You might call Drew Philip lucky. In 2009, he purchased a foreclosed house in an auction for only $500. He was only 23 years old. Most 23-year-olds these days can’t afford to buy a home. Many struggled just to pay rent on time. With the escalating cost of education and the expectation that you’ll go to college to get a job, many younger people are swimming in debt by their early 20s. Buying property feels like an impossibility!

But Drew bought his home in Detroit, where $500 homes were commonplace. When the housing bubble burst, it hit Detroit hard. Michigan’s collapsing economy and high unemployment rate meant that people could no longer afford to live there. Residents began fleeing the city in search of jobs and wealth. Some were forced out—their homes foreclosed upon because they couldn’t pay. They became homeless.

The value of property plummeted, and homes sat empty and uncared for, making it possible for people like Drew to come in and rebuild for an unbelievably low price. Drew had a lot of work to do on his new home. The structure was intact, but it was missing windows and doors. It was also missing plumbing and electricity. The home had sat abandoned for more than ten years.

The yard was overgrown and the property had nearly ten thousand pounds of garbage rotting within its boundaries. That’s almost 1,000 pounds of trash for each year it sat empty. Drew worked on it for years. Throughout the process of rebuilding, Drew learned an unexpected and valuable lesson about community. While people were being forced out of Detroit, many of them low-income and black,

wealthier white people were moving in and actively gentrifying the community with little regard to its history or the issues plaguing the people who called the city home. Gentrification began to threaten people that Drew met and became friends with during his time in Detroit. One day Drew received a tip that a neighbor’s house was going to be auctioned off.

The house belonged to an elderly couple; the man had dementia, and the woman had no idea it was going to be sold. Because of the massive number of foreclosures in Detroit, people who had lived there their entire lives were being forced out, and their homes were being sold for pennies to the highest bidder while they were still living in them.

Drew knew the couple were good neighbors, but more importantly, he understood the importance of keeping Detroit residents who had lived there their entire lives and couldn’t afford to move in their own homes. Drew and another neighbor decided to place a bid on the house in order to save it for the couple. After driving up the price several times, an anonymous bidder successfully purchased the home for $2300 and returned it to the couple’s name.

When the elderly woman realized she might lose her home, she was grateful to Drew for attempting to reclaim it. When he won the bidding war, she promised to repay him, which she did gradually in small increments of change. This meant everything to her and her community, where so many people were forced to flee or became homeless as their homes were bought and sold.

Drew’s experiences are detailed in his new book, “A $500 House in Detroit: Rebuilding an Abandoned Home and an American City,” which was published this month. Have you ever done anything similar for your neighbors? Have you ever seen people band together to do incredible things for their community? Like us on Facebook and let us know what you think!