When Anne Elizabeth Moore was given a free house in 2016 as part of a writer’s residency programme in Detroit, it felt too good to be true.
However, as she learned more about how the property arrived in her life, it came to feel more like a racist true crime story: the home had been sold out from under a 47-year-old woman named Tomeka Langford against her will, part of a trend in Wayne County of municipal authorities aggressively seizing homes from Black Detroiters and selling them at foreclosure auctions during the height of the financial crisis.
