On the front porch, in yellow spray paint, is the symbol so many houses in this city know too well: CP. For Consumers Powers. Meaning the electric company has visited and turned the power off.

Because nobody needs lights here anymore. Nobody will be making coffee or watching the ball game or ironing their favorite shirt.

CP.

It’s like a scarlet letter for forgotten homes.

The city is filled with homes like this. Bait for arsonists. There have been 1,631 fires at vacant structures in Flint from 2008 through 2012, according to the Flint Fire Department.

For these houses, it wasn’t always like this. The house at 1736 New York Avenue was where my great-grandfather, Martin Vik, lived.

The house seems smaller now. Everything is larger when you’re 6.

It’s a white house with a big porch across the front wall. According to property records, it’s 1,141 square feet with three bedrooms and two baths and a basement.

City property records also show what year a house was built. But this one doesn’t. For this house, the records simply read “Year Built: 0.”

I called Martin Vik’s son, Leonard Vik, my great-uncle, to ask more about the house. To ask if it was really built in year 0.

“My grandpa, he built that house,” said Leonard Vik, who lives in Lennon now. “Must have been in the 20s.”

It was one of the first houses on the street. Leonard Vik lived here until he grew up and left for the military. His wife and children lived here briefly. He is the one who eventually cleaned out and sold the home when his father died.

Leonard Vik’s grandfather, Martin Anderson, built the house and lived there with his wife. When Martin Anderson Died, his daughter Hazel moved in with her new husband, Martin Vik. He raised his family there.

Martin Vik lived there with his wife until she died, then he lived there alone until 1995, when he died at St. Joseph Hospital on his 90th birthday.

He lived there in 1987, when I was born. I can vaguely remember playing on the floor in the living room. I remember him sitting in a recliner and eating peanuts.

In 1997, when there was nobody left to live there, Leonard Vik sold the house.

I called my mother, Connie Thorne, to ask her what she remembers about the house.

“They had an old-fashioned kitchen forever. I remember going over there and staying all night. They must not have had a water heater, because grandma made us take a bath and she had to heat up water on the stove.”

I tried to reach the current owner of the home. Property records show the owner is a Flint man. I called a number listed for that name. A woman who answered said he didn’t live there, but was a friend. I asked her to take a message. I haven’t heard back yet.

The city lists the taxable value of the home at $5,400, putting the market value at less than $11,000.

But there is little hope for it being purchased. It is on the city’s list of homes to be demolished. The list, as of December, included more than 2,000 homes.

“It definitely needs to be torn down,” said a man who lives next door to the house and asked his name not be used.

The house has sat empty for a couple years now, he said.

“There’s probably too much damage to that house to really rebuild it or anything.”

He is one of few neighbors the house has. The house to the other side has been demolished and grass grows over an empty lot, next to that, another vacant house.

The entire street is like this. Here and there are signs of life, but many houses are vacant, many look broken in to, some are covered in graffiti.

For Flint firefighters, this is arson country.

“On the fire department — anytime you heard there was a fire — they mention the words New York, Bell, Mabel, Jane, you know there was a fire,” said former Flint firefighter Raul Garcia, who retired in 2011 and now works volunteering at a Catholic church in the neighborhood.

It used to be different.

“It was a working class neighborhood, lots of big factories,” said U.S. Rep. Dan Kildee, who grew up at 1813 New York Avenue.

Kildee’s family moved when he was four, but he said he still has “a ton of memories from New York Avenue.”

He remembers sitting on the porch, watching the workers head to the factory. Years later, he had to oversee the demolition of his former home, when he was serving as Genesee County treasurer and board chair of the Genesee County Land Bank.

Standing on the porch, he knowing his childhood home needed to be demolished, the memories came flooding back.

“When I sat down on the front porch of that house, it occurred to me that the first image of the world for me was the view from the front porch of that house,” said Kildee, D-Flint Township. “Maybe that’s why the memories are so intense, it was the first impression I had of the world as a human being. It was a neighborhood.”

But the neighborhood has changed.

“The area has really suffered over the last few years,” said Flint City Councilman Bryant Nolden, who represents the area.

Nolden has hopes for the area, calling it “prime for redevelopment.”

But there’s a lot of work to do. Along with arsons and vacancies are drug trafficking, prostitution, he said.

“It’s not going to be an easy fix.”

While walking down New York Avenue, I met Tom Childers and Diann Linn, a man and woman who live nearby.

“You probably remember it looking nice at one time,” Diann Linn said of the Vik house. “A lot of these houses looked nice at one time. Now they’re all torn down or burned up.”

“What they have to do is tear them down,” Childers said.

Maybe that’s what the house is destined for: a bulldozer comes to wipe clean all that was here.

Or maybe it just goes up in flames.

Blake Thorne is a reporter for MLive-The Flint Journal. Contact him at bthorne1@mlive.com or 810-347-8194. Follow him on Twitter or Facebook.