John Carlisle: Some Detroiters living with Marathon plant pollution find peace - at a price

Oh, you should’ve seen the hardwood floors in that house across the street, she says. They were just beautiful.

That big white house down the street had rich, dark wood everywhere inside, too, including stunning French doors leading to the dining room.

Mary McKenzie liked those doors so much, the 71-year-old went into the house and took them off their hinges. Nobody would be living there again, anyway.

She lives in a southwest Detroit neighborhood called Oakwood Heights, which is nestled against the massive, hulking, fire-breathing Marathon Petroleum plant.

A couple years ago, after decades of complaints about the pollution from the plant, Marathon embarked on a plan to buy out the whole neighborhood, tear down the houses and create a 100-acre buffer zone around it.

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Nine out of 10 residents jumped to take the offer. Their houses, after all, were bathed in pollution, and their home values were negligible and getting worse. Many of them didn’t want to leave, and did so reluctantly, but they knew they’d never again see the kind of money Marathon was offering for homes like these in a place like this.

But a handful chose to stay.

Some couldn’t leave the place they’d called home for decades. Some were suspicious about the company’s offer and refused to meet. And some came to like the idea of living in the peace-and-quiet midst of a very green, very quiet, newly sculpted parkland.

Like McKenzie. For years, she’d endured all the struggles of living in a declining area — drugs and violence and blight. Now, living virtually alone out here, she loves her home again. Because there’s no neighborhood around her anymore.

“New Year’s Eve, it was as quiet as could be,” she said, looking out her Luther Street door at a wilderness of trees and grassland. Not long ago, a fox was waiting by her steps in the morning.

“This was the one section of the city that wasn’t getting gunshots. It was really nice.”

Most polluted

Oakwood Heights is the city’s southernmost neighborhood. It was a working-class Italian enclave with century-old roots, filled by employees from the nearby steelmakers and factories that were clustered in this part of the city.

So much industry has amassed here over the years, in fact, that its ZIP code — 48217 — was considered the most polluted in the state in 2010, according to a study by environmental scientists at the University of Michigan.

For residents of Oakwood Heights, the closest culprit has always been the Marathon plant, a towering labyrinth of smokestacks and storage tanks and steel pipes. It looms over the neighborhood and dominates the skyline.

Normal life here is a constant rotten smell. It’s smokestacks puffing white clouds into the air. And it’s an anxious wait for the next accident at the plant.

So when Marathon embarked on a $2.2-billion expansion of the refinery that would bring the plant’s machinery right to the edge of the old neighborhood and allow the company to process an extra 14,000 barrels of oil per day, a lot of people decided it was time to go.

The Oakwood Heights Property Purchase Program, as it was named, began in November 2011 and targeted 294 homes with about 1,200 people living in them. Marathon held a community meeting, sent out flyers and opened an information office at the plant to tell residents that if they wanted to leave the neighborhood, the company would buy them out.

Residents who enrolled were offered at least $40,000, plus 50% of the assessed value of their home, and were given 60 days to accept the offer. Later, the company bumped the minimum part of the offer up to $50,000. The owners of rental properties were offered $30,000, plus 30% of the appraised price. The renters themselves were offered $3,000 in moving assistance if their landlords accepted the offer. In exchange, participants had to sign away their rights to sue the company over the purchase. Once they accepted, that was it.

In an area where the average home appraised at $16,000, the response was overwhelming.

So far, the company has purchased 239 out of 294 properties, with an additional 26 homeowners in the midst of the buyout process. Some offers are still being worked through because of confusion over deeds and land title history. Some homes were already abandoned.

That left a few dozen people living in a no-man’s land.

Marathon said it had expected that some people would stay. “From the beginning, we anticipated that certainly not everybody would participate in the program,” said Jamal Kheiry, company spokesperson. “And we’re very happy to remain neighbors of the folks who decided to stay.”

The departure of so many people so swiftly left the recently dense area rangy and desolate. Whole blocks are nothing but soft blankets of snow unspoiled by footprints. Tall trees testify to the area’s age. A few boarded-up houses await their date with the bulldozer.

All the street signs were taken down, erasing the last proof that this was once a neighborhood.

In their place went up signs warning not to trespass and not to dump, all featuring the Marathon logo, declaring this area is now essentially an extension of the plant itself.

Taking their chances

Don Wilcox is a gambler.

The 71-year-old landlord owns several houses in Oakwood Heights and rents them out to tenants willing to live in the shadow of the plant. And he’s betting Marathon will one day pay him what he demands for them.

“They’re going to buy eventually,” he said confidently. “They have to. I’m just waiting for them to call me.”

He might be waiting a while. When he heard that some people were offered up to $60,000 for their homes, he demanded $70,000 for each of his. He set a $140,000 price for one small rental house stranded on Bayside and the two empty lots next to it.

Robert Parmenter, 35, lives in that house with his father, who recently suffered an incapacitating stroke. Parmenter quit a landscaping job to take care of his dad full time. It makes for intensive days sometimes. “But I got my old lady here, so I can go out if I want,” he noted.

Parmenter hates Marathon. He hates the rotten-egg smell that infuses the breeze. And the explosions that sometimes shake the whole house. And the accidents like the one that plunged his truck into a cloud of white dust as he drove down the street.

“Man, I couldn’t even see down Oakwood. I had to turn my fog lights on in my truck and I still couldn’t see. I just creeped home.”

He’s a renter and could leave, but where else would he find a landlord who cuts rent in winter to offset high heating bills? Some renters stay in Oakwood Heights because they’re simply too poor to leave. And a landlord like Wilcox stays because he has nothing but time on his hands.

“It doesn’t really matter to me,” Wilcox said. “I’m still making income on rentals.”

'A mushroom cloud'

The only thing separating Sherry Griswold’s home from the plant is a short fence covered in thin black plastic. It isn’t enough to block the sights and smells from the plant. It wasn’t enough to protect her from a blast at the refinery.

Griswold said she was outside with her dog when a steady hum from the plant became a sudden explosion and knocked her to the concrete.

“I looked up, and it looked like a mushroom cloud with different colors,” said the 50-year-old. She permanently lost hearing in an ear, and she keeps forms from doctors who told her she has brain damage from the incident. Her skin is covered with red rashes she says are chemical burns. The dog died from its injuries.

When she went to the hospital, she was so bruised the doctors thought her boyfriend had beaten her. “They were looking at his knuckles,” she said.

Her boyfriend, 55-year-old Tom Gutenschwager, owns almost a whole block’s worth of Dumfries Street — four houses and 15 lots, plus his welding business, which sits across from the couple’s home. The house is just 600 feet from the plant.

After Griswold developed the rashes, Gutenschwager tried to convince her to move to an apartment Downriver for her health. He has to stay in Oakwood Heights to keep an eye on his shop, which is full of equipment in a city full of thieves, he said. “I mean, this is Detroit.”

She refused to go.

“This is our home,” she said. “These are our friends. You don’t just throw that away.”

To her, the burden isn’t on them to leave, it’s on Marathon to better protect those who choose to stay.

Even McDonald’s, she said, puts up a concrete wall between it and its neighbors. “We just have a fence with a black tarp. They should make it safe for the people who are still here.”

Marathon’s Kheiry said the company doesn’t give out details about specific accidents other than to state regulatory agencies, though he said the plant takes steps to prevent similar incidents in the future.

Inside the couple’s house, blankets and sheets hang between each room to slow the flow of the fumes that seep in, which both say cause burning sensations on their skin. The couple sleeps in the living room because the last blast left leaky cracks in the plaster walls upstairs. Gutenschwager sleeps with a wet rag over his face every night. “So I can breathe and stuff,” he said.

Like Wilcox, he stays not because of sentimentality but because of money. He’s convinced Marathon will make him a better offer than the one he initially got. If the company agrees to buy his welding business, he might go. Otherwise, he can’t afford to pay for the move to the suburbs, where his taxes will be 10 times higher than they are at his 25-year business here.

“They gotta get us out of here eventually,” he said, standing on his front porch. Behind him, white plumes from the smokestacks at the plant filled the blue sky and covered the sun. “Something’s gotta break. I just hope it isn’t me.”

Peace and quiet

When Calvin Pearson looks out from his front porch, there’s a snowy field to the right. Another to the left. A thicket of trees across the street. A winding canal from the Rouge River curling through the block.

And no other person in sight.

“It’s so peaceful down here,” said the 54-year-old, who makes a living downtown cleaning the docks at the Renaissance Center. Apart from the noises from the plant, it’s always dead quiet outside. “There’s no people. The people being there was the problem.”

Pearson bought his Heidt Street house 13 years ago. “When I first moved over here, it was like the Wild West,” he said. “It was all drug houses down there, and at night they were shooting and everything. I don’t see it going on no more. Everybody’s gone.”

He was stunned two years ago when he got an offer for his home. “No thought in my mind ever in life that anybody would come along to try to buy this house,” he said. “I figured I’d be here until the end, or until I came into some money and bought a house somewhere.”

Yet he stayed. Once the neighborhood started clearing out, he realized that despite problems like the chemical odor that sometimes permeates his house and taints the smell of the water coming out of his pipes, he’d never find anywhere in the city this sedate, this relaxing.

He even tried — after he got a taste of the solitude here, he looked all over the city for a similar home in a similar clearing. But nothing could match the seclusion of Oakwood Heights, where nearby freeways give quick access to city life, but where home is suddenly on a rural plain.

“I went through the worst part of being over here,” he said. “But everybody slowly moved away and when they did, peace set in. Now I’m over here by myself, and I have some peace.”

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