A brilliant expose of urban inequality. When younger, white newcomers squat in other people's houses, they believe they are 'settling' a 'wild' place, but when mostly black, longtime residents do the same, they think of themselves as surviving a temporary situation. Our policies reward only the self-imagined 'pioneers' and thereby widen race and class disparities.--Debbie Becher, Associate Professor of Sociology, Barnard College/ Columbia University and author of Private Property and Public Power: Eminent Domain in Philadelphia An insightful, penetrating ethnography exploring why and how different sorts of 'appropriators'--motivated by lifestyle, routine, or necessity--engage in illegal uses of property in Detroit. It elucidates a vital, decentralized, unregulated energy shaping not only the current quality of life in an iconic city but also its potential future.--George Galster, author of Driving Detroit: The Quest for Respect in the Motor City The most compelling urban ethnography to come along in several decades. Detroit is often framed as dead by scholarly and journalistic writers. But Claire Herbert shows us that while formal services and markets may be absent, life is abundant, complex, and intricate. This book is a series of compelling, sometimes heartbreaking, stories about off-grid lives in a large American city.--Jason Hackworth, author of Manufacturing Decline This is an evocative work that I can imagine being adopted for classes as well as publicly discussed and debated.--Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Director of the Humanities Center, University of California, Irvine A Detroit Story will be an important contribution to urban literature and scholarship on shrinking cities. --Renia Ehrenfeucht, Professor of Community and Regional Planning, The University of New Mexico