Detroit, 10 years later: underwater and under water bills
About ten years ago, during a period of transition, I spent some time in both New Orleans and Detroit. Ostensibly I was doing “relief” work in post-Katrina New Orleans, although the kinds of relief that were needed at that point had little to do with a hurricane. Residents displaced from public housing were gutting flooded homes to try to make a life again; poor people overwhelmed shelters on blocks full of empty houses, still with X’s on the facades and rubble in the front yards. My friends and I took care of kids, wore dust masks while we tore out rotting walls, tended gardens and planted sunflowers. We sat out on the curb in the sun, stunned by the apparent lack of presence of any forces with the resources to help.
Those resources came later. After people had left, 250,000 people, only some of whom came back. Brad Pitt built houses in the Lower Ninth. FEMA and insurance came through for some. The city government, years later, put back up the street signs. Someone hauled off the debris. Rents doubled in some of New Orleans’ neighborhoods, tourism returned and the area became more upscale. From a money perspective, New Orleans made a roaring comeback. It was the people, mostly black people, who didn’t return.
Conditions in Detroit were much the same ten years ago. People who lived there, who had been living here, found space to squat or do community organizing or build gardens or run youth programs, on blocks dotted with burned out buildings owned by absent banks or missing investors. People kept driving to work, kept paying the bills, took out new home loans with lousy terms. There was so much space, so much life and livelihood, but so few resources.
And the disasters, natural and human-made, continue to strike. This week there’s news of flooding in Louisiana. President Obama landed there Tuesday, and the nation pledges once again to bring relief.
But I’m back in Detroit, looking at the long-term consequences of a slower disaster. I’m reporting several stories for Marketplace, about the parts of the housing market that haven’t recovered, about services that have been slashed. It’s not flooding or a hurricane, but the aftermath looks much the same.
Here in Michigan, it’s been raining. People say everyone’s got a leaky roof here, everybody’s basement floods. I visit a former bank, a solid greystone on a corner on one of Detroit’s wide avenues, that’s now home to a community development agency. We walk past a leak in their new offices, dripping straight onto the carpet. I visit a woman’s home where the back porch and basement are thick with the smell of mildew; she’s just finished scrubbing the walls after the latest storm. She calls her landlord about the problems and doesn’t hear back for months.
I drive by the collective house where I used to live in Detroit, on Trumbull Avenue. Around the corner, I meet a shocking sight: a fully-functioning housing development, beige on top, brick on bottom, with new street signs, newly-invented street names, clean curbs and trim lawns. Blocks and blocks of public housing and three-story burnouts were demolished to make space for this. Now we see it: private market activity, recreating the map of the city.
The woman with the community housing agency tells me it’s common wisdom in the city not to do “in-fill” development — meaning, all the people need to be gone from a block (and their former homes demolished) before it’s worth it for a developer to build there.
And we hear that Detroit is “coming back,” that people are coming back. But statistically, it’s not true. It’s white people who are coming back. The ongoing exodus began with white flight and redlining, and continued as Detroit was depleted of both jobs and property values by deindustrialization and a devastating home market crash. From a trickle, to a flood, to a trickle again, people are still leaving.
Right now there are 14,000 tax foreclosures pending in Wayne County, 20,000 water shutoffs, multiple lawsuits over keeping people in their homes. A delinquent water bill often leads to a delinquent tax bill; tenants are kicked out, owners foreclosed on. The rules for tax foreclosures have people paying thousands a year in taxes on homes worth virtually nothing, unable to get a revaluation before the foreclosure goes through. Then the houses go to the auction block, with the best ones going to investors and the worst, sitting on the city’s books.
Meanwhile, so many of the families who stayed, who bought homes in Detroit and stuck it out through the long storm of divestment, are still underwater. The cost of living is high: they pay more in taxes, insurance and utilities than their suburban neighbors. I interviewed a man whose elderly father kept his home through thick and thin, finally selling it recently for $4,000. These are pretty houses, some solid brick houses with elaborate stained glass, some sweet bungalows. Some are rundown and gutted, but the biggest factor in defining their value is the block on which they sit. Blocks away in a white suburb, the same house will go for twice as much.
It’s an “exciting time” to be in real estate here, sources tell me. In pockets, the market is coming back. Private investors are buying houses by the tens and even hundreds, flipping them for rent or letting them sit while they speculate on the city’s future. But the mortgage industry is mostly absent, and almost all home purchases are happening in cash.
The stories I’m working on try to trace the lines of divestment from red-lining in the last century to predatory lending in this one, to today, when finally it seems some wealth accumulation might begin again in the city, but for a variety of reasons, the people who most need it can’t get a loan.
I walk past a building that’s been empty for my entire living memory, a tower of gaping holes and debris on the skyline, the grand old train station, and it has panes in the windows. Me and some other white people gaze up at it, snapping photos, amazed. Panes in the windows!
I wonder if they’ve replaced the roof.
