Detroiters in need of affordable housing are about to lose a lifeline – By Allie Gross (Detroit Free Press) / April 9 2018
As the car whizzed past the Alberta King Village in Detroit’s Midtown neighborhood, Jessica Williamson leaned forward.
“Wow-w-w-w,” she said, drawing out the second “w.” Pushing a cell phone toward the finger-smudged window, the 9-year-old pretended to snap pictures.
To many, the village would register as nothing more than nondescript city backdrop — 121 uniform brick units clustered around tidy, clipped lawns, a wreath or potted plant peeking out here and there.
But to Williamson, her 5-year-old sister Jammie Moore and their mom, Rashiko Washington, Alberta King represented so much more. The community — the houses — signified stability.
For years the family had been bouncing around the city. With a monthly income of $675 from Supplemental Security Income, daily life was a struggle. The smallest crisis could scuttle any progress toward security.
But on this crisp spring morning, with the help of United Community Housing Coalition, a local nonprofit with a housing placement department, anything seemed possible.
“We got you,” Latrice Watkins, a caseworker with the organization, said as she flicked on her turn signal and approached the parking lot. Mirroring the air of reliability and safety that the homes seemed to represent, Watkins provided additional optimism.
What she didn’t let on was that her own program — the one that was aiming to help Washington and her girls make the transition from chaos to structure — was in the midst of its own troubles.
Starting in August, the nonprofit will lose two key grants funded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. A total of $1.1 million will vanish from its budget by the fall — 40% of the organization’s overall financing, 90% of its housing placement capital.
In a city with a 40% poverty rate, unreliable public transportation, a tangled education system and a limited supply of truly low-income housing options, UCHC’s placement program had been a life raft. It’s helped families stay afloat and navigate a byzantine and deceptively simple system. Connecting people with housing options, standing in as a stable address for paperwork to be mailed, providing legal help in eviction cases, offering budgeting classes, and doing housing inspections to make sure renters were not being taken advantage of, the program helped more than 1,000 Detroiters last year.
And now, with a shaky future on the horizon, this case loomed as one of the last.
In 2015, Washington and her daughters spent time at COTS, a homeless shelter a few blocks north of what is now Little Caesars Arena. They said they left because of rodents. Last spring they were evicted from the Regency Towers, an “affordable housing” complex south of Eastern Market over an outstanding payment of $1,568. In the interim, they continue to ricochet around town. All of their belongings — from underwear to birth certificates — are stuffed into two backpacks and a vinyl Victoria’s Secret tote.
On this day, oblivious to UCHC’s reality, Washington and the girls imagined for a minute what could be a different future.
“There’s even a school across the street,” Washington gasped, pointing to Burton International Academy, one of the city’s better elementary schools, stretched out on the other side of MLK Boulevard. “Praise Jesus.”
Watkins gave a faint and forbearing smile. While it was clear Washington and the girls were on board, the question remained as to whether a truly affordable unit would be available.
Advising the family to stay in the car, Watkins went in first. If the news was bad, she’d shoulder the disappointment and make plans for the next steps.
“We got you,” she repeated before heading in.
Change in priorities
The defunding of UCHC has been a long time coming, according to Ted Phillips, the executive director of the program.
While Phillips acknowledges that it could be tempting to some to want to tie the cuts to President Donald Trump — in February the administration announced its 2019 budget, which included an $8.8-billion cut in HUD funding — Phillips contends that the reality goes farther back.
UCHC’s homeless placement program is considered a “supportive service” — it counsels individuals through the housing system, versus providing actual housing — and for years, HUD has been deprioritizing such services, encouraging local entities who divvy out the funding — known as a Continuum of Care — to rank lower grant applications for support.
In 2015, when HUD grants were distributed through the Detroit-Hamtramck-Highland Park Continuum of Care, more than 20% of the awarded programs were for supportive services. The 2017 grant — the one that is eliminating UCHC’s funding — has no sole supportive services receiving grants.
“I think the limit is in part because there is just this confusion over what supportive services is? There is sort of a bias against counseling —a belief that it doesn’t solve anything,” said Phillips, who is adamant that this isn’t the case.
His organization, he argues, is crucial to untangling the knot of policies and procedures around housing— systems that leave some of the most marginalized seemingly powerless.
“Absent us, and before we did this, basically you would find landlords hanging out in shelters,” Phillips said. “You go back into people’s history and you find that they’re homeless time after time again because they’re so desperate, they grab whatever they can and they rent from someone who doesn’t really own the place. They rent a piece of garbage. So the idea here is that we assure ownership, we assure that the property is in decent condition. We give people the best possible chance to move forward without repeated episodes of homelessness.”
As he speaks about the day-to-day work of his organization, Phillips touches on the bigger issues. The loss of funding for UCHC shines a light on some of the worst rental practices in Detroit, and more specifically, the options that vulnerable, low-income people will find themselves accepting when true affordability seems out of reach.
It’s a reality that leaves incredible hurdles for someone trying to wade through it all.
Nothing available
For about 25 minutes, while Watkins was inside the Alberta King administrative offices, things continued to feel calm. Hopeful really.
But then — just as it had earlier that morning with the Manchester Homes in Highland Park — bad news arrived.
Alberta King would not be able to accommodate the family of three. The “affordable housing” complex, built in 1998 with tax subsidies from the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, was out of range. The only six units open were two-bedrooms running at $710 a month — $35 more than Washington’s total monthly income.
“We have a very long waiting list — six months to a year. There are only so many below $400,” Jessica Sharp, the community manager of the property, said. The cheapest units were $275 a month. There were two of them, and they both had been occupied for years.
“We don’t need to spend money marketing here,” Sharp said.
When asked whether there was an affordable housing crisis in the city, Sharp chose her words carefully.
“I don’t think there is a lack of affordable housing, but a lack of subsidized housing,” she said.
While moving to the head of the waiting list sounded unlikely — much less getting off the waiting list for a unit within budget — Washington filled out a form. She put UCHC as her point of contact.
“Do you think we got the unit?” she asked as the group walked back to the car, not understanding just yet what had happened.
“No, but we got you,” Watkins repeated, once again staying positive for her clients.The process would be impossible without Watkins.
Three options for renters in the city
Today in Detroit low-income individuals have three options when it comes to renting. They all come with problems — namely a lack of actual availability.
A person can live in public housing, which are units run by the Detroit Housing Commission. There are 3,340 units under the organization’s purview. They are at 95% occupancy. The waiting list, which is currently closed, holds 5,760 individuals. When the list is open, it too can come with barriers. In January 2016, one public housing community opened its list. To apply one had to physically visit the building to get an application and then the completed application, which required original birth certificates, social security cards, proof of income and photo IDs for all adults, had to be “hand delivered” between the hours of 11 a.m. and 3 p.m., Monday through Friday.
A second option is a housing voucher — formally known as Section 8 — which gives one a rental subsidy, which can then be used at any unit at which a landlord decides to accept it. The waiting list for the city’s housing voucher program, which has been closed since 2014, has 6,000 people on it. This calendar year, 140 vouchers were issued, according to the Detroit Housing Commission.
Finally, one can look for so-called affordable housing. These are units that are built through the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, which gives developers tax subsidies in exchange for building a certain number of “affordable” housing units that accommodate those living below the Area Median Income (AMI).
What complicates this latter option is the fact that determination of AMI includes suburbs. In the case of Detroit, the suburbs included are Warren and Livonia. The end results are inflated AMIs, which skew out of the favor of actual Detroiters. While the AMI of a single person is $48,000 in the Detroit AMI, the true median income in Detroit is $28,000 — a 71% difference.
“It’s sort of Orwellian we’ve fallen into these terms we just automatically use without thinking what these terms even mean,” Phillips said of the propensity for people to point to “affordable housing” in Detroit, without acknowledging how out of reach it is for so many.
“One would think when you’re talking about affordable housing, you’d be talking about housing that’s affordable to people in the community, the people that need it. But we’ve just lapsed into using that term so that even people in the industry know — well we don’t really mean affordable, that’s just what we call it,” he continued.
In Detroit, nearly 60% of renters are considered “rent burdened,” which means they spend more than 30% of their income on housing. This is 10% higher than the national average.
More illuminating, when it comes to understanding the crisis is the fact that less than a quarter of the rental units in Detroit are affordable to “extremely low-income households,” according to a 2016 study commissioned by Detroit’s Housing and Revitalization Department. The current housing stock, the study wrote, “lacks adequate units affordable to households with an income under 30% Area Median Income.”
Given that the AMI is inflated, it is clear far more individuals are being outpriced.
Last year, the Detroit City Council approved an ordinance that requires housing developers who receive a certain threshold of public subsidies or discounted city-owned land to set aside at least 20% of their units for lower-income residents. The plan was touted as a big win for parity in a city that’s rapidly changing.
Housing advocates, however, say the plan continues to use AMI instead of actual Detroit median income when determining what lower rents should be.
“The AMI prices everyone in Detroit out of the market for affordable housing,” said Peter Hammer, director of the Damon J. Keith Center for Civil Rights at Wayne State University Law School.
“It is interesting, given the size of Detroit’s historic housing stock, that we do have an affordable housing crisis,” he said, pointing to a list of issues that he believes contributed to today’s problems.
At the base is housing quality. Many homes in Detroit weren’t built to last, and a lack of mortgages made it difficult for homeowners to have the capital to later maintain their homes.
Crisis accelerants, according to Hammer, have been mortgage foreclosures, which claimed 65,000 Detroit homes, tax foreclosures, which have claimed nearly 73,000 homes, and the city’s water shut-offs.
These, he said, have forced people out of their homes, instigating a tsunami of destruction.
“The moment a home is foreclosed it becomes vacant, blighted and it further depresses prices in the entire neighborhood,” he said.
Former homeowners already with cash flow problems that likely led to the loss of their homes then become renters in a market with constantly increasing prices.
“As we know, that will just spiral,” Michele Oberholtzer, who works in UCHC’s tax foreclosure department, told the Detroit Free Press in November when discussing a homeowner, Steve Colvin, who lost his home in the Wayne County Auction. “All Steve’s income will be spent on rent. It’s not going to get better. He’s not going to get more income as he ages. He’s not going to come back from this. If this hard time equals him losing his shelter, the rest of his life his income will be spent on that. That’s real.”
Life after the tax auction
As Watkins drove Washington and the girls back to the UCHC headquarters to regroup, the car cruised through Midtown passing the future home of Stanley Thompson, one of Watkins’ other clients.
Rattling off the basics of the case, it was difficult not to miss the connection between the auction and future placement — the weight of poverty in a city like Detroit.
Thompson, a polite and gravely-voiced, 70-year-old man, has lived on-and-off on Avery Street in Detroit’s Woodbridge neighborhood for the past 66 years. The home was purchased in the 1950s by his grandmother Corrine Lowrey. In 1987, three years after Lowery died, the home was transferred to Thompson’s mother, Louise.
When she died, Thompson, a former bus driver with the Detroit Department of Transportation, continued to live in the home. Paperwork, however, was never submitted to transfer the home to him.
In the proceeding years, things got tough.
A few days after Watkins visited Alberta King with Washington and her girls, Stanley Thompson is standing in his mother and grandmother’s once majestic home — intricate woodworking lining each archway. He points to the wear and tear that occurred over the years as the heat was turned off, furnaces gave out and water was shut off. The house, which today would best be described as ramshackle, is in such disarray that Thompson lives in an RV out in the back.
It’s been a slow decline.
In 2013, Thompson filed for bankruptcy. In 2012, letters warning of possible tax foreclosure began to arrive. This continued for three years until 2015, when the home was officially lost.
According to city records, the city purchased the home from from the county in 2015 for $3,905. The city then sold the house to Southwest Housing Solutions, which then sold the property to the Woodbridge Neighborhood Development Corp., a local nonprofit that was created in 2002 to “address the housing and community development needs of Detroit’s Woodbridge neighborhood.” It received a $280,000 mortgage last fall to fix the house up — calling on UCHC to help find Thompson new housing.
Watkins came through and found Thompson the new two-bedroom unit in Midtown. Watkins was unable to find Thompson any “affordable” housing, so the unit is market-rate. Watkins, who makes $1937 a month from SSI and retirement funds, will pay $720 a month in rent — or nearly 40% of his monthly income. He will straddle the line between being “rent burdened” and what the federal government calls “extremely rent burdened” — which is when one spends 50% of their income on rent.
“What are these Atlanta prices?” he asked, on a chilly afternoon as he sifted through bookcases and boxes in the living room trying to decide what to keep and what to discard.
“I’m going to do like what I’ve been doing,” he said when asked if he was nervous about having to pay rent. “I wouldn’t have made it if I didn’t budget.”
While Thompson is grateful for the opportunity to move into a new home, and for the help of UCHC in finding housing, there is also sadness. The house had been passed down from generation to generation. Home ownership is considered paramount for working and middle-class families to accrue wealth. With the home gone, even in the shape it was in, there, too, was the equity that had accrued.
Still, he tried to take a positive spin.
“I’ll be able to take a bath again, you know, clean up, get myself back feeling good, feeling good about myself instead of just sponging off. Having running water, heat and stuff. For practical reasons like that, yeah, I’m excited,” he said.
What will people needing help do now
Understanding how individuals like Thompson and Washington end up in the positions they are in is just as much a part of the work of UCHC as finding a home.
While the housing placement program had been meant to provide a soft-landing for those dealing with a sudden loss in shelter, caseworkers like Watkins also work to pinpoint areas of stress and find ways to alleviate them.
When Watkins returned to UCHC’s offices that April afternoon, she looked into trying to get Washington onto an unpublicized list that lets homeless individuals get housing vouchers, despite the list being closed.
“If you are homeless, we have what’s known as a homeless preference,” explained Joy Flood, director of the Assisted Housing Department with the Detroit Housing Commission. Service providers with agreements with the commission could recommend homeless individuals, who then get a chance of bypassing the waiting list and get a voucher.
It’s a little-known program that Washington likely would not have known about without Watkins.
A few phone calls later, however, it turned out the plan was a no-go. Washington’s paperwork was spotty. The ability to “prove” homelessness was shot.
The conundrum is something that pains Phillips.
“We get so caught up in the nickel and dime-ing that we forget the bigger issue and don’t serve someone because their story doesn’t match up,” he said. Washington and her little girls need shelter and stability.
“Technically right now, she’s like the least prioritized group in the world,” said Phillips. “I say she’s the least prioritized because she probably has some place to be tonight. It’s with a friend; she doesn’t know whether it’s going to be the same place tomorrow night. But that’s the lowest priority possible in the way we look at homelessness now. I don’t think that’s fair. I agree people literally on the street, at risk of freezing, that you got to have some way to deal with them, but you also got to have some way to deal with the folks — the person you saw today.”
On Friday — a little over a week after the Alberta King disappointment — Watkins met with Washington and the girls again. Two units were possibly available — one on the east side and one on the west. They’d meet again Monday to check each out. The landlord, according to Watkins, wouldn’t share the available price points until they came in person.
Luckily, Watkins was at the ready — the funding for the program is still available through August so she could pull out any necessary stops.
“We’re going to find them housing,” she said. “We got them.”
