Update: "Ice House Detroit" echoes frozen housing market

From the Denver Post:

Brooklyn photographer Gregory Holm went to one of Detroit's poorest neighborhoods this past winter and began blasting an abandoned house with industrial hoses. He and his partner, architect Matthew Radune, tried to completely encase it in ice.

The metaphor of this public art project would be lost on no one. Frozen real estate. Frozen banking system. Frozen job market. Frozen economy. But apparently, it is much easier for entire macroeconomic systems to freeze than for just one clapboard-sided house.

Working 24 hours in shifts for three weeks, Holm and his crew sprayed 20,000 gallons onto the blighted abode at McClellan and Sylvester streets. But in the mornings, the sun would rise and melt the ice off the roof. Much of the water then pooled and froze around the house instead of on top of it.

"We didn't consult with thermal-dynamic engineers," said Holm, 39, in a phone interview. "Eventually, we decided to put a thermometer in the attic. It was 59 degrees . . . even though it was 22 degrees outside. . . . We had to start venting the attic."

So the ice on the house could have been thicker, as the economy's plunge could have been deeper. But the images Holm and Radune created are still potent symbols of our times. Like "Ice House Detroit," more than one of every four U.S. homeowners with a mortgage is under water.

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Scavengers pick (abandoned houses in Detroit) clean of wires and pipes to turn a quick buck at recycling centers. Suburban contractors sometimes get seven-figure contracts to wreck and haul away entire neighborhoods. But there are never enough resources to clear all of the wreckage.

Holm says the solution is obvious: Train folks in Detroit to deconstruct houses. Salvage bricks and timbers and unique architectural features. Then, eventually, take the grid of streets and utilities stamped between the empty lots and build anew. "You've got a ton of unemployed people," he said. "You've got a ton of empty houses. It just seems like a no-brainer." Instead, dilapidated buildings are sometimes turned over to filmmakers for apocalypse scenes. Some empty lots go to "urban farmers." And what's left, nature reclaims.

"How is this happening in what was once one of the top cities in the country?" Holm asked. "In the city that developed the car and changed the face of the planet?"

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Holm began the Ice House project online last year to raise money. It cost more than $16,000 but fed the hungry, raised money for one family to stay in a home and created a gathering point in a desperate neighborhood.

"And if I inspired just one kid to say, 'Hey, wow, this is kinda off the wall . . . and then inspired them to do something a little different . . . or consider their neighborhood in another way . . . that would be more than enough for me to consider this a success."