Buying the House on Detroit's Hardest Block

In 2009, a Detroit schoolteacher named John George did something his neighbors called foolish. While families fled the city by the thousands, while foreclosure signs outnumbered mailboxes, and while entire blocks sat hollow and dark, George bought a crumbling house on Hantz Street for eight hundred dollars. He planted fruit trees in the empty lots next door. He mowed grass where no one asked him to.

People thought he had lost his mind. The city was dying. General Motors had just filed for bankruptcy. Property values had cratered to nothing. Who invests in a place everyone else is abandoning?

George did. And then he bought the house next door. Then another. He recruited volunteers to plant gardens, repair porches, and string lights along the street. Slowly, others returned. A family moved in across the road. A corner store reopened.

George once told a reporter, "Somebody has to act like this neighborhood has a future before it actually does."