and planted an apple orchard and mulberry trees. The Weens had built it because African Americans hoping to buy their own home in the 1940s and 1950s had few options. The majority of lending came from the FHA, which refused to extend mortgages to them. Some took out predatory, secondary-market mortgages from loan sharks, so named because they preyed upon African American families by selling them loans with marked-up interest rates and a never-ending list of tacked-on fees. Others, like the Weens, bought land and built their homes themselves.
After her husband died, Ms. Ween vowed she would never leave her home, because it was filled with memories of her husband. She never put the house on the market. And even though she knew she would have to move eventually, neighbors worried that she’d never find a family that would make her satisfied enough to sell.
“She and her husband built this home and put the driveway in themselves,” remembers Willie McDade, one of Bertha’s neighbors and friends. “Ms. Ween was very particular about who would move into this home after she moved. . . . She promised us that she would sell this home to someone who was worthy and would take care of it, and she kept her word,” said McDade.53
Bertha and William Garrett visited the house again, this time during daylight and with their baby son in tow. Ms. Ween fell in love with the little child. She offered to sell them the house.
William remembers feeling filled with pride that day, knowing that he, a barbershop owner and soon-to-be father of six, could afford to buy a house.
“I bought this house with the kind of money I made with six kids. She fell in love with one of my kids, and she told me she wanted me to have it. And I got it—she gave it to me—at a price I could afford to pay. So I just been proud and I’m happy to live here.”54
Bertha, too, remembers the move as being filled with joy.
“This area was so beautiful when I first moved here,” remembers Bertha.
And so the Garretts arrived, leaving the paintings and trinkets and yellowed pages of Ms. Ween’s poetry untouched.
Over their twenty-two years in the home on Pierson Street, Bertha and William raised their children and grandchildren. The elegant living room and large backyard was the place for family dinners, picnics and graduation celebrations—from elementary school all way through a master’s program. The backyard hosted three family weddings. For Michelle’s in 1994, Bertha bent over with her pregnant belly and dug a pond in the backyard. Flower beds ringed the front lawn, and Ms. Ween’s trees flourished and bore fruit. Every so often, the old woman would call Bertha to see how her mulberry tree was faring, and how old that beautiful baby boy was now.
That boy and the rest of Bertha’s sons grew into pastors and deacons. Soon, the house became a refuge for eighteen grandchildren, who camped out in tents for two weeks each summer during Bertha’s annual “Grandma and Grandpa Camp.” Bertha would hire a horse to give the kids rides while her children gratefully enjoyed their kid-free vacations.
Herself a writer, Bertha found her favorite room was the library. She woke early, drank cup upon cup of tea, and sat among the books and heavy wood shelves reading the Bible and writing her own religious reflections before anyone else had roused. Later, she would give up the tea for Lent, thinking it might be an excess. She penned and published two books in that room, Pushing Through the Crowd with Faith and Discipline Your Life to Serve a Risen Lord. As she grew older, she retained her grace and the Southern lilt of her voice. Her skin was light and almost wrinkle-free, and her square jaw gave her a resolved, pensive look. She dressed properly, especially for church, donning outfits like a pressed white suit with prim ruffles, an embroidered muslin shawl, a cream-color smock and a large-brimmed white Southern hat. She might be living in postindustrial Detroit, but her home was a refuge, a sanctuary over which she had full control.
The mulberry tree and the summer camps, the horses and the verses, the children and the grandchildren—this was Bertha’s life, and it was all contained in this house in the quiet neighborhood that was too far north and too far west. It was a swirling mix of chaos and calm, dinners and dishes, that reigns every day in millions of homes across the United States.
“Memory lives in a space,” Bertha said. “This is what people don’t understand. We raised our kids here. It’s more than just an investment.”
Hers are words that echo in living rooms across the country—a promise of comfort and stability that drove the frenzied rise in homeownership.
“This is our paradise,” said Pamela Douglass, a woman in rural Minnesota. “We got married in this backyard, and so did our daughter.”
For mothers especially, a safe and stable home is not an entrepreneurial or economic calculation; it is an intensely personal dream that can often feel like a woman’s duty.
“I moved [to the suburbs] with a grand vision of saving my kids,” recalled one mother who left Washington, D.C., to settle in North Carolina. Another described her home as the culmination of “hoping and praying that the American Dream could come to a single mother who . . . decided to be responsible, pay bills, and try to get a house by thirty.”
Housing activist Anthony Newby explained in an interview that, more than equity or investment, homeownership represents stability, family and future—particularly in the African American community.
“All people fundamentally really care about, speaking specifically to African Americans but also to the larger population, is knowing you can come to the place you’ve chosen to live, be able to afford it, and not be under threat,” he said.
As Bertha settled into her new home in the early 1990s, she understood that her homemaking was part of this greater trend, this larger collective achievement that was swelling, expanding, and, for a fleeting moment, utterly magical.
“All the teachers, window washers, publishers, writers, garbage collectors, union workers, all the workers—when a man or a woman comes home after a day of work, there’s a peacefulness,” she said.
This was Bertha’s definition of the American Dream: a peaceful place to come home to. But there was another story, a competing narrative of what homes are worth, that would soon come to threaten her own.
47. Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns (New York: Random House, 2010), p. 11.
48. Ibid.
49. FHA lending manual from the 1930s, quoted in Vincent Cannato, “A Home of One’s Own,” National Affairs, Issue 3, Spring 2010. http://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/a-home-of-ones-own
50. Thomas D. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in PostWar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 63-72. Quoted in Dolores Hayden, Building Suburbia (New York: Random House, 2003), pp. 111–112.
51. US Census Bureau, State and County Quick Facts: Levittown, New York. Population, 2010: 51,881 http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/36/3642081.html
52. Federal Housing Administration, FHA Loan Requirements. http://www.fha.com/fha_loan_requirements.cfm
53. Quotes from video by Bob Ingalls: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8dfiVzL11U
54. Ibid.