Memoir chronicles home resuscitation

In 2009, Drew Philp was a semester short of graduating from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor when he decided that he needed to buy a house in Detroit.

He settled on a Queen Anne with “good bones” in a neighborhood barely hanging on. He paid $500 for the house, which had been vacant and looted for 10 years, at an auction of foreclosed property. Talk about sweat equity. During the next several years, at first camping out in an unheated house owned by a friend and supporting himself by working at a restaurant and a juvenile prison, Philp gradually made the house livable.

“A $500 House in Detroit” — his gritty, fascinating memoir — details the steps he took.

When he could move in, he lived first in just a few rooms, with a loaded gun

and the company of a puppy he bought to help scare off potential burglars. He hauled out 10,000 pounds of trash and old plaster, installed a new plumbing system and built a chimney.

He got some help from his bemused, blue-collar family members upstate. The basic skills he had learned while growing up served him well, and his father and grandfather traveled to Detroit, glancing around nervously while there, to help with the front steps and a back shed.

His parents, afraid that he might freeze to death, gave him a furnace, which he kept at a frugal 50 degrees.

Some local counterculture friends made sure ■ “A $500 House in Detroit” (Simon and Schuster, 304 pages, $26) by Drew Philp that he was eating right, kept up his spirits and helped with some heavy lifting that he couldn’t do alone.

To a remarkable degree, though, Philp ground out the project on his own. Idealistic though he may be, he offers anything but a romantic account — aside from a few digressions about his infatuation with a pretty visiting Italian architect 10 years his senior, which ended as badly as might be expected.

Philp is thoroughly aware of the contradictions in the life he has chosen, as a young white man with other options in a city of black residents with many fewer options.

Fiercely protective of his home, his neighborhood and his city, he (or perhaps his editors) sometimes seems to struggle to keep his temper in check as he contemplates new waves of hipsters attracted by “ruin porn” or developers looking to make a buck out of the slowly resuscitating city.

Philp isn’t one of those short-term visitors. As of now, he and his dog are still firmly planted, making a life.