In American communities, there’s good quiet and bad quiet. Good quiet is the hushed murmur of a bustling neighborhood settling in for bed on a weeknight or relaxing on a Saturday afternoon. Bad quiet is the quiet of abandonment—of vacant buildings, shuttered-for-good storefronts, and asphalt crumbling in the sun.
In the summer of 2013, Detroit was hearing a lot of bad quiet. The city had hit economic rock-bottom. Its population had declined more than 60% from its 1950s peak, the auto industry was still reeling from the Great Recession, and the subprime mortgage crisis had gutted dozens of its remaining healthy neighborhoods. Unemployment hovered above 20%, and more than 110,000 vacant housing units pockmarked the city like rotting jack-o-lanterns. In July of that year, out of options and starved of tax revenue, Detroit declared bankruptcy.
