Will write for housing: Will free homes work in rebuilding Detroit?

Are you an aspiring writer who wants to get cozy in a house and practice your craft, but just can’t afford to pay for that house? Detroit has an offer for you.

A group called Write-A-House is offering a writer-in-residency program. The chosen writer will get a house that is 80% renovated (by young people learning the construction trade). He or she will finish the work to make the house habitable and cover insurance and taxes. In exchange, the writer will be expected to live full time in the house, blog for the Write-A-House website, participate in literary readings and engage with the community. After two years, the writer gets the deed to the house. If he or she sells the house within five years, Write-A-House has the first option to buy it.

It’s a pretty creative idea. And it’s fascinating how people view bankrupt, depopulated Detroit as a blank screen on which to project their visions of the ideal city.

Write-A-House aspires to create a writers’ colony from abandoned houses and nurture a literary arts scene. Other groups want Detroit to be the epicenter of the slow food or local food movement by turning vacant lots into organic gardens. And some have said Detroit should fashion itself as an immigration sanctuary, recruiting illegal and legal immigrants to settle, build businesses, work, pay taxes and repopulate the city.

Perhaps some of these visions are completely divorced from reality, and probably too many of them come from people who don’t live in Detroit.

But, still, there’s a lovely optimism about Detroit — that we can rebuild our cities and this time we won’t push out artists with high rents, we won’t pave over the green space and we’ll embrace diverse cultures. That’s an offer that may even be better than a free house.

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Follow Kerry Cavanaugh on Twitter @kerrycavan and Google+