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.
In 2010, Ms Langford, a mother of four, bought the home for $700, after a previous owner experienced mortgage default.
At the time, she knew she could face a back tax bill on the property for up to $10,000, and began a payment plan on the tax bill, while investing roughly $8,000 dollars in fixing up the house and furnishing it, hoping to leave the property as a gift to her kids one day.
Then the county stepped in.
In the spring of 2012, while Ms Langford was casually browsing the county’s property auction site, she saw her own house for sale.
That’s how she learned Wayne County considered the home foreclosed for being thousands behind on back taxes, seeming to defy a process that was normally supposed to take three years and involve multiple notices. The city said it served Ms Langford in person and left written notices, but she said she never received these warnings or any guidance from the county treasurer that she was facing foreclosure.
According to a Guardian investigation, Ms Langford’s home was assessed and given a resulting tax bill at a value 2,500 per cent greater than the price she bought it for, going against a state constitutional requirement that assessment rates couldn’t rise above 50 per cent of the purchase price of the home.
The constitutional provision suggests her tax bill should’ve been something like $30 for 2010, but was $1,800 instead.
“You can’t harbor stuff,” she told the paper. “You can’t believe it, but when you’re the little person, what can you really do? You don’t have anything to fight with.”
The county insists it followed proper procedure.
The foreclosure is part of a larger trend in the city, whose numerous foreclosed and abandoned homes became an emblem of the financial crisis.
Between 2002 and 2016, roughly 143,000 homes were foreclosed in the county, over a third of the total property stock, most of them for unpaid taxes, according to an analysis from Regrid. During that time, Detroit likely overtaxed between 55 and 85 per cent of properties, according to the ACLU of Michigan, leading 100,000 families to lose their homes, many of them low-income people of colour with home values below $9,000.
All told, the city of Detroit may have over-taxed homeowners by as much as $600m between 2010 and 2016, leading to an estimated 100,000 homeowners, most of them Black, losing their properties, according to the Detroit Metro Times.
Meanwhile, Wayne County made $421m in interest and fees on back taxes during the financial crisis, Bridge Michigan reports.
According to Ms Moore, the writer, who is white, she only learned Ms Langford had a title on the house when she eventually sought to move out and sell the home, entering into a legal battle to quiet the title to the property, not knowing that the now-defunct writer programme bought it from the county amid such turmoil.
“This isn’t a story about gentrification – at least, not how we usually think about it,” she wrote in The Guardian. “It’s a story of a Black woman losing her home to municipal greed, and a white woman benefitting from her loss. It’s a story about the racial wealth gap, and how the median white American household accrues almost eight times the wealth of most Black American households.”
City Council president Mary Sheffield is pushing the mayor and others for a full reparations programme for people kicked out of their homes.
“We are working diligently and very hard to find solutions,” she told the Metro Times this summer. “We don’t just want to put a Band-Aid on it and not get to the core of what happened.”
Housing advocates in Detroit have suggested giving displaced people tax credits, cash compensation, home repair grants, public housing vouchers, employment opportunities, or property itself from the city’s holdings.
The phenomenon in Detroit is part of a larger legacy of Black people getting unequal access to the US housing market, the major form of financial uplift and wealth creation for most families in the country.
Federal officials intentionally kept Black homeowners and neighbourhoods out of midcentury loan programmes to encourage home ownership in a process called red-lining, while Jim Crow segregation and vigilante violence targeted Black families and further hampered equal housing.
