After living in San Francisco for 15 years, journalist Gordon Young found himself longing for his hometown in the rust belt: Flint, Michigan, the hometown of General Motors and the star of Michael Moore's Roger & Me. He hopes to rediscover and help a place that once boasted one of the highest levels of per capita income in the world, but is now one of the poorest and most dangerous cities in the country and returned to Flint with the intention of buying a home.

What he found was a place of stark contrasts and dramatic stories, where exotic dancers could buy a luxury house, speculators pass cheap houses from dozens of houses on eBay, and arson is often the fastest way to beautify neighborhoods. Young mixes personal memoirs, historical interrogations and interviews with Flint residents, building a vibrant story for a once prosperous city, and still fighting - despite overwhelming odds - to climb ash.

He endorses a host of urban tables and communities that refuse to give up in an attempt to turn Flint into a smaller, green city that offers lessons to cities all over the world. "Teardown", which is so often portrayed, portrays loudly, often painfully painful, reminds us that cities are ultimately defined by people, not politics or economics..

I want that book.