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7

Bar Logic

It’s fitting that the notion of buying a house in Flint began to take shape in a bar, like so many other ill-formed and potentially disastrous ideas. I played basketball every Saturday morning at the Mission Playground in San Francisco. A collection of players would retire after the game to the grimy gravel patio of Zeitgeist, a dumpy bar that has the trappings of a tough dive without the credentials to back it up. Yes, people who ride motorcycles hang out there, but so do aging punk rockers, bike messengers, assorted hipsters, uninhibited pot smokers, and the occasional yuppie types slumming from the more upscale Marina District, all united in the desire to start drinking at 1 P.M. on a Saturday or as soon as the morning fog burns off. The Zeitgeist motto showed that it didn’t take itself too seriously: “Warm Beer/Cold Women.”

Although our gang of mediocre basketball players was a mixture of native Californians, Midwest transplants, and a few Texans, we were all conditioned by the exorbitant cost of local real estate, even in the midst of the Great Recession. In 2008, a few players were unsuccessfully trying to buy houses, and they were frustrated by the fact that a down market meant a two-bedroom house in a decent San Francisco neighborhood was now going for $775,000 instead of $800,000. The minor drop in price was offset by stiffer mortgage requirements that demanded 20 percent down. “Can you imagine writing a check for $160,000?” one of my friends asked. It was a big shift from the easy-to-find, no-money-down, interest-only loans that were prevalent just a short time earlier. The kind of loans that enabled Traci and me to buy our house and pushed the planet to the brink of economic collapse.

After a few beers, I inevitably began regaling the Zeitgeist crew with tales of Flint gleaned from my blog, both depressing and uplifting. There was the one about the family who posted a “No Ho Zone” sign in their yard to ward off the neighborhood prostitutes. Or the retired blues musician who was nurturing a huge garden on the vacant lot near his home. And of course there were stories about all the Flint houses going for pocket change on eBay with the option of buying them by the dozen, like the jelly rolls I used to love at Dawn Donuts. With a little cocktail napkin math, we determined that I could own a Flint house for the cost of our bar tab. Wild speculation ensued. I could snap up a house in Flint, quit my job, and survive on the freelance income Traci and I could generate once we were freed from San Francisco’s crushing cost of living. I would be embarking on a grand adventure and helping Flint at the same time. Or I could buy a few Flint houses, rehab them, then rent them out—stabilizing the local housing market and making a modest profit at the same time. Or I could improve the city by transforming a junker into a summer house, allowing me to reconnect with Flint without abandoning San Francisco. Or instead of giving money to charity, why not buy a house, make it livable, and give it away to a needy family? The ideas came fast and furious, and the possibilities were intoxicating, perhaps because we were often intoxicated.

My friend M.G. understood the appeal of a Flint house. He grew up in a small town in the suburbs of Los Angeles, the kind of close-knit place where you could return books to the police station if the library was closed. He had no desire to ever live there again, but he liked the idea of it enduring more or less as he remembered it. Being a homeowner meant something to M.G. His father had immigrated from Iran, where property symbolized wealth and success. His mother was on her own at an early age, paying rent in San Francisco when she was only sixteen, so a house equaled stability and security. While I was still parsing my feelings about Flint, my motivation was fairly obvious to M.G., regardless of how many pitchers we’d finished off. “I think you’re selling yourself on something,” he told me one Saturday after he’d bummed a cigarette off three women at a nearby table. “You’re selling yourself this ideal of small-town America being feasible in a world that’s constantly changing. It’s a real possibility that the kind of towns we grew up in are going to disappear. They aren’t going to exist anymore. A house in Flint is your way of trying to hang on to something from your past that’s important to you.”

Leave it to a tipsy Persian-Irish guy from LA who had never been to the Midwest to sum up my feelings about Flint. As I unsteadily rode my old Schwinn home that day, I started to believe a house would be the best way to forge a connection with Flint and do my part to preserve the city I remembered, or what was left of it. I could make this happen. I could go home again.

The wondrous World Wide Web aided and abetted this half-baked bar logic. No sooner had the Zeitgeist sessions picked up steam than I read a story online about a guy who bought three houses in Detroit for a dollar each. He planned to fix them up and donate them to needy families. Apparently, someone had already adopted our brilliant idea.

I scoured the Internet for more examples and discovered John Law, a colorful San Francisco character who was an early member of the Suicide Club, a group that had illegally climbed the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge more than a hundred times. He was also one of the creators of Burning Man, a weeklong experiment in radical self-expression that takes place every year in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada. Think drugs, art installations, naked people, and sand. Law had a distinctive mustache reminiscent of Greg Norton of the band Hüsker Dü. And according to his website, he had recently purchased a summer home in Detroit. “It’s a small but comfortable three-bedroom house in good condition that sits on a shorefront plot of land along the banks of an actual river,” he wrote. “The location is serene, and the price was right—the whole thing cost less than a new Cadillac Escalade.”

I posted an item about John on Flint Expatriates, and he responded with a concise rationale for his purchase. “Phoenix, Vegas, El Paso, LA, and most of the rest of the cities of the Southwest will be ghost towns in twenty years if the hydrologists are right and the water tables sink to nothing and the drought-ridden countryside ceases to provide water for reservoirs,” he wrote. “If the hippies are right and global warming is real, where do you think those displaced by rising sea levels and unlivable climates will go? It’s not rocket science to figure it out. They’ll go where there is water and land. If you’re thinking long term, now is the best time ever to buy in Detroit (or Flint).”

This was the kind of quasi-scientific underpinning that the Zeitgeist sessions never achieved, mainly because the conversations often veered wildly to other weighty topics: Was Magic Johnson better than Larry Bird? If we trained hard, could we dunk? Do we want to order another pitcher? John Law was showing me the way, making it all sound simple and logical.

Then I got an email in early 2009 from a San Francisco real-estate agent named Rich who had grown up in Flint. He had seen the blog and wanted to meet for drinks. It turned out that Rich was only a grade ahead of me, and we’d attended the same schools without ever managing to meet. He had clearly kept a low profile in the Catholic school system, somehow managing to make it through Saint Mary’s without ever getting paddled by Sister Ellen, which I didn’t think was possible. Sitting in another bar, this time the Latin American Club in the Mission, I told Rich about my crazy idea of buying a house in Flint.

“That’s not crazy,” he said, taking a sip of his beer and looking at me over the top of his small, wire-rimmed glasses. “I already own three houses in Flint.”

Rich is decidedly mild mannered, often speaking in such a soft voice that it’s difficult to hear him. So he hardly fits the stereotype of the aggressive real estate agent. But he definitely has the trait of people who sell things, especially things as wrapped in emotion as houses: he never says anything negative. He calmly rattled off all the good things happening in a city typically defined by bad news. Development in the urban core of Flint was taking off, he said. There was talk of a tapas restaurant. The new loft apartments downtown on Saginaw Street were rented out. Flint was on the cusp of becoming a full-fledged college town, and an increasing number of students would need places to live near the downtown campus of the University of Michigan–Flint. Prices were so low that there was nowhere to go but up.

I countered that I’d been away from Flint so long I wasn’t even sure what neighborhoods would be best for me. “No problem,” he said. “I can tell you anything you need to know. I’ll put you in touch with a few homeowners who know the neighborhoods. I can even let you stay in one of my houses when you go back to visit.”

He was already planning a trip to Flint for me. And given our shared background, he knew when to play the ultimate trump card—Catholic guilt. “You know Flint’s not going to save itself,” he said, raising his eyebrows. “A big corporation like GM isn’t going to rescue it. It’s going to take people like us to help turn it around. People who grew up there. People who remember what a great place it was. We owe something to Flint.” He paused, put his beer on the bar, and pointed at me. “You owe something to Flint.”

Unfortunately, I also owed something to Wells Fargo Bank, $551,000 to be exact. The relief that came with refinancing our mortgage in 2006 had quickly worn off, and the reality of our monthly payments was weighing heavily on us. Despite our scrimping, it was nearly impossible to save any money or make payments each month that covered even a tiny portion of the principal. If I allowed myself to think about it, I knew Traci and I could easily find ourselves ten years older with the same mortgage, no equity, no retirement savings, and payments well over $4,000 a month.

The situation got worse when Traci lost her job as an editor at the magazine where she worked in San Jose. We had talked about the possibility of this happening—the publication was of dubious quality thanks to the aging frat boys who ran the place—but it was still a shock. She threw herself into freelancing but wasn’t making close to her old salary, and the feast or famine nature of being an independent writer made budgeting impossible. I called a mortgage broker about the possibility of another refinancing, but we didn’t have enough equity or cash to meet the down payment requirements. Just when I had come to fully embrace the joys of home ownership, there was a looming possibility that we might lose our house.

I became obsessed with reading anything I could find about real estate, somehow thinking that being more informed would improve our financial situation. That’s how I discovered a way out, a logical proposition that would rescue us from the ongoing worry and stress of owning a home we couldn’t afford. Two words: loan modification. Traci and I would simply ask Wells Fargo, our loan servicer, to change the terms of our mortgage to make it less burdensome for us. We envisioned a reduction in the principal and a lower interest rate. It seemed like a reasonable request given the utter collapse of the housing market. How could the bankers refuse? We were doing them a favor by helping them avoid another foreclosure.

Based on home sales in our neighborhood and casual conversations with real-estate agents, I knew we were not underwater on our mortgage. We’d lost a lot of value from the stratospheric prices at the height of the bubble, but the house was still worth more than we’d paid for it. After the house-hunting process and the refinancing odyssey, I felt prepared for the long, frustrating modification journey that articles and web forums warned me about. I also knew our chances of success were slim. The mortgage industry was in disarray. It was often difficult to determine who held a mortgage, especially if it had been sliced and diced into the toxic securities the media was trying to explain to the public. But, aside from the lottery, we didn’t have a lot of other options.

It appeared the best chance for a modification was being in a little trouble but not a lot. If you were too broke, the lender wouldn’t bother because you’d probably default on the modification anyway. And if your financial situation was too rosy, you could probably make your current payment. You needed to find the sweet spot between skid row and easy street. But even if you did, there were endless tales online of homeowners who were refused a modification for no apparent reason. It was all a leap into the unknown.

With this nebulous background information, we composed a letter explaining our situation to Wells Fargo. We were not in danger of missing a payment, we wrote; we were thinking ahead to the day when our interest-only payments would balloon into principal plus interest. We were being responsible by recognizing trouble down the line and trying to correct it early. At the same time, we explained that Traci had lost her job and my freelance income was dwindling as a result of the bad economy and the death of journalism as we knew it. An unexpected financial setback—a leaky roof or a major car repair—might cause a missed payment.

“Kafkaesque” is a pretentious and overused term, but I feel justified in relying on it to describe the loan modification process with Wells Fargo. The bank’s symbol is a stagecoach, and I wondered if the corporate monolith relied on a team of horses to slowly transport our financial documents between far-flung outposts. I imagined our modification application and income tax forms bouncing off the top of the stagecoach on a bumpy road in Utah. Why else would they request them three times? And each request came with an urgent warning that we needed to fulfill it within twenty-four hours. Frantically faxing 170 pages of documents before work—a two-hour ordeal complete with multiple misfeeds, numerous disconnections, and several paper cuts—was enough to make me question the point of home ownership, if not life itself.

I spoke to a bevy of polite but clueless representatives in Des Moines, Saint Paul, and Milwaukee. I chatted with Larry, Kary, Tanisha, Danielle, Nathan, and others. I got conflicting information from each of them. It really wasn’t their fault. One representative confided to me that he had been thrown into the job with little training. He was just happy to have work in the crumbling economy. I took notes on all the conversations, filling a fat notebook that I kept next to the phone for easy access. Some days, just for fun, I’d hang up with one representative, then immediately call back just to see if the next one would tell me the same thing. They rarely did.

One day, after about five months, I called and was told that Wells Fargo had no record of our modification request. “Oh,” I said, deciding it was best to simply hang up rather than let loose on the phone. I stood in the living room, working my way through the list of profanities in my repertoire, most of them old standards introduced to me in Flint. Then I forced myself to try out some breathing techniques I had learned at the San Francisco Zen Center. I threw in a Hail Mary just in case. I invoked Saint Jude, the patron saint of lost causes. Apparently, there are no atheists in foxholes or the San Francisco real-estate market. Then I called Wells Fargo back and got a different representative. No problem. They had my request. They simply hadn’t made a determination yet. At that point, a visit to Zeitgeist seemed the logical next step.

Finally, a letter arrived saying we’d been approved for a three-month trial period with reduced payments. Apparently, it was like a tryout for a final modification, a chance for the bank to see if we could even handle a smaller payment. We were halfway home. Or, more accurately, halfway to staying in our home. We made the three payments and were rewarded with a letter from Wells Fargo indicating that because we were not paying the full amount on the mortgage, they might “have no choice but to pursue other options, up to and including foreclosure.” I called and was told to just ignore the letters. “Those generic letters go out automatically,” Brian in Des Moines told me. “You’re in the trial modification period, but you’re viewed as someone who’s four months behind on his mortgage.” Very reassuring. I ran a credit check and sure enough we were getting dinged for missing mortgage payments, even though we were paying the amount Wells Fargo told us to pay. I called again to see if they could fix our credit. No dice, Janet told me. That was the price of going through the process. If we didn’t want our credit damaged, we could have simply paid the mortgage and not asked for a modification. She had a point. It was a reminder that banks aren’t in the business of helping you stay in your home. We’d get a modification if it made sense for them, not us.

But what was I complaining about? A mere eight months, 406 phone calls, and $378 in fax and FedEx fees later, Wells Fargo modified the loan. The principal stayed the same, but the interest rate plummeted to 2.75 percent before returning to 6.625 percent after six years. At that point, we’d be required to make the full principal and interest payments for the last twenty years of the loan. We’d save more than $100,000 on interest payments. And with payments down to around $1,200 a month, we could start whittling away at the principal right away.

I greeted this news with a huge sigh of relief, but at the same time I felt guilty and ashamed that it had come to this. I took no real satisfaction in beating the system when I read about other families who were denied modifications and lost their homes. But maybe the modification wasn’t just a lifeline for me and Traci. I saw it as a way to help Flint. I now had some extra money to buy a house in the Vehicle City, even if it would have been more wisely spent paying down my San Francisco mortgage.

I’d joked with Traci for months about the two of us getting a house in Flint, but a few weeks after the modification I presented a serious proposal. She has a skillful technique for dealing with my latest Big Idea, like the plan to rip out the ceilings of the entire house to expose the attic space above, an idea that was also hatched at Zeitgeist. She had feigned mild enthusiasm before pointing out a few minor sticking points: The attic is framed with ancient, discolored two-by-fours. Do we want to look at that? I’d have to remove all the rat-turd-infested insulation even though I’d been too squeamish to crawl up there to investigate a possible leak a few months back. I’d be dumping five hundred square feet of old drywall onto the floors, so we might have to relocate for a few days. I’d have to rewire the ceiling lights, and I didn’t know anything about electrical work. Yeah, yeah, whatever. I toyed with her trivial concerns for a few weeks before announcing that the time probably wasn’t right for the ceiling project. I managed to do it in a way that made it seem like it was her idea all along, and I was reluctantly saying no.

To my surprise, Traci didn’t reject the idea of a Flint house in its broadest form. After losing her job, she was suffering through the indignities of freelance journalism in the Internet age—low pay, intense competition, and the necessity of taking lame assignments because we needed the money. It was hard for her to get inspired writing about “Twenty-Five Fun Things to Do with Your Kids” when she didn’t happen to have children. “I feel sort of like an autoworker,” Traci said. “The job I’ve done my whole life is disappearing.”

The stock image I have of a shop rat—the sobriquet for autoworkers in Michigan—is Ben Hamper on the cover of his book Rivethead. He’s a solidly built guy with a mustache, a trucker’s hat, and an expression that asks, “What the fuck are you looking at, asswipe?” Traci is five feet three and weights about 110. She has thick dark hair and beautiful eyes with impossibly long eyelashes. She’s very calm, able to talk me down when I start ranting about double-parkers or the guy who keeps letting his dog poop in front of our house. It’s hard to equate her with an autoworker in any way, but I knew what she meant. She was open to new possibilities. We were both ready for a change.

I hatched a plan. I’d travel to Flint in June of 2009 as soon as classes ended at the university to rediscover the city and look at houses. Given that any money I spent on the trip would cut into my house-buying budget, I thought I should try and scare up some freelance writing work to finance the excursion. I didn’t have high hopes when I started calling various Flintoids in search of story ideas. I came up with about a dozen and spent the spring pitching to various newspapers and magazines. I was a little stunned when Slate, an online magazine published by the Washington Post Company, wanted a feature on my search for a house and a story on the special election for mayor of Flint in August. Then, shockingly, the New York Times approved a piece on the uneven and unexpected revival of Carriage Town. Apparently, the fickle world of journalism—so averse to my brilliant ideas in the past and experiencing an economic collapse of its own—found a downtrodden city like Flint as compelling as I did.