Stepping in for the state in Detroit: when the government can't or won't provide services, residents step in.

• Author: Tuccille, J.D.
• Position: 'DIY Detroit' by Kimberley Kinder - Book review

DTY Detroit, by Kimberley Kinder, University of Minnesota Press, 248 pages, $24.95

In 1950, roughly 1.9 million people lived in Detroit. Fewer than 700,000 are left there today. In the bankrupt, crime-ridden city, the government has largely lost the ability to provide the services it once promised. And so residents have taken to plowing streets, picking up trash, and maintaining public facilities on their own.

"When public schools performed poorly, parents looked to home-schooling alternatives," Kimberley Kinder writes in DTY Detroit. "When public libraries closed, residents set up mobile book shares. When ambulances were unreliable, neighbors organized dial-a-ride phone trees to get people to hospitals." And when streetlights failed, a computer programmer named Ellison tells Kinder, people started to "leave their porch lights on all night."

DTY Detroit is filled with these simultaneously inspiring and heartbreaking tales of perseverance and innovation. Unfortunately, to learn about these residents' struggles to keep their community habitable, you have to dig your way through layers of Kinder's tendentious take on why Detroit declined. But the effort is worthwhile. Kinder, an assistant professor of urban planning at the University of Michigan, documents dozens of examples of "self-provisioning"--that is, of Detroiters doing for themselves in a city from which much of the population has fled. "You have to take matters into your own hands," Elena, a young mother, tells Kinder.'"Cause if not, if you wait, then you wait, and wait, and wait. You're going to end up frustrated, and it's probably not going to get done."

How Detroit residents take matters into their own hands depends on their time, resources, and willingness to commit themselves. Those efforts range from disguising vacant homes to demolishing abandoned structures, from creating unofficial parks to standing in for a shrinking police department.

In a city where one in four housing units was empty by 2010 and much of the area is being claimed by an "urban prairie" of returning plants and wildlife, matching potential residents with abandoned but still-livable homes has become an important activity. Empty houses are ripe for picking by "scrappers" who strip anything of value and leave the gutted shell uninhabitable. The best defense is for residents to actively seek new neighbors who will maintain the homes and protect the community from further decline. "Among these recruits," Kinder...