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Rust Belt harvest
In the last decade, 250,000 people have left Detroit. An estimated 60,000 buildings sit abandoned. As the city empties, the millions of tons of copper, aluminum, brass, steel, iron and tin used to erect the Motor City are being shipped out, in the form of scrap, much of it to China.
As Detroit’s jobs continue to disappear and the foreclosure crisis swells its ranks of vacant buildings, an increasing number of residents have turned to scrapping. For some, like Mo, scrapping is a profession. For others, it’s just another hustle, like collecting cans or passing out handbills, one of the dozens of marginal occupations in a city in which a quarter of the population has no job.
“First week of the month is always the slowest,” says Stanley Beltzman of McNichols Scrap Iron & Metal, a scrap yard on the city’s east side. “That’s when the checks come in.”
Free market principles apply as much to scrapping as they do to any industry. When scrap metal prices shoot up, more people get into the game. In February, scrap copper reached $4.57 per pound, a 40-year high. At around the same time, Will, 49, found himself freshly out of prison and jobless.
Much of the harvested scrap is stolen from homes and buildings such as the Ford. Scrap yards are not legally allowed to accept stolen scrap. All yards in Detroit require that scrappers selling metal provide identification and the address from which the scrap came. Some demand more thorough documentation or even fingerprints.
Yet few scrap yards do much checking, and scrappers have ways of evading regulation. For example, most yards only accept scrap delivered by vehicle. So scrappers without automobiles hire vans or trucks—”jitneys”—to haul their loads. Drivers charge $35 to haul scrap across town, but only $20 if the scrappers have made it just outside a yard. If all else fails, a scrapper can sell his metal to an unlicensed scrap broker. Most of these brokers operate out of their homes, using scales in the basement or backyard. An illegal broker will pay half what a licensed one will, but they’re open 24 hours and never ask where the scrap came from.
Nationally, Detroit’s scrappers have a reputation among security experts for unusual organization and aggressiveness. Virtually everyone who lives in the city has either been the victim of a scrapper or knows someone who has...
