Detroit’s campaign to bring the nearly 40,000 rental properties into compliance with the city housing code by 2020 defies logic. These codes were intended to prevent neighborhood deterioration. This blitz, however, will accelerate abandonment and decimate both low-income and middle-class communities. Rental property owners will have six months to register their units, bring them up […]
It was the late Eighties, and the neighborhood just to the south of where John George lives in Old Redford was feeling the pinch of the crack epidemic. “We didn’t want to be part of an expanding problem but part of a solution,” he says. It came a little too close to home – literally […]
by Marge Sorge and M. Lapham Inside the Michigan State Housing Development Authority (MSHDA) headquarters in Lansing there’s a room with four 8-foot walls filled from floor to ceiling with thank you notes and family pictures from people the agency has helped avoid foreclosure or pay outstanding property taxes or condo fees. “It is a […]