Detroit in Ruins
My brothers run a property service company that maintains foreclosed homes in Detroit and parts northwest of it.  When they need extra help, I ride along with them.<p>Detroit and Pontiac are not the kinds of places that one would care to go by oneself, even for muscular young men.  On more than one occasion, we would be approached by "youths" (one of them wasn't even that young) who were clearly drug dealers.  One of my brothers confirmed this to me.  The smell of marijuana smoke was another tell.  Once, we were leaving a property just as several police cars were converging on a group of huddled young men.  Those young men had been giving us the evil eye and my brother hurried us out of there.<p>In some houses, the mold grew as tufts of fur spackling the walls in patches bigger than a man's hand.  Garbage, broken furniture, and other debris was piled higher than our waists in some houses; the previous tenants had been mentally ill hoarders.  We hiked through those rooms more than we walked into them.<p>Last winter, we found a house where ice covered the basement up to a foot below the roof.  I stepped on the ice on the stairs going down and my foot cracked through.  I missed a cold and putrid bath by catching the walls just in time.<p>When they first went into that business, my brothers were assured that -- sooner or later -- they would come upon a drug house or a dead body.<p>I live in the suburbs.  I do not want to live in Detroit.