|
Fire moves into houses abandoned by foreclosures
2009-06-20
FLINT, Mich. - Like the house across the street gone missing and the one at the corner stripped of its front door, the weathered brown bungalow at 1430 Jane Ave. bided its time, edging nearer to a meeting with a wrecking crew. Muzi.com News 10090779-1 (muzi.com)But in a city with more than 1,000 abandoned homes slated for demolition, it would have to wait its turn. Until, at 8:15 a.m. Oct. 8, the little house jumped the line. Muzi.com News 10090779-2 (muzi.com) When firefighters arrived seven minutes later, the front of 1430 Jane was already swollen with flames -- the latest in a long, sad string of fires destroying scores of homes this half-empty city no longer has any use for. Muzi.com News 10090779-3 (muzi.com) Except this one was different. Muzi.com News 10090779-4 (muzi.com) Like the others, the owner had thrown in the towel. It was in tax foreclosure and ready to be forgotten. Muzi.com News 10090779-5 (muzi.com) But it wasn't empty. Muzi.com News 10090779-6 (muzi.com) "Gordy!" neighbors yelled in to the flames. "Get out of there if you're in there!" Muzi.com News 10090779-7 (muzi.com) Flint's abandoned homes usually announce themselves by the boards covering their windows, walls ripped open and scavenged for pipes and aluminum siding. But at 1430, a pair of chairs hung from the porch. Blinds flapped from bedroom windows. Muzi.com News 10090779-8 (muzi.com) And as firefighters battled in, a terrible paradox was revealed. In a city and a nation awash in empty structures, one man's abandoned home can be another's man refuge -- and sometimes his final resting place. Muzi.com News 10090779-9 (muzi.com) ___ Muzi.com News 10090779-10 (muzi.com) If a fire destroys a home that doesn't really belong to anyone and is worth next to nothing, does it matter? Muzi.com News 10090779-11 (muzi.com) The nation's housing and mortgage crisis is proving there are no simple answers to that question, just unexpected consequences and difficult choices. Muzi.com News 10090779-12 (muzi.com) Human activity -- whether it's cooking or smoking in bed -- sets off most house fires. That explains why the vast majority happen in homes that are occupied. But foreclosures, on top of depopulation in struggling Rust Belt cities, have left millions of homes vacant. Muzi.com News 10090779-13 (muzi.com) Fire has begun creeping into the void. Muzi.com News 10090779-14 (muzi.com) Fires in vacant homes rose 11 percent to 21,000 in 2006 -- the latest year for which figures are available -- while all home fires rose just 4 percent, the National Fire Protection Association reported in April. More than four of every 10 vacant building fires were intentionally set, the group reported. Muzi.com News 10090779-15 (muzi.com) Some of that is arson for financial reasons. But in neighborhoods of sagging homes worth little, fires are often set by vandals, the homeless or people seeking revenge. Muzi.com News 10090779-16 (muzi.com) The threat grows as empty homes multiply, said John Hall, the NFPA's division director for fire analysis and research. Vacant homes nationwide topped 19 million earlier this year, up from 15.7 million in 2005, according to the Census Bureau. Muzi.com News 10090779-17 (muzi.com) "The best way to prevent vacant building fires is to prevent vacant buildings," the NFPA concluded. Muzi.com News 10090779-18 (muzi.com) That is easier said then done. Muzi.com News 10090779-19 (muzi.com) Fire complicates the calculus for officials in cities trying to stabilize neighborhoods pocked with abandoned homes. Muzi.com News 10090779-20 (muzi.com) Firefighters, pledged to a gung-ho culture that demands attacking fires head-on, increasingly confront dangerous blazes where the property is not worth saving and often the only lives endangered are their own. Muzi.com News 10090779-21 (muzi.com) Abandoned homes offer shelter to drug users and gangs, which can make them magnets for fire. Muzi.com News 10090779-22 (muzi.com) And then there are people like Gordon Yoesting, looking for a place to sleep. Muzi.com News 10090779-23 (muzi.com) ___ Muzi.com News 10090779-24 (muzi.com) By the time Yoesting and 1430 Jane found each other, the neighborhood where both were raised was crumbling. Muzi.com News 10090779-25 (muzi.com) Even in its heyday, Flint's East Side was far from fancy. It was a working man's neighborhood of small lots and modest woodframes, built fast after World War I. You moved to the East Side because it was within walking distance of the massive Buick plant. You stayed because it was home, a close-knit haven of families. Muzi.com News 10090779-26 (muzi.com) "Everybody had kids on this street. It seemed like they lived here forever," Dan Kildee says, driving slowly down Jane. Muzi.com News 10090779-27 (muzi.com) Kildee, who grew up to become the Genesee County treasurer, points to yards he used to play in and struggles to recall families now gone. He stops his car in front of a little yellow house -- right next door to the charred carcass of 1430 -- where his dad was raised, and muses about long-ago walks to his grandmother's and countless Sunday dinners. Muzi.com News 10090779-28 (muzi.com) Then he looks at what's left of the neighborhood -- blocks lined with bruised homes and broken windows. Two streets over, someone has nailed a plywood sign to a tree: "No Prostitution Zone." On three blocks of Jane, the city is targeting 14 homes for demolition, four of which have already been scarred by fires. Muzi.com News 10090779-29 (muzi.com) "My dad, he can't come down this street anymore. ... It's too hard to see," Kildee says. "Because his whole life was here." Muzi.com News 10090779-30 (muzi.com) What was once Buick City is largely a cement prairie now, and General Motors, which once employed more than 80,000 in the city of its founding, has cut its Flint work force to about 6,000. Flint's population, which peaked at 197,000, dwindled to 115,000 in 2007, and falling. Muzi.com News 10090779-31 (muzi.com) To stabilize the city, Kildee started the Genesee County Land Bank, which has taken title to 9,000 properties since 2002, tearing down 1,000 and selling or rehabbing others. The foreclosure crisis has made the job even tougher, leaving the Land Bank with at least 1,000 more abandoned homes to demolish. Muzi.com News 10090779-32 (muzi.com) But in a neighborhood left reeling, the old block of Jane Avenue hangs on. There are four or five empty or abandoned homes. Others, though, are carefully tended, lawns mowed and siding painted. The 1400 block is battered, but not yet beaten. Muzi.com News 10090779-33 (muzi.com) Maybe that's why Gordon Yoesting found it to his liking. Muzi.com News 10090779-34 (muzi.com) Yoesting, too, was born to the neighborhood and raised the son of an autoworker. He returned at 46, a survivor. Muzi.com News 10090779-35 (muzi.com) He could barely see and walked with a shuffle, at least partly the toll of a long-ago beating in western Michigan by men who subsequently ran him over with a pickup truck. That was more than 20 years ago, and he'd never been the same since. Muzi.com News 10090779-36 (muzi.com) Still, Yoesting -- Gordy to all who knew him -- got by. He roamed the East Side, often shirtless and wearing shorts even in Michigan's chill, suspenders strapped across a tattooed back. He mowed lawns for cash, mopped up at The Hideaway and Art's Pub & Grub and cashed his disability checks. Most of what he didn't spend on rent or child support went for beer or vodka, consumed by the gallon. Muzi.com News 10090779-37 (muzi.com) Yoesting was widely liked, a neighborhood fixture. If you needed furniture or boxes moved, he was the first to volunteer. When neighbor Dakory Cooper's daughter had her bike stolen and Gordy heard about it, he made her a new one out of scavenged parts. He liked nothing better than trading stories and drink. Muzi.com News 10090779-38 (muzi.com) Yoesting bounced around the East Side -- mostly renting cheap apartments, but staying in at least one abandoned house. Then, last March or April, he set his sights on 1430. Cooper had bought the house as a rental property. But upkeep and taxes were dragging him under. By the middle of 2007, he'd given up. The house fell into legal limbo as it moved through tax foreclosure. But when Yoesting asked after it, Cooper handed him a set of keys. Muzi.com News 10090779-39 (muzi.com)
| 
