Kevin Houston scanned the Michigan street where his fixer-upper and older homes bridge gaps between the vacant, overgrown lots and abandoned, ramshackle houses, boarded-up businesses and potholed streets of Highland Park.
“It’s not a bad place to live,” Houston said. “It’s not the best.”
The community nearly surrounded by Detroit is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy because it cannot pay its bills to the utility providing drinking water and sewage services to a city that was once a thriving auto manufacturing town. It serves as an example of blue collar cities that lost their way amid changes to manufacturing and are now shells of their past, plagued by neighborhood malaise, neglect and deep poverty.
