John Carlisle writes in the Free Press about a group of squatters in a devastated neighborhood near Woodward and 7 Mile in Detroit that is attempting to create a sustainable community amid the chaos of contemporary Detroit.
In an earlier time, the squatters would have been called hippies.
A couple years ago, residents of Goldengate Street were scratching their heads as people with strange names like Coconut and Mars started moving into the street’s abandoned homes, decorating them in wild colors and planting vegetable gardens in empty lots.
There’s about a dozen or so of them now, along with waves of couch surfers who pass through. They live in houses with no electricity or water or heat. They warm themselves with wood-burning stoves and wash themselves outside with buckets of water on warmer days. Their toilets are outhouses.
But the utopian ideal clashed from the beginning, and establishing peace-and-love community proved harder than expected.
Some residents saw the newcomers as easy targets for robbery. Hangers-on showed up and took advantage of the group’s friendliness. Mostly, neighbors complained about suddenly having a circus on their street. But the newcomers say they came to improve the neighborhood — not take it over or cause a disruption. They give free bicycles to kids, mow lawns on empty lots and hand out vegetables from the garden.
One neighbor, who is not into eco-friendly, off-the-grid anarchism, has complained numerous times.
“They try to make it seem like, oh, you’re just not ready for ‘the change,’ ” he said. “But to me it’s like going backwards. It’s like we’re regressing into animalness. You’re living in a house where you don’t have any lights, you don’t have any water, you’re not washing up. You’re basically a caveman.”
