On buying a house in Detroit, professional protest coordinators and a law that might threaten voting rights and democracy

This is one of the best articles I have read online in a long, long time.  

Drew  Philp writing at BuzzFeed:

.......When I told the neighbors I wanted to buy it, they looked at me like I was insane. A young white kid stuck out like a snowball in Texas, and I was self-conscious and very aware of my color, stumbling over my replies for the first time in my life. When I was moving in, most other people, white and black, were moving out.

“Just looking at it, it’s a lot of work,” the neighbor across the street said, figuring I would give up after a month or two. There were no doors or windows, plumbing or electricity, nothing. There was a pornographic hole in the roof. It was just a clapboard shell filled with trash on a crumbling foundation. I’m talking chest-high piles of clothing, yard waste, empty tin cans, toys, diapers, those white Styrofoam trays that raw meat comes in, used auto parts, construction debris, liquor store plastic bags and bottles, rolls of old carpeting, broken furniture and glass, literal piles of human shit, uncapped needles. When I was clearing the house — which took me three months, with a pitchfork and a snow shovel — I also found the better part of a Dodge Caravan inside, cut into chunks with a reciprocating saw. From what folks who grew up around here told me, it was an “insurance job.” Someone had needed the money, so they reported the van stolen and paid a couple of guys to cut it apart and deposit it around the city. The backyard was a jungle of invasive plants and more trash, trash so old it had turned to dirt.
I purchased the house in October 2009 at a live county auction for $500 cash. I was 23 years old........

................One of the events I did see was a march staged by professional protest coordinators who had come in from California opposing Detroit’s trash incinerator, the largest in the United States. It’s located in Poletown. We have an asthma hospitalization rate three times the national average. If you would like an inside look at Detroit’s Third-World level of corruption, a good place to start is the incinerator. You can safely say there is a culture of corruption in your city when the top two politicians, including a former mayor and city council president pro tem, have been, or are currently in, prison for corruption, racketeering, and the like. One former city councilwoman allegedly requested a bribe including 17 pounds of sausages.......