This is the second part of an ongoing series about racial and economic disparities in Detroit.
Nine days before Christmas last year, dozens of seniors gathered in the lobby of the Himelhoch Apartments in downtown Detroit for a meeting with the building’s management.
For decades, the seven-story building has housed seniors who receive rental assistance from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
One of the few remaining senior buildings in downtown, it’s a coveted spot because the apartments are in a relatively safe area that’s close to public transportation and other resources.
So when management told the seniors in December that many of them would be displaced because half of the building was being converted into market-rate housing, they were shocked and scared. Some of them use walkers or wheelchairs and have become accustomed to life downtown.
Though they were given the option of moving to another building, it’s under construction about a mile away in a more isolated area in Brush Park.
For Steve Handschu, a visually impaired 76-year-old sculptor, the prospect of moving away from downtown is frightening. He’s lived in the building since August 2016, and with the help of his cane, he’s learned to navigate the area. Living in Brush Park would not be easy.
“They are subjecting us to a more dangerous location, and it’s farther away from mass transit,” Handschu tells Metro Times. “It’s a more deserted area, and it does not seem reasonable to us to suggest this is a safe place for seniors to be walking at any time, let alone in the dark. We’re old folks, but we’re not dead yet. We have lives, and we go places. This provides an incredibly potential safety issue to us.”
Esther Valdez, 74, moved from a Detroit neighborhood to the Himelhoch Apartments in October 2021 because of its proximity to public transit.
“I am safe here,” Valdez says. “I can actually take a walk and not feel afraid. Here, I have a quality of life that I wasn’t able to get in the neighborhood because I’m a widow.”
After seniors complained to the Detroit City Council, the building’s owner pledged to work with residents to get tenant protection vouchers to allow them to stay in the building. But the vouchers must first get approved by HUD, leaving their living situation in limbo.
The fear of displacement is omnipresent in and around downtown Detroit. As real estate prices soar and new developments reshape the landscape, Detroiters find themselves struggling to maintain their homes and communities.
Over the past decade, the cost to live in many parts of Detroit has sharply increased, beginning in downtown and Midtown and spreading to Lafayette Park, the North End, Corktown, Southwest Detroit, Brush Park, and the area surrounding Eastern Market.
Relentless rent hikes are pushing out residents from areas that are considered safe and forcing them to leave the city or find apartments in less desirable and often neglected parts of Detroit. Many of those apartments aren’t registered with the city and have a history of being run by slumlords, housing activists say.
At the Himelhoch, new investments in the building have become a nightmare. With plans to convert the first floor into commercial space, the building’s owner, American Community Developers, Inc., hired crews to destroy the recreation and community room where residents socialized and used a computer to log onto the internet. The company kicked out the podiatrist who had an office on the first floor and treated seniors, Handschu says. The lobby, where seniors got haircuts, grocery deliveries, and waited for public transportation, became unusable, and their main entrance door along Washington Boulevard has been boarded up. As a result, they’ve been using a side door in an alley that “smells like a garbage dump,” Handschu says.
Despite all the work, the commercial space was never completed.
“It is now a big, raw, unfinished space,” Handschu says. “Now when people go by the building, they think it’s abandoned because of the state of the first floor, which is a complete wreck.”
“It feels like our community planning process is being driven by real estate speculation, as opposed to thoughtful, long-term planning for stabilization.”
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Without any warning, seniors were forced to vacate their apartments for renovations, Handschu says.
“They would come in at 8 a.m. and say you had to leave the building with your possessions,” Handschu says. “One woman wound up in the hospital because she got put out of her apartment and wound up wandering around in the rain. She got hospitalized with pneumonia. Stress is a killer for old people. This is a very stressful situation.”
Despite problems with the building, many seniors want to stay because of its location.
The Himelhoch is one of the last downtown housing options catering to low-income seniors who depend on Section 8, a form of federal aid, to help cover their monthly rental expenses.
As gentrification continues to sweep through Detroit’s most sought-after locations, seniors are getting displaced at an unprecedented rate. Developers capitalizing on higher property values and increased demand for downtown living have been buying buildings and converting them into market-rate apartments and condos, leaving seniors struggling to find affordable alternatives.
In 2014, about 120 seniors were forced to move out of another downtown building when a new owner redeveloped what is now dubbed The Albert, a high-end apartment and condo complex that charges some of the highest rates in the city.
Beginning in October 2018, seniors and other low-income residents at the 13-story Park Avenue House were given 30-day eviction notices because of plans to convert the building into an upscale hotel.
Over the next decade, more than 2,000 seniors are at risk of being displaced from their apartments, according to Senior Housing Preservation Detroit, a coalition dedicated to preserving affordable senior living spaces.
The shortage of affordable spaces also means seniors are stuck for years on waiting lists for subsidized housing.
Michelle Fallena, a senior who has lived in the subsidized Louis Kamper building near the Himelhoch for about 20 years, says older residents are losing amenities as downtown continues to cater more to young, wealthy professionals.
“The young people want to come along and crowd us out,” Fallena, who is a member of the United Community Housing Coalition’s board, tells Metro Times. “We have been here for a long time while people have come and gone. We have a lot to offer. We need a decent quality of life. We’ve got to do something. We’re not going to take this anymore. We’ve got to fight.”
Skyrocketing rent
Detroit is one of the poorest cities in the country, but it has one of the fastest growing rental rates in the country, according to several market research reports. Since 2017, the average rent in Detroit increased a staggering 46.2%, from $831 to $1,215, according to rent.com, which tracks apartment rates. During that period, the average annual income in Detroit has risen a modest 11%, from $31,283 to $34,762, according to census estimates.
Some of the steepest increases in rent occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic, at a time when Black Detroiters were disproportionately hit hard by unemployment.
Rising rental costs are especially worrisome in Detroit because about half of the city’s residents are renters, not owners.
HUD recommends that renters spend no more than 30% of their income on rent. For the average Detroit household, that means spending no more than $869 a month, a rate that is exceedingly difficult to find.
In 2021, the most recent year available, 60% of Detroiters spent more than 30% of their income on rent, and 34% spent more than half of their income on rent, according to Detroit Future City, a think tank that develops strategies for a more equitable city. It was the first year in nearly a decade that the number of Detroiters who spent more than 30% of their income on rent has increased.
Over the past decade, dozens of apartment buildings have been renovated or built downtown and in surrounding neighborhoods, attracting predominantly young, white, suburban professionals who can afford to pay high rents that often exceed $1,800 a month. As a result, these areas are losing their diversity and becoming inaccessible to lower-income and even middle-income Detroiters.
Making matters worse, thousands of affordable housing units are at risk of becoming market rate because their low-income tax credits are set to soon expire.
Housing activists say city leaders aren’t doing enough to stem gentrification and preserve affordable housing.
“Real estate speculation is driving gentrification,” says Linda Campbell, director of the Detroit People’s Platform, an activist group that promotes a more equitable city. “The disappointment for us is that the city government has failed majority Black Detroit. It feels like our community planning process is being driven by real estate speculation, as opposed to thoughtful, long-term planning for stabilization.”
Beginning in 2017, Mayor Mike Duggan’s administration began requiring developers who receive tax incentives from the city to carve out 20% of the new housing units for people who live below the area median income (AMI). The trouble is, the AMI is a federal statistic based on the median income of people living in the greater Detroit-Warren-Livonia metropolitan area, where the wealthier suburbs drive up the median income to $48,000 for an individual and $62,800 for two people.
In Detroit, the median income for an entire household is $34,762. The income gap is so large that a majority of the new “affordable housing” units are still too expensive for many Detroiters.
As of 2022, most of the “affordable” housing units are offered to Detroiters making between 60% and 80% of the AMI.
The escalating housing costs are a key factor driving people out of Detroit, housing advocates say.
“We look at the latest trends at what’s happening in Detroit, and we see that Black Detroiters are leaving,” Campbell says. “They are finding that Detroit is no longer a place they want to call home. A model of economic development that is more equitable would lend itself in the long-term to attracting residents back to the city.”
Subsidizing gentrification
Gentrification doesn’t happen in a vacuum. In Detroit, one of the primary reasons residents are getting displaced is tax subsidies to wealthy developers.
Over the past decade, the city of Detroit has handed out hundreds of millions of dollars to billionaires who are building luxury housing complexes, upscale office spaces, and high-end amenities, all of which contribute to the rise of property values and the displacement of lower-income residents.
About a decade ago, the city began shelling out what would eventually balloon to roughly $400 million in tax incentives to the billionaire Ilitch family to build an entertainment district in the Cass Corridor, an area long known for its affordable housing and resources for lower-income residents.
Since then, developers have purchased affordable housing complexes and forced out the tenants, leaving many of the buildings vacant. Two homeless shelters, a soup kitchen, and a small grocer have since moved out of the area, leaving the remaining residents with fewer resources.
The Ilitch-owned Olympia Development built Little Caesars Arena and numerous parking lots, but failed to deliver on its promise to create five new neighborhoods full of retail, residential units, restaurants and nightlife in what was pitched as the “District Detroit.”
Despite the failures and displacement of residents, Detroit City Council approved more than $615 million in tax incentives in March to the Ilitch family and billionaire Stephen Ross to build new residential units, hotel rooms, and office space in District Detroit.
As part of the deal, 20% of the new housing units must be considered “affordable.”
The 8 to 1 vote shocked many residents.
An overwhelming majority of Detroiters are opposed to tax handouts for wealthy developers and believe incentives should instead benefit neighborhood services, affordable housing, libraries, and recreation centers, according to a poll released in May.
The survey of 430 Detroit voters, conducted by the independent pollster American Pulse Research & Polling, found that only 6.1% support prioritizing tax incentives for retail, dining, and entertainment districts. An additional 8.1% of voters support incentives for projects in Midtown and downtown.
The survey also found that 88.8% of Detroiters want tax incentives for youth and senior services, libraries, schools, public transportation, affordable housing, and small businesses.
“When you see a bulk of the tax incentives going to areas that are experiencing the most dramatic Black population loss, the money is going to a process that is not designed to benefit Black Detroiters,” Theo Pride, a community organizer for Detroit People’s Platform, tells Metro Times. “It’s designed to create space and place for white gentrifiers. Areas that were low-income and Black are now affluent white areas where most Detroiters cannot live. It’s unjust. There is a desperate need for a model of economic development that is more equitable.”
Duggan’s administration counters that the city is doing more than ever to attract and retain affordable housing. In January, Duggan announced that the city is offering loans to developers who offer affordable housing units. The first recipients of the loans are the developers behind the subsidized District Detroit project.
Under the plan, developers are eligible for loans on projects that reserve 20% of the new residential units for households making between 50% and 70% of the AMI.
“You have to reach down to the 50% AMI,” Kenyetta Hairston-Bridges, chief operating officer of the Detroit Economic Growth Corporation, tells Metro Times. “Having more of this type of housing will make sure Detroit is a place where everyone can live, regardless of your salary.”
In July 2022, Duggan announced a $203 million affordable housing plan to protect Detroiters from rising rent costs. The plan calls for creating affordable housing by renovating vacant apartment buildings and Detroit Land Bank Authority homes, providing mortgage down-payment assistance, and establishing a Housing Services Division to help people facing displacement.
The plan is partially funded by a portion of the city’s $826 million share of American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds.
“We have a clear vision to create a city, including our downtown, where Detroiters of all income levels can afford to live side by side in the same buildings as people of much higher income,” Duggan said at the time. “This new fund gives us the ability to make downtown living accessible to Detroiters of all income levels.”
In 2018, the city’s Housing and Revitalization Department (HRD) announced it was trying to preserve 10,000 affordable housing units that were set to expire over the next five years. Most were in areas where the demand for housing has been on the rise.
Worried the units would become market rate, city leaders launched a plan to preserve the affordable housing units.
“HRD developed a plan to engage the owners of every one of these developments to work out a deal with them for some subsidy to renovate the buildings to improve the conditions, but to keep the rents affordable in exchange,” Duggan’s spokesman John Roach tells Metro Times. “In every single case so far, the owners have signed on and to date, we have preserved the affordability of nearly 9,000 of these units for anywhere from the next 15 to 40 years. That means the residents living in these buildings are living in a renovated building with newer amenities and can have the peace of mind to know that their rent won’t be jacked up to a price they can no longer afford.”
Bed bugs, mice, and cockroaches
After Paul Warner was priced out of an apartment in Lafayette Park, he moved to a four-story brick building in southwest Detroit for $550 a month in 2017. Before long, Warner realized his apartment was infested with bed bugs, forcing him to throw out his furniture. He still has scars from the bed bug bites.
When mice began slipping into his apartment through a two-foot hole underneath his kitchen sink, Warner says the landlord refused to fix the problem because he was behind on rent. He estimates he’s killed nearly 40 mice in his apartment.
Early one morning in August 2021, Warner was taking his blood pressure medicine when he “heard the most startling sound I have ever heard in my life.”
The ceiling in his bathroom had collapsed.
“It is only by the grace of God that I was not hurt,” Warner wrote in a letter to HUD, the Michigan Department of Civil Rights, and local legal assistance groups. “I was only moments from going into the bathroom to use the toilet. Had I been on the toilet, I would have been injured. Had I been showering, I very well could have been killed.”
Fearing that the rest of the bathroom ceiling would collapse while waiting for the repairs, Warner knew he had to move out for a few days. His landlord offered to pay for his stay at a nearby motel that is known for attracting sex workers and criminals.
Warner declined and headed to his hometown in the Chicago area, but his friends and family were out of town for the Labor Day weekend. Without enough money to spend on a hotel, he ended up sleeping in the lobby of an Amtrak station.
Not long after he returned, Warner’s apartment became infested with roaches.
“If I was seeing six roaches a day, it was a good day,” Warner tells Metro Times.
When a city inspector arrived one day, Warner hoped his problems might soon be solved. He showed the inspector the roaches and mice holes. But the inspector only cited the landlord for failing to have smoke detectors in the apartment, Warner says.
Despite the conditions of the apartment, his landlord continued to increase rent. When Warner finally left in April, rent had reached $675 a month.
Since then, Warner has been looking for an affordable apartment.
“The prices are definitely going up,” Warner says. “It has never been this hard. I used to find that Detroit was the easiest place to find an apartment.”
Warner says landlords are becoming more selective about whom they rent to, and he suspects he was denied an apartment at least twice because he’s Black.
“Racism is creeping in,” Warner says. “Back in the day in 1993, you had racist landlords who would still rent to you because they had no one else to rent to. It’s not that way anymore.”
Evictions on the rise
As rental rates continue to rise in Detroit, an alarming number of families are being forced out of their homes.
So many landlords are seeking evictions that Detroit’s 36th District Court is jammed with a backlog of cases.
In the first four months of this year, judges signed more than 1,800 eviction orders. That’s more than twice the number over the same period last year.
Through April, landlords filed 7,300 evictions, most of which are still wending their way through the court system.
In 2022, there were 23,000 cases.
Evictions are expected to soon exceed pre-pandemic periods, when an average of more than 29,000 eviction cases were filed a year, according to the University of Michigan’s Poverty Solutions.
Emergency protections for tenants — such as an eviction moratorium and rental assistance — have ended, and landlords are responding by forcing out tenants who are having trouble paying rent.
In fact, about 15% of landlords who received federal emergency rental assistance for single-family properties in Detroit moved to evict tenants within six months of receiving the funds, according to UM researchers.
“In Detroit and cities like it, COVID-19 eviction response measures disrupted a status quo of unjust and unmitigated mass displacement,” Alexa Eisenberg, a postdoctoral research fellow at UM’s Poverty Solutions, says. “The policy changes early in the pandemic showed us evictions are preventable but inevitable within a system that prioritizes landlords’ investment interests over tenants’ health and human right to shelter.”
People who are evicted lose more than their homes. In an increasingly competitive rental market, landlords have more flexibility to be selective and are frequently conducting thorough background checks on potential tenants, which includes screening for past evictions, says Robert Day, an attorney with Detroit Eviction Defense.
Even if the eviction case gets thrown out, it still appears on a tenant’s record.
“It’s happening to so many people,” Day tells Metro Times. “People are desperate. There are single parents with kids who are getting iced out of decent places because they have an eviction on their record, so they’re forced to deal with slumlords” who don’t conduct background checks.
“It’s another way to displace people from the better apartment buildings and more popular neighborhoods,” Day adds.
“Everybody here in this room knows somebody who has moved out of this city for whatever reason. We’re continuing to lose population.”
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Ashley Winston knows this all too well. In late 2021, she and her then-boyfriend withheld rent from their landlord because he wasn’t fixing a leaking ceiling and plumbing problems at their Midtown apartment.
Despite the conditions, their landlord kept raising rent while ignoring their pleas to make repairs.
Instead of fixing the problems, their landlord threatened to evict them and said they’d have a hard time finding a new apartment with an eviction on their record.
“We decided to pay him [what was owed] and moved out when the lease was up,” Winston says. “I didn’t want an eviction against me. It’s hard enough finding a decent place to live in Detroit.”
But Winston’s search for a new apartment in early 2022 was more difficult than she had imagined. She and her boyfriend had broken up, and she couldn’t afford more than $800 a month.
“I couldn’t find anything close to downtown,” she says. “I looked for a couple months but I gave up.”
When Winston first moved to Midtown in 2012, she says she would have had no problem finding a place for $800 a month. She also noticed a significant racial shift.
“Half of the building was Black when I moved there” in 2018, she says. “When I left, me and my boyfriend were the only Black people there.”
Winston now lives in Eastpointe, where she pays $750 a month for a larger apartment than she was renting in Detroit. But she misses the city.
“Maybe someday I’ll be able to afford it,” she says. “I’ll have to experience it on the weekends when I can get down there.”
City council admits mistakes
Some city leaders are just beginning to acknowledge the severity of gentrification and the affordable housing crisis. After years of essentially rubber-stamping development deals that have driven up the costs of housing in the greater downtown area, city council members said they’ve finally had enough at a public meeting on July 11.
In front of them was a developer’s $14.8 million proposal to convert a large, abandoned Catholic church and school into dozens of tiny apartments in the LaSalle Gardens neighborhood. The company, St. Agnes Lofts, LLC, was also asking for tax incentives.
Under the plan, most of the apartments at the St. Agnes Catholic Church campus would average a little more than 300 square feet, according to council members.
It clearly was targeting a young demographic and did nothing to help longtime Detroiters, especially families, find practical housing, council members said.
Pledging to “push back” on the proposal “until we can start identifying how to increase affordable, accessible housing,” Council President Pro Tem James Tate said city leaders need to address “this housing crisis.”
“Until we do that, there’s going to be a lot of resistance, at least from me,” Tate said.
Other council members agreed and took responsibility for not acting sooner.
“There is certainly a concerted effort to push families out of this city, and we want to know why we’re losing population,” Councilwoman Angela Whitfield Calloway said. “Everybody here in this room knows somebody who has moved out of this city for whatever reason. We’re continuing to lose population. But we’re doing it. This honorable body, we continue to vote for these small units. We say we’re not going to, but we do.”
Tate also conceded that city leaders are to blame.
“We’re transforming the landscape of the city, and we’re contributing to it, and I don’t want to do that,” Tate said.
It’s not clear why the council is just now willing to take action. Much of the damage has been done, and more than a dozen large higher-end developments that have already been approved are in the process of being built.
As for Duggan, his administration is increasingly working with developers to build affordable housing. Of the 2,000 newly built units or ones still under construction, a majority of them are reserved for people at or below 60% AMI, Roach says.
As part of Duggan’s $203 million housing plan, the city is taking a new approach by having the Detroit Housing Commission purchase and redevelop vacant apartment buildings in neighborhoods. The city also has a new Housing Services division with a hotline staffed by workers to help residents find affordable housing.
Duggan’s administration is also focused on turning Detroiters into first-time homeowners. The mayor believes “the best protection against displacement is owning your own home,” Roach says.
Duggan recently announced a $6 million down payment assistance program that is helping turn renters into first-time homeowners. The program, funded by ARPA, is expected to make homeowners out of 400 Dertoiters.
“This all said, we fully realize that rents outside of our control are rising as our neighborhood market conditions rise,” Roach says. “And the administration is helping to drive investment into neighborhoods that historically have seen only disinvestment. This means improved parks, blight clearance through demo and rehabbing of Detroit Land Bank homes, new streetscapes with new shops and dining options.”
As the city stabilizes neighborhoods and attracts new development there, Duggan’s administration said it’s aware of the potential for rent increases in those areas as well.
“That’s why we also are very intentional about creating and preserving affordable housing in these neighborhoods, so even if a person can’t afford the rent at the same home or apartment building, there will be other options in that neighborhood,” Roach says.
Roach pointed to a $30 million grant from the Housing and Urban Development’s Choice Neighborhoods project, which aims to boost public and private investments in struggling neighborhoods. The grant will help create more than 500 units of affordable housing in Corktown “so residents of that neighborhood will have options,” Roach says.
Meanwhile, in a coffee shop in the Cass Corridor, Derrick Brown pondered what’s next for his life. A graphic designer who works at the whims of his clients, Brown doesn’t make enough consistent income to stay in his $1,300-a-month apartment in Midtown.
But he winces at the thought of returning to his family’s home on the west side. He doesn’t own a car and dreads the idea of depending on the city’s notoriously unreliable public transportation.
Growing up in Detroit, Brown always wanted to live near downtown “where all the good shit is.”
“It sucks because I feel like my kind is not wanted here,” Brown says. “Like, what is the city doing for those of us who’ve lived here our whole lives? Don’t we deserve anything nice?”
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