After being shot and left for dead, Charles Brooks Jr. received instruction from the Almighty.
The Lord told Brooks that if he rebuilt a home on the east side of Detroit, people would return and the city would be resurrected.
“It started out with a single house,” said Brooks, a carpenter and contractor by trade. “And as the Lord blessed me and talked to me and had me rebuild, I just branched out and started doing the community.”
Brick by brick, pipe by pipe, year after year, the faithful servant cobbled together seven lots and erected a masterpiece of inspiration.
The Castle, as it’s called, is an architectural marvel, considering the blight and burnout that surrounds it. The estate features a 12-car garage, an 8-car garage, a large fountain, copper duct work, and a pair of three-story homes connected by an aerial gangway. The grounds are enclosed by a stone and iron fence with scripture verses carved into the granite.
But now, City Hall has come and stuck its claws into things, trying to rip up Brooks’s little piece of heaven.
At the rear of the estate is the one house waiting to be restored. Half the windows and half the masonry are incomplete. A sizable pile of rubble squats in the yard. Brooks was working on it until he fell ill.
Unmoved, Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan and his Detroit Land Bank Authority sued Brooks—without telling him. That’s called “ex parte” in the legal parlance—basically “you’ve got no say so in your own business.”
Brooks found out that the court had granted the city a lien on his property when the summons server showed up at his fence.
“I refuse to give up on the city of Detroit,” said Brooks. “But the city doesn’t want to be committed to me. They want to take my property.”
The mayor’s men claim they notified Brooks when they tacked a blight notice on the door back in November.
Brooks said he never saw any notice. And according to the city’s database, Brooks has never been cited for blight. One wonders how an inspector could scale the seven-foot piked fence.
“No one can climb over that fence,” Brooks said doubtfully. “It’s topped with spears. They’d be dead and stuck up there if they climbed that fence.”
The city gave Brooks an ultimatum this past weekend. Brooks has 180 days to get permits, utilities, and tenants. Otherwise, the city can take his land.
“That’s not much of a deal,” Brooks said. “I can’t get it done that fast.”
So Brooks, a Baptist pastor, took to the social-media pulpit to sing his lament, and a small miracle happened. The community came to help Brooks tidy up the grounds. They came in their Air Jordans. They came in from the suburbs.
“This man right here, he’s the true mayor of the neighborhood,” said one of the volunteers. “Duggan don’t mean nothing to the people out here. It’s the pastor who shows you you can be better than you are.”
One wonders why the mayor is so troubled about Brooks when the city’s properties on the next block over are hulking hellscapes of filth and feral animals. The windows are blown out and trees grow through the roofs. They cast a foreboding shadow on the neighborhood.
One also wonders about a house on the city’s north end. It used to belong to Lt. Governor Garlin Gilchrist. He got it for peanuts from the city back in 2016, when he worked for the city.
Gilchrist, too, had 180 days to fix the abandoned eight-unit building… but he never did. The neighborhood accused Gilchrist of being a slumlord speculator.
Because of the bad press, Gilchrist—who was by then elected lieutenant governor—was allowed to sell the dump and pocket almost $200,000 that he claimed he poured into it.
Thousands of other Land Bank property owners in Detroit don’t get that kind of treatment when they can’t make timely repairs. Their properties get repossessed.
Not Gilchrist. He got to sell the building to a Miami shell company. Who would pay that kind of money for a place with no walls or wiring or plumbing?
How did the shell company even find out about it? The building was never listed for sale. And how—after six years and a dozen blight tickets—does the shell company still get to keep it? The company is also behind on the taxes.
As for Duggan’s Land Bank, it was the subject of a seven-year federal grand jury probe into allegations of collusion, bid-rigging, and the use of contaminated soil to fill holes where houses once stood. After clawing back millions of dollars from the city and its contractors, the federal investigation evaporated in a cloud of backroom dealing.
So now Duggan and Gilchrist want to be your governor. And Charles Brooks Jr.—the mayor of the east side—wishes to be left alone to finish his castle.
Many things have changed in Detroit since its historic bankruptcy, and many things have not. Just take the parable of Pastor Brooks.
It’s not what you are, it’s who you know.
Charlie LeDuff is a reporter educated in public schools. Follow him on X @Charlieleduff.
