In Detroit, massive foreclosures strip neighborhoods of people and homes

The coalition counsels thousands of people on how to get into the payment plans the county offers in order to help them stay in their homes. It does more of this kind of work than any other organization in Detroit.

“These are people who lost their homes because they were poor or they were grossly overassessed or they were unaware that they could have gotten their taxes completely waived,” says Phillips, referring to property tax exemption the city offers to people who live below the poverty line.

Nearly 40 percent of Detroiters live below the poverty line, according to census data, but each year only a few thousand homeowners manage to get on a tax exemption plan offered by the city.

John Roach, a spokesman for Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan, said in an email that city and county efforts to stave off blight have been a “tremendous success.” He noted that state officials have kept roughly 15,000 owner-occupied homes out of foreclosure in the last year alone. Duggan’s administration says it has demolished more than 6,000 homes since he took office in January 2014, and Roach said legal auctions by the city have ensured that 400 vacant homes must be renovated and occupied within a six-month window.

“Keeping families in their homes has been a top priority for this administration,” Roach wrote.

But those efforts won’t keep Juanita Westbrooks, her daughter, her sister or her sister’s two children in their home. Westbrooks, 39, found out her home will be auctioned off in September, even though she bought it twice — once in a scam that cost her thousands of dollars and then a second time from an owner who bought it in the county auction.

When Westbrooks lost her job in 2011, she fell behind on her property taxes. She’s now working for $9 an hour and owes roughly $18,000 in taxes, even though she purchased her home for less than $6,000. Part of the problem, critics say, is that outdated assessments make owners’ tax bills far too high.

Her appeals with the county failed. “I’m not asking for a handout or a pity party,” says Westbrooks, who refused in the past to go on welfare. “I go to work every day.”

County officials say their hands are tied by an amendment to state law passed in 1999 that forces them to seize and sell off properties that are three or more years behind on property taxes.

“Our office has helped a lot of people who don’t manage money well,” says Eric Sabree, a deputy treasurer for the county. “Our tax system is being used like a credit card. It’s one of the things people pay last.” But he admits that some Detroiters like Westbrooks are choosing “between eating and putting gas in your car.”

On the block where Jessie West lives, the buffer against decay has been her family, and her many relatives, including her mother and three siblings, who all have homes there. Still, roughly 15 homes have become blighted, been foreclosed or been bulldozed by the city on her block in recent years, she says. But not a single streetlight there has been replaced, even though Duggan’s administration has thus far installed 40,000 LED streetlamps in more densely populated and upscale neighborhoods.

“This used to be a pretty, tree-lined street with carpetlike grass and manicured lawns,” says West. “At night in front of my house, it’s total darkness.” She says she and her children will end up with relatives or in a shelter.

“We can’t afford to buy back this house in the county auction, even at a low price,” says West, who has 2- and 6-year-old grandchildren also living in her home. “There are four or five generations of our family on this block. But not for much longer.”

Her family moved to Detroit’s Black Bottom neighborhood from Arkansas in the 1950s. Named after its dark soil, the neighborhood was largely Jewish and Eastern European in the early 1900s, then became poor and black. In the 1960s it was demolished to make way for one of the nation’s first major interstate highways, displacing tens of thousands of people.

The stress from uncertainty has weighed heavily on West and her two daughters for weeks now.

“I’m tired of looking over my shoulder,” says Rolanda West, Jessie's 41-year-old daughter who bakes to make extra money but has struggled to find full-time work, only recently landing a full-time job in a city with few of them.

“I’m tired of wondering if I’m going to have a place to live.''