Detroit housing

Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan announced Tuesday the creation of the Detroit Housing for the Future Fund (DHFF), a public-private partnership that seeks to  bridge the funding gap between the cost of redevelopment and the income developers will receive from a particular project. 

"If you want to hold rent low enough that people of low income can afford it, but your housing costs to build are the same as every place else, you lose money," said Duggan. "Nobody is going to build apartment units where the cost of building it costs more than they get back in rent. They'd all go out of business."

Update: 8:15 a.m. Friday, June 12: Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is extending a ban on evictions through the rest of June for tenants and mobile home owners. The eviction ban was set to expire when Whitmer signed a new executive order expanding it until June 30.

Original post: Wednesday, June 10: A group of protesters caravanned through the streets of one Detroit neighborhood on Tuesday, demanding more relief for renters during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The protesters called on Governor Gretchen Whitmer to extend the moratorium on evictions that's set to expire on Thursday. Whitmer has already extended it twice.

Detroit mayor Mike Duggan announced a new program that aims to preserve affordable housing on Monday at Conner Creek Senior Apartments.

The city says the "Preservation Partnership" is meant to renovate apartment buildings that already have low rents and reduce the displacement of low-income families by keeping the rent low. The initiative is part of the city’s Multifamily Affordable Housing Strategy intended to preserve low-income housing in areas at risk of gentrification.

The city of Detroit is suing three major real estate investors the city calls “slumlords,” accusing them of an “invest and neglect” business model that leaves homes in deplorable conditions, and puts the health and safety of tenants at risk.

The city identifies the “notorious speculators and slumlords” as West Bloomfield father-and-son team of Steve and Stephen Hagerman; Michael Kelly of Grosse Pointe Woods; and Salameh Jaser of Dearborn. Together, the city says the men own more than 1,000 blighted properties throughout the city, and have amassed thousands of tickets from city building inspectors. They purchased many of their properties through Wayne County’s annual tax foreclosure auction.

Wayne County will foreclose on fewer Detroit homes this year for the fourth straight year, according to numbers the Wayne County Treasurer’s Office provided on Friday.

Wayne County has 3,023 residential Detroit properties on its tax foreclosure list right now. 1,083 of them are believed to be occupied homes.

11 years after the start of the recession and housing crash, the ripple effects are still felt acutely across Detroit and Wayne County, members of a U.S. House subcommittee heard at a field hearing in Detroit on Friday.

The issues are complex, but the numbers are stark: since the housing crisis began in 2009, Detroit has flipped from a majority-homeowner to a majority-renter city. That’s due in large part to the wave of mortgage and property tax foreclosures that swept the city in the following years.

Researchers say more immigrant homeowners could help stabilize neighborhoods in Detroit.

That's according to a study released Wednesday by the economic development initiative Global Detroit.

Most Detroit landlords will no longer be able do to criminal background checks on potential tenants until they’ve otherwise completed the rental application process.

City officials say the new Fair Chance Ordinance will help ex-offenders stay on the right path by offering them a better shot at secure housing when they return home. They say it’s needed in a city where about 1,000 people return from prison each year.

Rent has increased more in Detroit as a percentage of household income than in any other large U.S. city in the last few years, according to a report by the financial tech company SmartAsset.

The report looked at fair market rent across the U.S. between 2014 and 2017.

Detroit’s homeless population is trending downward for the third year in a row—in part, officials say, because of an emphasis on finding people homes.

Detroit’s annual “point in time count” of people living on the street or in shelters tallied up 1,769 people when it was conducted on January 31st of this year. That’s a 15% drop from 2017.

Starting this summer, Detroit will try a to combat its problem with childhood lead poisoning by heading to what’s usually the source: the homes where children live.

Detroit’s plan to get all city rental properties up to code launches at the start of next month.

Landlords in certain parts of the city will have 90 days to register their properties, and another 90 days to comply with a city ordinance.

Detroit updated and strengthened its rental ordinance last year, after letting it largely go unenforced for years.

An effort to help some Wayne County residents from losing their homes to tax foreclosure seems to have stalled. Until the last minute, low-income property owners were being encouraged to apply for tax exemptions, with the hope of preventing their homes from being sold at Wayne County’s annual auction of tax-foreclosed properties.

Detroit City assessor Alvin Horhn’s office promoted the idea that some low-income homeowners might be able to avoid tax foreclosure this year if they hurried to apply for a tax exemption.

A Detroit City Council committee heard some passionate pleas for tighter rules on city landlords and their rental properties Monday.

Renters’ advocates and neighborhood groups said it’s past time to tighten up the city’s rental property, ordinance especially now that Detroit has moved from a majority-homeowner to a majority-renter city.

The proposed new rules would amend an existing city ordinance, which city leaders admit has not been well enforced in recent years.

The Michigan Court of Appeals has ruled against plaintiffs in a discrimination lawsuit against Wayne County over tax foreclosures.

The ACLU filed the lawsuit on behalf of a group of Detroit homeowners. It alleges that cities in Wayne County failed to perform required property tax assessments for years, over-assessing homes and forcing homeowners into tax foreclosure. The plaintiffs argue that these actions violated the Fair Housing Act because they disproportionately affected African-American homeowners. 

Detroit leaders hope to solve a real estate riddle with some help from banks and non-profits.

The Detroit Home Mortgage program is designed to counter stubbornly low property values in the city.

Those low values mean low assessments — which prevents many otherwise-qualified homebuyers from getting traditional mortgages that cover the full sale price of the home, or include the cost of needed renovations.

A project that turns empty shipping containers into sustainable housing kicked off in Detroit this week.

Development firm Three Squared is using nine containers to construct a three story unit in the city's Corktown neighborhood. 

A zero-down mortgage without closing costs, fees or a credit check probably sounds too good to be true, but it's about to become a reality for some Detroit home buyers.

Mayor Mike Duggan Thursday announced a new mortgage program to make it easier to finance a home in the city.

DETROIT – The federal government has ended 10 years of management of Detroit's public housing system and restored it to local control.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development says in a statement Tuesday that the change is effective March 16. U.S. Housing Secretary Julian Castro says the update "represents an important milestone in Detroit's road to recovery."