Housing as a Human Right
October is often a cruel month in Detroit. It is the time of foreclosures for overdue taxes and land sales through public auction. This year, an unprecedented efforts by public and private groups will make tax evictions less likely. Wayne County officials are trying to avoid foreclosures on occupied homes and the Stay As You Pay program is designed to exempt people who are struggling with finances from property taxes. Still officials say somewhere between 18,000 and 25,000 homeowners are at risk in Wayne Country of losing homes.
Along with evictions related to tax foreclosures, many Detroiters face eviction due to inability to pay rent during the pandemic. A recent survey in Michigan identified more than 100,000 people facing foreclosure or evictions. With the ending of the CDC freeze on evictions this week, the future is precarious.
The immediacy of the crisis draws our attention away from the longer term trends that shape it. Over the last 20 years, Detroit has been transformed from a city of homeowners to a city of renters. A recent article by Bonsitu Kataba-Gaviglio, deputy legal director of the ACLU of Michigan notes:
Once a national leader in Black homeownership, a majority of Detroit residents now live in rental properties. That, combined with high poverty rates, results in a shocking number of evictions. In 2016, for example, there were 6,664 evictions in Detroit, according to researchers at Princeton University’s Eviction Lab. That amounts to more than 18 families losing their homes every single day.
Along with the housing crisis in 2008, many Detroiters were forced out of their homes by inaccurate and inflated property taxes. In 2017, Mayor Duggan attempted to adjust assessments, but most studies demonstrated that Detroit homeowners are still over assessed. Last year the Detroit News documented that home owners were over-assessed by at least $600 million since the great recession. The News also documented that more than 90% were overtaxed by an average of at least $3,700 between 2010 and 2016. Roughly 1 in 10 of Detroit tax foreclosures between 2011 and 2015 are attributed to the city’s inflation of property assessments. During that time 100,000 properties were foreclosed.
There are broad based coalitions advocating to address these injustices, but the cold fact remains that people’s lives have been disrupted. Detroit has lost valuable community members and many neighborhoods are suffering as families have been forcibly moved out, leaving homes empty.
The long term trend is clear. City policy combined with banking practices are driving out African Americans, while welcoming in younger, whiter homeowners. The percentage of African Americans who own their own homes dropped in Michigan more than any other state, down to 40%. In contrast, home ownership rates for whites dropped 3%.
This drop in home ownership is coupled with the inability of African Americans to get mortgages. A recent report documented that in the metropolitan area African Americans are almost twice as likely to be denied a conventional home loan as white applicants. In 2017 African Americans received just 34 percent of all loan dollars coming into Detroit, whereas whites received 58 percent, up from 17 percent in 2007.
Behind all of these figures is the reality that intentional policies and practices by those in authority in our city are driving out long term residents, targeting neighborhoods that are predominantly African American.
There are many things we can do to turn this around. Establishing legal protections, initiating fair assessments, restoring homes to those unjustly foreclosed upon, and providing low cost homes to those without shelter are all possible. Our task is to forge the political will to make sure “housing is a human right” is more than a slogan.