The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives by Sasha Abramsky

jobs, as production processes increasingly became automated. In 1979, for example, General Motors was producing as many cars in Detroit as it had done twenty years earlier, but with half the number of workers. Finally, however, even those workers proved too costly, and companies shuttered their factories entirely, the jobs outsourced to nonunion sites in other states, or overseas. Once iconic factories, such as the enormous Packard complex that, at its mighty zenith, had employed 60,000 people, remained only as vast shells, the ground carpeted by broken glass, the entranceways to buildings that used to house state-of-the-art industrial machinery piled high with tires, bricks, and twisted metal piping. “Detroit had what appeared to be a curse,” explained Shea Howell, a local university professor of communications and longtime community organizer, who had made something of a hobby of taking out-of-towners on tours of the Motor City’s underside. “People left to follow a job. In the late ’70s, there used to be a bumper sticker: ‘Last one out of Michigan, turn out the lights.’ It was so many people leaving so fast. They just walked out of the house, got in the car and left behind the house. You have magnificent one- and two-story brick homes built for the workers of the auto industry. Andpeople walked out, couldn’t afford them, couldn’t afford the heat, couldn’t pay the mortgages. It’s overwhelming. Over 30 percent of the city is abandoned; over forty square miles. The abandoned land became a curse; it pulled the heart out of neighborhoods.”
    During the days, tourists, engaging in what locals termed “ruins porn” watching, would venture out to the Packard plant in their cars to take photographs of the ruins—as impressive in their own way as those of the pyramids of Egypt. At night, the ruins belonged to graffiti artists, the homeless, drug addicts, and scrap metal scavengers, who would load up stolen grocery store carts with their wares and cart them off to recycling plants. “Decay,” one tagger had thoughtfully painted along one shattered interior wall, empty windows staring vacantly on either side. There was enough piping and other metal amidst the ruins to keep the scavengers occupied for decades.
    From one neighborhood to the next, blight flourished, although the word itself didn’t really do justice to the magnitude of the catastrophe. Jobs disappeared; factories ceased operations; supermarkets, banks and other basic business amenities closed up shop. And, in their hundreds of thousands, those residents who could left. Abandoned, their homes—once some of working-class America’s loveliest housing—fell into disrepair, burned down, or crumbled to the ground. The lots became overgrown. At night, coyotes, possums, and other wildlife roamed free. For those who remained, two-thirds of them living at or near the poverty line, the poverty getting deeper and more entrenched by the year, converting the vacant lots to urban gardens became both a way to keep neighborhoods functioning and also a somewhat desperate pathway toward self-sufficiency in an environment increasingly hostile to the poor.
    And thus the surreal sight, in the shadows of the Packard ruins barely a stone’s throw from downtown, of small family farms dotting the landscape. Many of them were farmed by African American residents whose families had migrated from the rural Deep South decades earlier and who still retained knowledge of family farmingmethods from their youth. By 2012, there were perhaps as many as 2,600 such farms in the city, community organizers estimated. Some of them were just a few rows of vegetables; others, however, included rambling orchards, chicken runs, little plots on which resided sheep and goats; a few were even home to bulls and horses. One, run by a group of Capuchin friars, was experimenting with year-round growing techniques; others were using sophisticated organic methods to leach the myriad of