The Gas Leak

There's a musty-smelling room in the basement of my apartment building where we go to do our laundry, push rent through a slot in the wall, and haphazardly store our bikes. Like everything in the building it's imperfect, but functional laundry machines and relatively secure bicycle storage is all I can ask for, really.

Last week I woke up early Sunday morning, intending to go to church. But when I opened the metal door leading to the basement the smell that greeted me was not must, it was gas. Very strong gas. I held my breath while extricating my bike and pulling it up the stairs. Noticed briefly that the dryers appeared to be pulled away from the wall. Gasped the fresh air once back outside!

Once in an over-occupied student house in Ann Arbor I thought we had a gas leak, woke up all my housemates, and called the fire department as we sat on the porch eating cereal. Their truck blocked the traffic on our one-lane street while they informed us that actually, our refrigerator had suffered a mini explosion. This crossed my mind as my fiance and I called the fire department and DTE. I'd feel pretty stupid if that happened again.

We first guessed that someone had walked into the room before me, smelled the gas leak, and then decided too unplug the dryers and call it good. Maddeningly irresponsible but not sinister. But the firefighters noticed something I had not - the glass punched in on the inner door to the room, just big enough to slip in a hand and turn the lock. Their first guess, which seriously freaked me out, was that somebody with a grudge had cut the line on purpose - perhaps intending to blow us up. I knew if that were the case we would move. Immediately. Pay two rents, live at my parents' - anything to get out of a targeted building.

But then they noticed that the coin boxes had been torn out, all the quarters gone. I don't think they're really ever emptied, so with $3 per resident per week that could have been a lot of cash. The new narrative that emerged was of serial thieves who target laundry rooms in beat-up looking apartments everywhere, who took the coins and then were in the process of stealing the appliances when something scared them off - maybe even the gas leak itself.

It still doesn't make me feel super comfortable, but at least it wasn't purely malicious and at least no one entered our personal apartment space. On the up side, the landlord  has been shocked into doing some landscaping to make this place look occupied. On the down side, who knows when we'll have laundry again? I don't know whether we'll keep living here after our lease is up. I'm mostly just happy they didn't take our bikes.

Has anybody else had this particular experience? Or gone through other property crimes that didn't directly affect your safety but made you feel squirmy nonetheless?

Questions from first month in Detroit - part 1

Adventures of a one-car cross-county household

Life gets a lot cheaper when you move in with somebody, and Alex and I recently took our Ann Arbor and Detroit habitations and merged them into one big beautiful Ypsilanti. Besides sharing rent, cooking, and bunnies, we decided to junk his clunker and rely solely on my decade-old Ford Focus, which has belonged to every member of my family and traversed the country twice.

Bunny numero uno

It's not like we have ten children, or any other small mammals in our care besides the furry type. But still, with our wildly regional schooling and employment patterns, there are days in which we have to be...creative.

The Detroit News goes off the deep end, and the Socialists miss the point

The Detroit News is going to get a reputation for being on the loonier side of conservative after they published this op-ed written by a random guy in Mt. Pleasant. Emboldened by the unscrupulous ravings of Keith Crain, he jumps on the vaguely racist anti-historical down-with-Detroit bandwagon.


First, let me reiterate my tireless point that suggesting apocalyptic, improbable schemes for various levels of capitalistic Detroit takeover is not useful in any way. It only creates more division, fanaticism, and distrust, and creates roadblocks for people who try to propose real solutions. The Detroit News has published a poorly-thought-out, speculative idealogue's rant that only sets us back as a region.

Ahh Detroit, the intellectual playground of anti-government Michiganders

THE SUBURBS

Grad school has eaten me alive, friends, thus the dearth of posts. But here we go... 

I grew up in the suburbs. You probably grew up in the suburbs. Almost everybody in all my classes grew up in the suburbs. The mainstream media is getting wind of the coming demise of the suburbs (hear the cheers of the urbanists!), but they're largely talking about the tumbleweed rolling along McMansion cul-de-sacs, so they're missing my biggest concerns.

Corn growing in the community garden near Claude Allison Park, Redford

Bicycle rides, race, and gentrification

My boyfriend is starting medical school at Wayne State, because he's awesome like that, and it means that I get to spend more time in Detroit visiting his apartment and meeting his friends. Since I really like Detroit, this is a win/win situation. He recently invited me to join his classmates on a bicycle tour of the city. Since I also really like bicycles, this seemed like a good plan. I managed to stuff my bike into a tiny Ford Focus and zoomed down the freeway towards the riverfront.

(Actually, I stopped zooming before I reached the riverfront, because being totally clueless about sports, I neglected to take into account the Tigers game traffic. Driving in downtown Detroit that day was actually worse than driving in southern Manhattan. Really. I've done both.)

America's Next Top Commuter?

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Due to the academic prowess of my homeskillet, who got accepted to med school at Wayne State, and my own choice to start a Master's program in Urban Planning at the University of Michigan in the fall,  I'm faced with choices that extend beyond the range of my heretofore uber-walkable, extremely local existence.

One might ask, Carolyn, how did you ever manage in the metro Motor City for six years without a car? Well, a few answers. My life for nearly four of those years revolved entirely around the city of Ann Arbor, where everything - school, work, friends - was in walking, biking, or bussing distance. The only thing that lured me away was my family back in Redford, and they kindly provided shuttle service whenever we wanted to see each other.

Bar your windows, bolt your doors - crime

While taking a weekend in Detroit, I spent the night recently at a friend's home in Hamtramck. It was a beautiful house - one that his parents owned so he didn't have to pay rent (can you imagine?), one that he had painted and decorated nicely, one that had an extra futon with clean sheets for me to sleep on. Everything was perfect, my friend was super hospitable, and the cats purred peacefully as I prepared to sleep. But I couldn't help being a little on edge, and that's because of the cumbersome security door and window grates that had greeted us upon entry.

A tale of Pope Benedict and Detroit, in light of recent events in the city

How would a most distinguished visitor fare in our "urban environment"?

In a surprise announcement last month, the Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI declared that he had changed his plans, and would now live out his retirement in the city of Detroit, Michigan.

"Its struggle to reinvent itself is inspiring," he explained. "It is the ideal location for my own meditations and rediscovery."

Not long after moving into his stately Woodbridge home, however, he received a ruder awakening than expected.

Cities sufferin from the chillies

Grand Rapids Transit Center, looking wintery. Photo by Carolyn.

This weekend, my homeskillet and I went over to Grand Rapids to hang out with his folks. I really like GR but I'm still not an expert on it, so I asked him to show me around downtown some more. We parked over by the transit center and began walking, ready for an urban adventure.

I looked over at him as we passed Founder's and he was crying.

Belle Isle is a park, not a commonwealth

view from Belle Isle beach, photo by Carolyn Lusch

Crain's Detroit Business published an opinion piece by Keith Crain encouraging the city of Detroit to consider all ideas, however ridiculous, regarding Belle Isle - including those that involve creating an exclusive libertarian utopia commonwealth.
 
He could not be more wrong. Everyone in metro Detroit, including business leaders and politicians, should summarily reject this idea. They should do this to show Detroiters that they understand the difference between apocalyptic, frightening pitches and real, reasonable proposals for change.

Ann Arbor to Redford - CARLESS

Everyone knows that I'm a transit nut, and you might know that I started getting into transit issues when I realized that I couldn't easily get from my home in Ann Arbor to my parents' home in Redford (28 miles away) without using a car. This has led to countless instances of my parents driving down M-14 to pick me up, something that's annoying for them and not conducive to me feeling independent.

(Note: the 2 1/2 hour bike ride isn't bad in the summer, but I'm not messing around with that in below freezing temps.)

For a long time I've wanted to do the trip on our incredibly inconvenient, expensive, and roundabout public transit routes, just to see what would happen. A video I needed to complete for a grad school application gave me the push to really do it.

It was an epic journey of 4 1/2 hours door to door, including significant waiting time (we hung around 50 minutes at the State Fairground Transit Center waiting on the 8 Mile bus). It cost $14.25 one way and covered around 60 miles. There are a few other combinations of public transit we could have used, and some might have been slightly shorter, but you get the point.

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I can't thank Dan Cox enough for accompanying me, despite his academic business. He is a top-notch friend.

My dad, Paul Lusch, let me use his awesome song, appropriately entitled "Driven," and I'm very thankful for that! He and my ever-supportive mom, Ann Lusch, drove us back to Ann Arbor - because nine hours of commuting is a little much for one day.

My home skillet Alex Janke helped me navigate the bewildering functions of Windows Movie Maker, even when it tore him away from all those infectious diseases he studies.

Regional Surfing

According to my very scientific count on the Wikipedia pages, there are 158 municipalities (cities, townships, and incorporated villages) in the four-county area that I think of as metro Detroit (of course, there is much debate as to what actually constitutes metro Detroit, notably among some of my neighbors in Washt Co who want nothing to do with the rusty lands to the east. But these are the counties whose leaders, plus the mayor of Detroit, make up the Fab Five at the Mackinac Conference).

Wayne 43
Washtenaw 28
Oakland 60
Macomb 27

Can you guess which municipality?

Now I'm going to count how many of them I have been to, roughly and from memory, even if I only drove through them:

A Detroit School of Urban Studies?

Ooh, sounds cool, what is it?

A week ago I attended a forum at the University of Michigan on the question of whether it makes sense to establish a Detroit School of urban studies. First of all, that’s pretty damn fancy. Second, everybody in that room was geeking out over cities, which I found delightful.

photo by Carolyn Lusch--that's me

One panel member made the theoretical case for the new School—planning has traditionally been seen as managing growth, but Detroit is not growing. How does one use planning to manage shrinking or decline?

Another panelist added that Detroit is not on a path of returning the past; rather, the creation of something completely new. We all know that manufacturing in Detroit will never be what it was. Thus, revitalizing is not an appropriate word.

Ok, I’m with you for all that.

But what about…?