I was even less keen on the new-tech voice-assistant pods: The wonderful women in my life hardly ever listen to me anyway. Why add the disembodied female voice of a robot to the mix?

“I’ve got an idea,” I said, when I came home to find the pods installed. “How’s about this, guys? Maybe you could install door locks on my house that even you guys can’t pick?”

Carlos and Jimmy exchanged a look, then burst out laughing.

“Ain’t no such luck with no such lock, Mr. Snow,” Jimmy said.

Begrudgingly, I let the boys work on the house. Mainly because when I saw them these days, I felt guilty: what had looked like promising employment for a kid with no future (Jimmy) and a Mexican immigrant not authorized to work in the US (Carlos) had come down to one last house to renovate and flip on Markham Street. Certainly, there were other properties in Mexicantown, but with Detroit’s recent renaissance, more suburbanites and real estate companies were buying up properties with a solid promise of a 300 percent return on investment. Instead of a one-and-a-half-square-mile lower- to middle-income working-class brown-and-Black “ghetto,” Mexicantown was quickly becoming the hipster, urban-chic place to be. I couldn’t find properties fast enough, and when I did, I was outgunned on fair market price.

My real estate agent (who is, I suspect, part-time Oracle of Delphi) had warned me this day was coming five years ago.

“What was lost, abandoned and forgotten all them years will be found again, young Snow,” Miss Jesse had told me over hibiscus tea and gingersnaps at her 6,000-square-foot Neo-Renaissance Louis Kamper-designed Indian Village home. “Everybody done forgot about the ’08 mortgage meltdown. The pirates are soon to find your little island nation of Mexicantown, and they will spread they money like cancer.”

Had I known I’d be responsible for the livelihoods of two good men, I would have listened a bit harder to Miss Jesse.

“You guys haven’t touched anything in the kitchen, have you?” I said.

They were tinkering with the personal-assistant pod on my fireplace mantel.

“No, on account we know you like it just like it is,” Jimmy said.

“And somehow that didn’t translate to the rest of my house?”

Carlos and his family, who had been chased out of the US by white nationalists wearing federal badges, were now hardworking, taxpaying, poutine-and-hockey-loving Canadian residents living only fifteen minutes south of Mexicantown (via the US/Canada bridge across the narrow churn of the Detroit River) in Windsor, Ontario. He’d started a heating-and-cooling business that was struggling but promised growth if he could just hold on for another year. A bridge pass made for easy commuting to this side of the Detroit River for Carlos to work on my flip jobs and collect cash infusions.