Renaissance

5 Reasons Why Aaron Foley 'Lit Up' Over Detroit Makeover by 'This Old House'

June 22, 2016, 3:38 PM by  Alan Stamm

As you're unlikely to have missed at Crain's, The Detroit News, the Free Press, CBS Detroit, Detroit Unspun, Metro TimesMLive, Curbed Detroit and our social media feeds, Norm Abram and his four fellow PBS rehabbers are bringing "This Old House" to Detroit. They'll renovate a 1939 home on Fullerton Avenue (neighborhood aerial view below).

A day after the wide coverage generated Tuesday by media interviews with senior producer John Tomlin, BLAC Detroit magazine editor Aaron Foley veers onto a more personal path than taken in other publications.

"When I saw that 'This Old House' was coming to Detroit, I lit up," he writes at the monthly's website. Here's why, as summarized and numbered by us:

1.) "They’re going deep in Detroit. . . . The 'Old House' crew will be headed to Detroit’s Russell Woods neighborhood on the west side." 

2.) The residents "purchased a home through the Detroit Land Bank auction. I can already see the wide grins of Mayor Duggan and his staff at the potential of hearing Detroit Land Bank said a bunch of times over a 10-episode season."


Master Carpenter Norm Abram leads the five-tradesman team on "This Old House."
(WGBH photo by Matt Kalinowski)

3.) "How cool would it be to finally see a black family restore a home in Detroit?"

4.) "I come from Russell Woods. My address was two blocks away from 4055 Fullerton, the home that’ll be in 'This Old House.' "

5.) "Russell Woods, and other neighborhoods like it, aren’t on the radar of house hunters in the city. It’s a good neighborhood with good stock and good neighbors, but because – ahem – newer residents of the city never venture too far outside the 7.2-square-mile comfort zone of Downtown, Midtown and Corktown, neighborhoods like the ones I grew up in are dismissed."

Foley -- citing 2014-16 attention via a BuzzFeed article, a West Village memoir and Nicole Curtis' last season of "Rehab Addict" on HGTV -- sees the public TV show's next season as "a tardy milestone in what we usually see in media about Detroit." He explains:

Think of who gets the most attention for moving into Detroit, and it’s usually those who are young and white.

And here’s the necessary disclaimer, as always: It’s fine if you’re young and white and moving to Detroit. Nobody’s saying you can’t move here. But you rarely see anybody older than 35, and you never see anyone with a bit of melanin.

And most of the spotlight given to home renovation projects in Detroit . . . are given to white folks. Do black folks restore houses, too? Yes, and now we’ll finally see them.


A retired Detroit firefighter and his wife bought the west-side home at a Detroit Land Bank Authority auction. It's between Petoskey Avenue and Holmer Street. (Google Earth photo)


Read more:  BLAC Magazine


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