Just south of 8 Mile Road in a run-down northeast Detroit neighborhood, the grasses are high and the small houses would be homogenous, if not for the vacant ones falling into disrepair. On this block of Dresden Street, there's one boarded up home that wouldn't stand out-- except it's a part of hip hop history, and it's for sale.
Fans of Eminem will recognize the building from the cover of 2000's "Marshall Mathers LP." The rapper, who used to live at this spot on 19946 Dresden St., apparently hasn't forgotten where he comes from. He revealed this weekend that the house will also be on the cover of forthcoming "Marshall Mathers LP 2."
But the house doesn't belong to the rapper, he hasn't lived there in years, and it's now up for auction through the Michigan Land Bank. The parcel, number 21034756, has a minimum bid of $1, according to the Detroit Free Press. The Land Bank's stated mission is to promote economic growth in the state through the "acquisition, assembly and disposal of public property ... to foster the development of that property."
The Detroit Free Press obtained public records showing that Eminem's mother purchased the house for $19,900 in 1987. The paper reports she signed the deed over to Ann Investment in 1994, and the property was owned by about 10 different parties before it was foreclosed on by the Wayne County Treasurer's Office in 2001.
Eminem and his mother Debbie Nelson have had a fraught relationship, and often disagreed on each other's portrayals of their past. In her 2008 book My Son Marshall, My Son Eminem, she describes the house on Dresden.
"Marshall loved it so much that he had a model of it made to take on tour with him," she wrote. "Even though we'd moved a lot, he always said the house on Dresden was his childhood home."
According to MLive, property records show that it's been in the Land Bank's possession since last October. According to the Free Press, the property is one of 4,000 others transferred to the Michigan Land Bank after it failed to sell for the minimum bid at auction last year. Estimates on various listing sites put its value in the mid-$30,000s.
The listing site Trulia shows the property as a 767-square-foot single-family home with 1.5 bathrooms.
Those looking to own a piece of Eminem memorabilia might do better to look for something besides this house, which appears to need extensive work. According to the Detroit News, a past owner once listed the house on eBay for $500,000, but received no bids.
In 2010, Eminem talked to Spin about his past and how he's visited his old home on Dresden Street as it's changed over the years.
"It may sound corny, but I'll go by and try to remember how things were when I was in those houses," he told the magazine. "I'll go back and remember, like, f***, man, how life was back then. How much of a struggle it was. As time goes by, you might get content and forget things."
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