- Coming up on American Black Journal, we have teamed up with Bridge Detroit to take a closer look at the large number of Detroit houses that need repairs.

We're gonna talk about the City of Detroit's repair programs and hear from residents about their efforts to get money to fix up their houses.

Plus, we'll talk about the impact on black Detroiters.

Stay where you are.

American Black Journal starts right now.

- [Narrator] From Delta faucets to Behr Paint.

Masco Corporation is proud to deliver products that enhance the way consumers all over the world experience and enjoy their living spaces.

Masco serving Michigan communities since 1929.

Support also provided by the Cynthia & Edsel Ford Fund for Journalism at Detroit Public TV.

- [Narrator] The DTE Foundation proudly supports 50 years of American Black Journal in covering African American history, culture and politics.

The DTE Foundation and American Black Journal, partners in presenting African American perspectives about our communities and in our world.

- [Narrator] Also brought to you by Nissan Foundation and viewers like you.

Thank you.

(upbeat music) - Welcome to American Black Journal.

I'm your host, Stephen Henderson.

Today we are partnering with Bridge Detroit for an in-depth look at the great need for home repairs in the city of Detroit.

We talk all the time about all the houses that are blighted and empty in the city, but it's estimated that 38,000 families are living in houses that need repair.

For a lot of people the money just isn't there to fix costly issues like roofs and windows and furnaces, and in fact, home repair was the number one response from residents when they were asked how the city should spend its allocation of money from the American Rescue Plan Act.

Bridge Detroit reporter, Malachi Barrett has the story.

- It was like snow and rain coming in 'cause there's nothing I could do about it.

So I just worked it out.

I just had a bucket there, put some tiles down.

That's it.

Just do what I do to make it work.

- [Narrator] That's lifelong Detroiter Samela Dean talking about a gaping hole that was in the roof of her 100 year old home on the city's northeast side.

- Dripping and dripping and dripping and one day it just fell in.

I had planned to get it patched, but I never could come up with the $500 this man was gonna patch it for me.

- [Narrator] Ms. Dean is a senior, disabled, and qualifies for a property tax exemption for low income residents, which made her a prime candidate for the city's Renew Detroit Home Repair program.

It's a $45 million effort to help 2,000 low income Detroiters fix up their homes over the next four years.

Those who applied in the first round could receive a new roof at no cost.

A second phase of the program opened in October.

It will include window replacements.

- My guess is if we drove down the street three or four years ago, you wouldn't see people fixing up houses along here.

- [Narrator] Dean was one of the first people to get a new roof through Renew Detroit.

- We get Miss Dean's roof done.

I think you're gonna see more and more investment in this community.

- I am so excited to have a roof and so emotional because I never ever dreamed this could happen to me.

- [Narrator] Renew Detroit only goes so far.

Just a small fraction will get help who need it.

The University of Michigan research estimates 38,000 families are living in homes that need repairs.

Most people need roofs, gutters, siding, brick work, porch work, windows.

They need everything.

- [Narrator] Vanessa Taylor lives less than five miles west from Dean in a house that she's owned for 40 years.

- The house was built in 1920.

- [Narrator] Taylor says she also applied for the Renew Detroit program, but she hasn't yet heard whether she qualifies.

- I would like to get the siding done on my house.

I would like to get the roof done and I would like to get the rest of the new windows in the house.

I get that done, I'm okay.

- [Narrator] Taylor estimates it will take 20 to $40,000 to do the repairs.

She's on a fixed income.

- With roofs like on a small house, a roof is $10,000.

- [Narrator] Edith Ford with Mac Development says even with programs to help, gaps in the system leave many Detroiters short.

Ford says the city is partly to blame.

Residents have been overtaxed an estimated $600 million following the great recession.

Money that could have gone toward fixing their homes.

- They could have been able to save towards getting their own roof.

I had one lady here, her payment plan was like $782 a month.

Her mortgage was never that much to pay her back property taxes.

But then when the Detroit Home Property Tax Relief grant came from the Gilbert Foundation, we were able to get her a property tax exemption and to get that past due amount wiped out.

When that came, you would hear people banging and hammering, people start fixing stuff on their houses.

- That's interesting.

So the direct impact of like giving people some tax relief is they immediately went.

- They immediately started doing stuff on their house that they know they needed to do.

- [Narrator] Foundations owned by billionaire Dan Gilbert are helping Detroiters with their taxes and home repairs.

His 20 million Detroit Home Repair fund was announced this spring.

- Incredibly, when we rolled out the Detroit Home Repair Fund, we saw about 150,000 phone calls in the first 48 hours and 250,000 phone calls in the first week.

Which was honestly an emotional realization because we had just tens and tens of thousands of people who really needed support and they were not getting it from existing ecosystem partners.

- [Narrator] The Gilbert Foundation expects to help 1,000 Detroit homeowners pay for repairs over the next three years, but that's still just another small fraction that so many more Detroiters are going to miss out.

Some Detroiters are finding creative ways to raise money.

Field Street Block Club President Janine Spencer crowdfunded more than $14,000 in the last year to help families in the island view neighborhood on Detroit's east side.

- We're actually able to help like four families, not just with heat but with other home repairs.

- I feel like the fact that you guys are fundraising really shows the gaps in these programs.

- Yeah.

- Like you wouldn't have to do that if these programs were able to like serve everybody.

- Not at all.

- Not at all.

I don't qualify.

I'm not disabled, nor am I a senior.

So I don't qualify for these home repair grants.

So what do I do?

- So what's the effect on the, like the black middle class then in Detroit?

- Well, what has happened that has driven the black middle class outta Detroit?

Well, you gotta have all income levels and all classes of people to make a city work and that has driven them out.

Because why should I spend $100,000 and rehab this house when one next to me is like only God and cobwebs, is keeping it up.

- To find out more about the outlook for home repairs in the city and the impact on residents, I sat down with Bridge Detroit's Malachi Barrett, the city of Detroit's chief of Special housing programs, Heather Zygmontowicz and Donna Givens Davidson, who is the CEO of Eastside Community Network.

Here's that conversation.

So Malachi, I'm gonna start with you.

You went out and actually talked to a number of people in neighborhoods all over Detroit about this issue.

Talk about what brought us to this point where we've got so many people who need this much help, but I guess also give us a sense of how optimistic people are, that this new program from the city and that the other efforts can actually make a difference.

- Yeah, I mean this has been a major issue in the city of Detroit for quite some time.

It feels as though we are kind of reaching a point now where the level of investment in these houses, needs to be increased or we're gonna be in a pretty significant crisis and some folks I think are describing the kind of home repair situation as an ongoing crisis and there's a number of different factors.

It's very complicated situation, but just to kind of give you, a sense of the need, the University of Michigan's Poverty Solutions Group has estimated that in total this is, the amount of investment needed is not just in the hundreds of millions of dollars, but bordering close to a billion dollars with a B and it's really, throughout the city.

There's not one particular neighborhood.

It's pretty widespread, but again, I mean I think there's a number of factors you could point to.

Generally the city's housing stock is very old, which poses an issue to keeping things in shape.

Most of the houses in the city were built before 1950.

So there's some significant kind of legacy investment that needs to happen there to keep properties that are that old in shape.

There's also the kind of cycle of families losing possession of a home and then that turning into vacant properties sitting.

Perhaps they get transferred to the Land bank or another organization that puts it in the hands of somebody, but at the time that that person obtains a home, perhaps it's been vacant for some time and there's some pretty significant repairs that need to get made.

You have a lot of seniors in the city who are living on fixed incomes and have a lot of deferred maintenance programs that they just simply can't afford to pay for on their own and one thing that came up a lot during our conversations was just the impact of the over assessment issue in Detroit where property owners were overtaxed in the order of some $600 million and a lot of folks said that they would've put that money into their houses had they had access to it.

- So if I could, if I could jump in though.

Yeah, there's some historical factors that we have to look at.

So right now we look at Detroit as a primarily poor city or a lot of these neighborhoods are low income people but having been raised in Detroit and growing up in Detroit, I can tell you the real estate values on homes did not appreciate like they did in the suburbs and so when you're talking about deferred maintenance, when you live in a suburban community and your home appreciates some value, you can take out that second mortgage and you can fix up your home and repair the roof and replace it and furnish and everything, like those expensive repairs that even middle income people struggle to pay based on their annual incomes and of course we have the wealth gap, but also the ongoing inability for homes to generate new value for homeowners and our community has just been something, and it continues, and right now, in the past it was redlining and now we don't call it redlining, but we have appraisal practices and policies that have the same, perpetuate the same kind of activities as redlining because they say homes in these communities have to be at this level of value and other homes or this level of value.

We can't compare these homes to other people's homes and that's really difficult and the other thing is the failure of banks to lend in certain communities because of low values and they don't call it redlining, they just say, we don't lend to communities where homes are valued at this amount and so when people are shut out of that valuation market during the years that they're earning income and they're able to repay and then they become seniors, their homes are declining and they've been unable to stop the decline when they could and now they're stuck with even bigger bills 'cause the preventive maintenance wasn't done.

- Yeah, so Donna, I wanna talk a little more about that historic loss, and I talk about it as a wealth loss, a black wealth loss that took place in the city during my lifetime.

I'm born 1970 in a house that was in a neighborhood that had become majority African American just a few years before I was born.

The people who brought those houses should have been in a position to pass on that generational wealth, to their kids, me, to my children.

Instead, if you look at the neighborhood where I was born over on Tuxedo, near near Liver Noy and Grand River, all of the value in that neighborhood's gone.

I mean all of it, literally, and houses sold for long periods of time for $500 or less.

That loss of wealth is one of the things that tells us about this inability to keep houses up, whether you had the house or not, and a lot of people lost those houses in that neighborhood.

You lost the wealth that you should have gotten from property investment.

- Right, and now let's say you live on a block and people have their homes taken for tax foreclosure, for any reason, whether it's over assessment, they just couldn't pay, they didn't pay, whatever the reason is, maybe some people didn't qualify for tax exemptions and they didn't get them, but you lose your home and a couple people lose their homes on their block, they lose their wealth, but you lose your wealth too because your home value has plummeted as a result of things completely outside your control and so now you still have to fix this house.

It feels as though we know there was structural institutionalized governmental racism in housing and that that has been perpetuated through private practices and to some extent sanctioned by the government even today because you still, again, have these appraisal rules that are somewhat unfair to many neighborhoods and Andre Perry speaks about that.

Some of us talk about the black tax.

So as we look at this situation and we understand there's a systemic problem, we need systemic solutions and not these one off solutions where we're going to help a few people but leave other people in a bad situation and I think there is an argument just based on what Malachi was saying about the data that will suggest that improving home values by fixing up homes and creating and fixing this problem would actually increase the value of the city of Detroit, improve its bond rating over time, improve the kinds of things that mayors and city councils and other forms of government should care about.

Because ultimately, if the values are improved and people are living in better housing, that can result in improved taxation down the road.

But I feel like we have shortsighted solutions around housing and we're unwilling to take the same kind of risk in helping people who live in homes as we are for corporations that say we're gonna do things to increase the workforce and we're willing to really go above and beyond to say, let's figure that out and I think we need to really turn and say who are the real building blocks of communities?

And it's gonna be residents.

Residents who live in houses.

- Yeah, yeah.

So Heather, the city's program to help people repair their homes is one of the steps that's being taken.

Donna was talking of course about more systemic answers, but let's learn a little more about what the city's doing and why you think it'll make a difference.

- Absolutely.

So I think, I love what you just said, Donna, about like, there have been systemic problems and we need to have systemic solutions and I think that Renew Detroit, we're hoping that to be the first step of many to start kind of fighting back and making an impact on the great need that we know is there.

So what we did last year was when we received the American Rescue Plan funds, we did a series of community engagement, over 60 meetings in less than 30 days that really said what we all already knew to be true, home repair is like that number one thing that everybody wants.

We know it's a huge need and so the, we are the only single appropriation that came out of the $826 million.

So many of these, it gets put into buckets.

I think we put it into about 15 buckets and there's one that's solely put aside for home repairs.

So that was $30 million that we put aside and 30 million to the point of that total number.

Definitely it's much smaller.

If people are who are researching this are saying it's getting into the billions, we know that 30 is not the same.

But what it is, is that there's also a lot that we have to coordinate when we're doing these repairs.

So there's contractor capacity, there's how do we actually get people in, and then also how do I ensure that I get that money into contracts and actually spend it so I'm not losing it on the back end.

And so 30 million was that first step.

We knew we wanted to create a program that we could scale.

And so it really is set up very differently, whereas many of these other programs are emergency or kind of first come, first served.

So like if you're number one on the list, you get served first, obviously the second person and on the way down, this is very different.

We were saying let's put out a huge application, let's take thousands of people in and then let's pick 1,000.

Like let's actually, like let's start creating a pipeline and it's like, the way that I've been describing it is, can we set up an assembly line for home repair so that we can start doing it in a much faster way, in a much higher volume?

What that doesn't mean though, and I think this is the toughest part that we're working through, is if I'm creating an assembly line, like I'm one piece in that cog and so we know that without many other things, both after me and before me, no one's gonna get to that complete home situation when you're thinking about these systemic issues that our community has been facing.

So we know that we wanted to focus on roofs because we felt it would be the largest impact.

It's one of the most expensive repairs and then we're really trying to figure out how do I piece together the programs and the right resources, so that if you need much more than a roof, which most of the homes that we go to do need more, how do we start lining them up for success so that we can put them on that path and that's really what we're trying to do with Renew Detroit.

- Yeah.

- Yeah and it would be great if what Renew Detroit hopefully will come together with community development organizations like mine that are also in neighborhoods working to renew houses because I think when we really work together and we say, let's figure out who are all of the actors in this space so that we can supplement the resources and that kind of thing, it'll be a better picture for all of us.

- Malachi, I do wanna get a sense from you of what you're hearing from people who are participating and whether they're optimistic about this changing not just their homes, but their neighborhoods.

- Yeah, I would say for the folks who have been able to secure a new roof through this, through the city's program, it's been transformative and really powerful for them.

So I don't want to disparage the city's efforts there.

I think for folks who are getting these programs, like it is, it is making a big impact.

But what I'm hearing from folks is, is just a lot of kind of confusion and frustration about how some of these programs are targeted for the Renew Detroit program.

It's going toward folks who are exclusively seniors, disabled or low income who apply for property tax exemption and obviously like those are probably folks that have the highest need.

So I think it makes sense from a process standpoint, but we're just talking about like the level of scale that this problem we're dealing with here, and I would be interested to see in the future if this kind of builds a foundation to kind of scale up that effort to make more people eligible.

Every time we do a story about these different programs, phase two for the program opened in October and we'll include window replacements in addition to roofs.

There's so much interest from people that just unfortunately aren't able to be eligible for it.

Another thing I wanna bring up too is that this is, in addition to being an economic issue, it's a public health issue in some cases.

When you have a hole in your roof and water's getting in, snow is getting in, cold temperatures are coming in through your house, animals and a lot of cases, are being able to access your home because of issues with your roof or your window, that creates in some cases pretty serious health risks for vulnerable people.

So that's kind of another layer of how this is a really intertwined problem with a lot of other issues in the city.

Another interesting thing that I hadn't really even thought about until we kind of hit the streets and started talking with people too is just, we hear all the time about the lack of contractors in the city.

It comes to to demolitions and constructions and really anything but we also heard that a lot of local handymen simply aren't able to do this work because of how prices for materials have gone up.

So even if perhaps you weren't gonna go hire a licensed contractor, there's people in a lot of neighborhoods that do that work for you and unfortunately they just haven't been able to afford it.

I've also run into some folks who said that they've been scammed by some local contractors.

Maybe they were able to raise a couple of grand to do something, but somebody ran away with their money.

People had their stimulus checks stolen during the pandemic.

So there's just, there's a lot of unfortunate kind of implications when it comes to actually connecting people to resources.

- I think economic inclusion is also super important and how do we include handyman and locally talented folks in job opportunities and contracting opportunities and help overcome those barriers through licensing programs and through some type of bonding, sharing, whatever, we can do, then we know that we're working with small businesses to get that done.

I also wanna say a million dollars, a billion dollars, is really large in the context from repair, but not so much in demolition.

Imagine a mayor saying, I'm going to repair every broken house in this city and running on that promise.

We say we're going to demolish every vacant structure in this city but the thing about that is that you can never do that because we have structures that are becoming newly vacant every day because of untended home repair problems.

So it's like we.

- On tax foreclosure, yeah.

- And for the tax foreclosures, when we look at the them, we're not really reducing the inventory of vacant structures at the pace that we should be, considering the fact that we are on pace to spend at least $800 million on home repairs in the past five years and so imagine saying we're going to commit this kind of funding.

I think that when we have political people who imagine a world where people don't have to live in this type of housing, where they are not responsible for the conditions of their neighborhoods and their inability to access capital and where we imagine the, a world where there's historic stuff.

We've talked about reparations, we're not even, reparations looks sometimes like we're gonna help people live in homes with good repair given all of the systemic reasons why they don't have them.

So I think that those are all important things to keep in mind and also the fact that people who are well housed are more likely to go to work, go to school, engage in job training, they're less likely to break the law.

Housing impacts every element of life.

- It plays a role in everything.

Heather, I wanna give you a chance to respond to some of that and talk about how much the city is thinking about some of these bigger ideas, some of these bigger programs, connecting this kind of policy to the other problems that we have to solve them in a systemic way.

- Definitely.

So I think everything that Malachi and Donna's saying, I think we are, I'd say obsessive about.

Like we're thinking about it every day and when the mayor approached me and asked me to help come up with this Renew Detroit program, the immediate next step was yes, this is part of what we're assigning to you, but like you have to understand the greater ecosystem of what's happening.

So like I started a very long journey that I will continue to be on for what feels like the rest of my career of learning how do all of these different things work together so that we can, so that we can connect with CDOs, so that we can make sure like how are we serving each gap that exists and I think part of it too, I mean I agree like there clearly have been systemic decisions long before any of us were here that have really led to the problem that we're seeing and so like one of the things that we did when we did the program design for Renew, most home repair programs require putting a lien on the property for a certain amount of time.

Most of them have a dollar limit and although there are very, very good reasons for that and that doesn't necessarily need to change for those programs, we actually went out of our way to do all the research on the American Rescue Plan funds and make sure that we could take those out.

Because if we are assisting seniors and God forbid they do pass shortly after this work happens, we're hoping that they're in a situation one, where that can pass on to somebody else in their family and then we're actually starting to get to the point where, to Donna's point, are we finally starting to make an impact so that more people are stabilized and we're not adding to that vacant home count 'cause when we really were sitting down and saying like, how do we create that home repair program that's actually going to start making an impact?

It's can we get ahead of the need and that's gonna take years, but can we actually stabilize people in their homes?

So that's actually a question we ask on our application, like, do you feel stable in your home?

And then we're gonna continue to ask them that in different ways throughout the entire process to see like, do they feel more capable of staying in their home because of this resource that they got?

So that's something that we're really tuned into in, and thinking about as well.

- That's gonna do it for this week's show, which is produced in partnership with Bridge Detroit.

You can find out more about these guests at AmericanBlackjournal.org and as always connect with us on Facebook and Twitter anytime you want.

Take care and we'll see you next time - [Narrator] From Delta faucets to Behr Paint.

Masco Corporation is proud to deliver products that enhance the way consumers all over the world experience and enjoy their living spaces.

Masco serving Michigan communities since 1929.

Support also provided by the Cynthia & Edsel Ford Fund for Journalism at Detroit Public TV.

- [Narrator] The DTE Foundation proudly supports 50 years of American Black Journal in covering African American history, culture and politics.

The DTE Foundation and American Black Journal partners in presenting African American perspectives about our communities and in our world.

- [Narrator] Also brought to you by Nissan Foundation and viewers like you.

Thank you.

(piano playing)