Philp’s name is perhaps familiar to regular readers of BuzzFeed: an essay he wrote for the online publication in 2014, one he says was read by more than two million people, chronicled a piece of the larger rehabilitation story he recounts in this book. A reader can’t help but finish the book and begin asking themselves the same questions. Philp, the 23-year-old, recent college graduate, begins with a carcass, and over time constructs a house that becomes the prism through which he determines not only his place in the world, but also what he wants out of life. The rehabbed house isn’t so much the endpoint as it is the way Philp relates a story about discovering his adopted city - and, in the process, himself.

Instead, the book is part memoir, part social anthropology, tracing Philp’s five-year journey of renovating a house and integrating himself into a new community.

You won’t learn about flooring, or custom cabinetry, or concrete kitchen countertops. But it’s no written version of your favorite home-flipping show on HGTV. That’s the backdrop to Philp’s new book, A $500 House in Detroit: Rebuilding an Abandoned Home and an American City. One wonders whether some things are better left to turn to ash.

On the first morning he woke up inside of it, he beheld his investment: a decrepit house strewn on both levels with used needles, piles of human waste, and mounds of trash left by squatters. In October 2009, at the age of 23, Philp decided to buy that house for $500, a king’s ransom for him, at a public auction. His house was a vacant shell, a two-story Queen Anne in East Detroit, built in 1903 and abandoned for a decade. THE FIRST TIME Drew Philp slept in his house, he tied a rope to a stud in the upstairs bathroom - a cheap life insurance policy, should his home catch fire and a quick escape out the second-floor window was necessary.

A $500 House in Detroit by Drew Philp