The City of Detroit Chief of Staff and Mayor Mike Duggan recently conceded to a 30 day extension, and a city commitment to do more outreach and information spreading to the neighborhoods to help facilitate awareness about the recent settlement between the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the City on helping save overassessed/overtaxed homes from foreclosure.
Community activists were successful in placing pressure on the administration of Mike Duggan to utilize efforts to help expand reach and information to residents eligible for a property tax exemption in the previous year to help buy back their homes.
In the current situation, the administration is offering relatively more concessions and flexibility to the community and advocacy groups under intense political pressure accruing from years of displacement. The success of demands are expected to be lauded as administrative victories and positive press for the administration that has otherwise been instrumental in expediting policies of extortion and expropriation.
Political pressure culminated following a community meeting, for Detroit’s fifth district. Following a 30 minute PowerPoint presentation where the administration showcased its developments, community members lined up to challenge Duggan on his role in sustaining water shutoffs, keeping Detroit out of a water affordability plan, foreclosing homes, and enabling a toxic incinerator to threaten the City’s air quality.
For years, the city has been illegally over assessing property taxes on homes, with property rates never lowered to correspond to the tanking of home values during the Great Recession. This caused over 100,000 properties, or 1 in 3 homes, to go into foreclosure since 2002. The result has been displacement and blight, contributing to homelessness and bolstering the transition of homeowning Detroiters to renters. Foreclosures also destroy credit of those it affects, lowering the average FICO score around 100 to 200 points. This further severs the ability of Detroiter’s that lost their homes to retain generational wealth, already systemically damaged nationwide among Black families through engineered economic crises.
Out of 1500 occupied homes, more than half fall into the category of being non-deedholding. While advocates were able to ensure a commitment from city administration Tuesday promising that the 700 otherwise homes are guaranteed as eligible to be saved during a Tuesday meeting with advocates, renters and occupants living in homes where the deed holder is deceased were left out of any guarantee for assitance. Many of these residents, inheriting properties from descendants or family friends, are now threatened with homelessness.
And Detroters were not informed or, at best, ill-informed of the settlement. Out of the 300 homes the advocacy group canvassed, only one-third were informed of the settlement. And many more, only equipped with vague information from canvassers, were not informed or followed up with on getting onto the program. On Loveland, a property parcel database and the primary medium for nonprofit organizations and groups are using to track which homes this year have been canvassed, even just leaving a flyer at a door was counted and registered on the interface as a completed canvas, not taking into account if any information on the settlement or the procedures to save their home was even delivered or confirmed to the home occupant.
Many more have been put onto payment plans where interest accrues though they should have never had to pay those amounts in the first place. And the city continues to incentivize payment plans even with the eligibility for thousands to not be on them. Moreover, those on payment plans are unable to benefit from the program. One such program touted by City Council Member Gabe Leland, called “Defend our Neighbors,” started in 2015 as a campaign placing residents on county payment plans, programs that in turn worked to drive Detroiters further into debts on property taxes that they should never have had to pay in the first place. Ultimately, the County has benefitted from the payment plans, filling a $98 million dollar deficit with $100 million extracted from Detroit’s poorest.
The City of Detroit’s inability to even understand the gravity of the disaster is reflected in their complete transfer of work around this settlement to nonprofits. The United Community Housing Coalition (UCHC), whose main source of funding and support for foreclosure home purchasing programs, such as one piloted first last October that allowed tenants of 80 foreclosed homes to purchase the homes, draws its funding from Quicken Loans. One of business mogul Dan Gilbert’s main companies in metro-Detroit along with Rock Financial and Bedrock, Quicken Loans has been a main player in engineering the foreclosure crisis, along with continuing the City’s downtown centered development blitz and gentrification.
The transfer of work and resources to nonprofits, understaffed, and under resourced, mirrors the general trend of neoliberal financialization that has afflicted public schools in Detroit. In both cases, an the orchestrated defunding of vital public services has opened up the opportunity for foundation and corporate money to profit off an engineered crises with heavily mitigated and essentially ineffective solutions.
Taking advantage of the conditions and constraints of these organizations and institutions, developers, investors, and foundation heads continue to reap benefits from the prolongation of poverty. UCHC was only allocated $275,000 for the program, enough for only 275 out of a total of 1500 occupied properties on the foreclosure list. According to an affected resident, who attended one of the required workshops the second Monday, residents were told that they had to pay $500 by July 27, before the second extension was recently awarded, just to even have a chance at saving their homes. This most existed to stretch the sliver of funds to make capacity for the hundreds more seeking assistance from the housing agency with regards to the settlement.
The chaos of the situation reflects the orchestrated nature of economic crises, particularly around housing and water, that have affected Detroiters from and beyond emergency management and bankruptcy. Neither the City nor Wayne County, which claims properties through the Wayne County Land Bank for auction after they go into foreclosure, have any incentive to save homes or assist working class residents.
In 2010, during the Obama administration and as a result of the Great Recession, Michigan received $760 million in Hardest Hit Funds to assisting with mortgage and property tax payments, as well as water bills arrearages attached as liens on those homes.
In 2015, Detroit faced the largest tax foreclosure on occupied homes in U.S. history, just a year after the City shut off water to over 33,000 residents and two years after the state had approved funds for blight demolition. Many residents and homeowners continued to suffer well after 2011, in need of amnesty from Hardest Hit Funds that ended up being used to demolish homes rather than to save them.
The contracts that went to demolition were supported by Stabenow and Peters, along with the County and City in their continued commitment and accountability to developers and demolition contractors amiable with developers and officials rather than to homeowners and workers.
The demolition blitz helped accelerate blight and affect air quality, spurring a recent public health crisis, particularly for Detroit children. These youth were found to have lead levels due to airborne contamination from lead paint and fumes that rivaled those affected in Flint. Contractors in demolition programs have also been found to participate in illegal dumping, corruption and other mishandlings warranting investigation. And Detroit’s Black contractors, shuttered out by discriminatory practices embedded in arbitrary pre-qualification pre-requisites, are also pushed aside and cast out in the City's business and decision making endeavors.
The foreclosure crisis accompanies Detroit’s water woes in representing an orchestrated attack on working class and Black residents to drive them out and, in turn, stretch more room in the already turgid pockets of banks and developers.Duggan has shown willingness to offer concessions only after the worst has passed; 700 homes, not even half of the original 1500 in the settlement and only about 7% of total homes forcibly evicted, does not measure up to amount the City is claiming as improvements. Though the administration boasts about the 89 percent reduction in foreclosures, these figures are not indicative of a commitment to housing being a human right. The City, running out of houses to foreclose on, otherwise leaves Detroiters stuck on payment plans or as renters in new Detroit’s neo- feudalism.
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