Power Washing in Warren, Michigan

A City Built in Two Decades

Warren is Michigan's third-largest city, 139,387 people at the 2020 census, and most of it went up in a hurry. The population climbed from 42,653 in 1950 to 89,246 in 1960 and 179,260 in 1970, and the houses that absorbed that growth were brick ranches and bungalows on compact grid lots between 8 Mile Rd and the Sterling Heights line at 14 Mile Rd. Our shop is on Hall Rd in Clinton Township, a little over twenty minutes away off-peak, and that grid is where our crews spend a large share of every spring and fall.

The city reads by its mile roads and its employers. The General Motors Technical Center fills the square bounded by 12 Mile, Mound, Chicago Rd and Van Dyke, a National Historic Landmark since 2014 and, at about 23,800 people, the largest employer in town. The Detroit Arsenal sits on 11 Mile Rd, and Warren Truck Assembly and the Warren Stamping Plant hold the south end of Mound Rd, where Dodge City opened in 1938 and Jeep Wagoneers are built today. Residents use the six school districts, Warren Consolidated, Warren Woods, Van Dyke, Fitzgerald, Center Line and Eastpointe, as shorthand for which part of town they mean, and our dispatcher has learned to ask the same question.

What the housing shares is exposure. Van Dyke Ave, Mound Rd, Groesbeck Hwy and I-696 carry enough traffic that a gray film settles on brick faces and aluminum trim over the decades, and the salt that drifts off those corridors every winter has turned original porches and driveways charcoal. The mature maples on the older blocks keep north walls shaded, so algae takes hold there every summer, while the parkways replanted after the emerald ash borer took the ash trees are years from casting shade of their own. The Red Run and Bear Creek drains cross the city, and their low-lying blocks stay damp after every rain.

Under all of it is the flat lake plain of southern Macomb County, almost all poorly drained clay. Yards drain slowly, drives puddle, and old flatwork heaves with the frost. The eight service pages below are written for that housing and that ground, each with a starting price, and there is no travel fee to reach any of it.

Brick, Aluminum and Sixty-Year-Old Concrete

The 1950s and 1960s bungalows and ranches are the city's signature exterior: face brick, original aluminum trim and soffits, and a concrete porch, steps and drive poured at the same time as the foundation. The brick takes a mild mix at hose pressure so sixty-year-old mortar stays put. The aluminum carries oxidation that reads as fading until it is washed, and we tell owners what a wash will not bring back before we quote it. The concrete has spent fifty to seventy winters unsealed and is usually the first thing a new owner asks about.

North of the bungalow belt, the ranches, colonials and quad-levels of the 1960s and 1970s finished the north half of the city before its population peaked in 1970. Brick fronts with aluminum or vinyl siding above are the rule there, which puts two materials and two chemistries on one wall, and the second story is out of reach for most owners with a ladder. The prewar homes of the old Village of Warren and the streetcar-era blocks, which already held 24,024 residents by 1930, get the gentlest treatment we offer.

Associations are rare here because the grid predates them, so no board calendar forces the work. The trigger is usually a green north wall, a porch gone black, or a listing photo. Warren Woods, Fitzgerald, Bear Creek, Warrendale, Piper Van Dyke, Berkshire Manor, Belangers Garden, Beierman Farms, Lorraine and Northampton Square all sit on the same clay and under the same salt, so the work repeats from one neighborhood to the next even when the house does not.