Detroit native buying homes in childhood neighborhood — and bringing them back to life By Chanel Stitt Detroit Free Press DETROIT — Several abandoned homes. A large street flood. Trash covering the ground. Overgrown grass and weeds. An almost completely deserted neighborhood. This is what Detroit contractor Alonzo Ramon, who goes by his rapper stage name King Yadee, saw when he returned to see the neighborhood where he grew up. The area, located off Seven Mile Road at Archdale and Vassar, was a disaster. Yadee immediately wanted to fix it. So he put his music career aside to begin doing what seemed like the impossible: buy up his entire childhood neighborhood and bring it back to life. His brother encouraged him to go to school to learn how to accomplish it all. 14
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“He was like, ‘Go back to school and get your license,’ “ said Yadee. “ ‘If you want to buy the hood, let’s buy the hood. That was 2018.’ “ And so far, it’s working. The company has been able to purchase three abandoned homes on Archdale with two more homes on the block owned by investors. It has been working to renovate them for about a year. When Yadee first entered the abandoned homes, the homes were completely trashed and had been vacant since 2010. He and his team began knocking down the walls to see what the structures looked like and immediately started the renovation. The well-connected team calls each other brother and sister, with two being Yadee’s actual siblings. Each person was brought on to the crew because of their passion for fixing the neighborhood,
where almost all of them grew up. Yadee has invested his own money to pay and train his crew. He also receives a surplus of volunteers. “We don’t clock in,” Yadee said. “We don’t clock out. We don’t ask people for nothing. We don’t ask for no handouts and we definitely don’t wait for nobody to do nothing for us. I’m building my community, my school and my culture.” This passion for fixing started when Yadee was young. He and his siblings lost both of their parents when they were very young. His aunt and uncle took the kids in and bought their Archdale Street home. After a while, they decided to leave the area. Then the 2008 financial crisis hit Detroit, and that’s when Yadee says the neighborhood started to go downhill. He says that contractors and the city of Detroit hadn’t come to fix the
