By Victoria Araj

On a cool, overcast morning, team members from Quicken Loans teamed up with the Motor City Blight Busters to demolish a home about 2 blocks from the organization’s hub on Lahser in Detroit.  Volunteers from other organizations were on hand and teams quickly came together to separate brick, wood and other materials into piles that could be salvaged or disposed. 

While breaking up cement, cleaning out the inside of the home and making it a skeletal structure to demolish, we uncovered some interesting artifacts.  We found stuffed toys, postcards from 1945, an old typewriter and an original 1931 copy of the Detroit Free Press.  This home definitely had a story to tell!  It put up a good fight too!  After stripping the house down to a basic structure, John George, the founder of Blight Busters harnessed a strong chain around the home and tied it to his truck.  He turned on the ignition, pressed play on his CD player and Michael Jackson served as the soundtrack for the pedal to the metal.  The truck launched forward and only part of the house came down.  We realized this would need another attempt to bring it down.  The chain was then wrapped around the upper part of the home and the accelerator was kicked into high gear.  More of the house came down, but still, it would not give up!  We had to manually have a tug-of-war with the remains of the structure and together we brought the final pieces of the house down. 

We continued to organize items into piles and within a few hours, the team felt a sense of accomplishment by removing a blighted home and improving the community.  “What made this special was that we were making a neighborhood safer for those families and children who call it home,” said Kristin Broadley, Loss Mitigation Director at Quicken Loans.

All of the volunteers put in a lot of hard work and muscle into the demolition and we were proud to contribute to the growing list of homes that Blight Busters eradicated this year.