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America’s foreclosure crisis, seen by some as a relic of 2008’s Great Recession, is very much alive in Detroit. Since 2008, one-third of properties in the city have been foreclosed due to tax issues. Homes in mostly black neighborhoods have been 10 times more likely to be at risk of tax foreclosure than those in other neighborhoods.
In this week’s episode with The Detroit News and Outlier Media, we take a close look at how Detroit’s continuing foreclosure crisis is trickling down to its residents, compromising their ability to remain homeowners and build wealth.
Although the Great Recession devastated Detroit, it did leave one bright spot: Home prices for prospective buyers were incredibly low after the crash. Cynthia Windham, a lifelong Detroit resident, moved to the city’s Morningside neighborhood 10 years ago to be closer to family; she was able to purchase her house for just $5,000 in cash. It seemed like a great deal.
But before long, she began receiving property tax bills whose yearly totals nearly equaled the price she paid for her house. That’s because the city of Detroit had incorrectly assessed her home’s value at $60,000 the year after she purchased it for a twelfth of that price. She quickly fell behind on payments.
She wasn’t the only one. Our analysis found that between 2010 and 2016, the owners of more than 40,000 homes were charged at least twice as much in taxes as they should have been. Over those years, Detroit overcharged its homeowners by more than $600 million.
“You might be wondering how the city could get home values so wrong,” producer Mark Betancourt says in this week’s episode. The answer: “After the housing crash in 2008, the average property in Detroit lost three-quarters of its value, but it took nearly a decade for the city to lower its assessments enough to reflect that. Taxable values are set by the city assessor’s office, which for years was plagued by terrible record keeping, understaffing and a lack of expertise.”
To make matters worse, Detroit declared bankruptcy in 2013. By that point, the city had been overcharging residents for years. Today, according to the city’s chief financial officer, there’s nothing in the city’s plan of adjustment that “provides for the repayment of any claim that was prior to that bankruptcy.”
Read more:
Also in the episode ...
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Outlier Media reports that a government agency in Detroit owns a quarter of the city and is leaving blighted homes unspoken for – sometimes for years.
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Host Al Letson sits down with Detroit’s mayor for a frank conversation about what the city owes its residents.
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