American Notes CRIME

The tumbledown house on Van Dyke Avenue on Detroit's gritty East Side looks as if it fell from the sky. Actually, it collapsed after scavengers pried the bricks out from the foundation. Armed with wagons, shopping carts, wheelbarrows and pickup trucks, vandals have descended upon the city's empty buildings. In some cases, they have hauled away entire walls and porches, brick by brick. These thefts are a new wrinkle in free-lance demolition on the East Side, which has also experienced a plague of aluminum-siding rip-offs.

The scavengers sell their booty to scrap dealers. While new red bricks cost about $450 per 1,000 on the retail market, dealers pay the thieves only $50. Since Detroit tears down 2,000 to 3,000 abandoned buildings a year, police are not terribly concerned about the thefts. The most troubling aspect of this new inner-city crime wave is the motive of most of the culprits: to get enough cash for another hit of crack. "Brick stealing is on the upswing, and it's directly tied to the price of the brick," says Charles H. Smith Jr., president of the Oakman Boulevard Community Association. "Crackheads will steal anything, and there's a market for them because somebody's buying."