The lost homes of Detroit

Reveal

The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX

News

4.7 • 8K Ratings

🗓️ 11 January 2020

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Entire blocks of Detroit look abandoned because people fell behind on property taxes and lost their homes. But hundreds of millions of dollars of that tax debt never should have been billed in the first place.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	From the Center for Investigative Reporting in PRX, this is Reveal.
0:08.4	I'm Al Edson.
0:11.5	Every summer, there's a mad scramble at the Wayne County Treasurer's office in downtown Detroit.
0:16.6	A couple hundred people are waiting in this giant ballroom.
0:29.1	Like Detroit, the ground is mostly African-American.
0:32.5	They've come here because they have unpaid property tax bills that are at least three years old,
0:36.9	which means the county can foreclose on their properties and sell them at an auction.
0:41.1	We are going to foreclose the property tomorrow.
0:43.9	So if you make a payment at the Kia's, you'll probably will not be foreclosed.
0:47.5	That'll be false to be foreclosed.
0:49.6	This is the last day to avoid all that.
0:52.4	People can pay what they owe in full, or they can get on a payment plan that breaks their
0:56.4	debt into monthly payments.
0:58.4	Latifa Pace owes more than $10,000 in back taxes.
1:02.0	So they're asking for a $750 today.
1:04.4	My payment plan a month would just be like $2,000.
1:09.4	So it saves my home for today by being the debt line by $4,000,000 to today.
1:13.4	So I'm pretty much safe.
1:16.2	Safe by paying $750 upfront and $211 a month for five years.
1:25.2	It's hard to imagine if you're not from Detroit.
1:27.8	But here, tax foreclosure is on everybody's mind.
1:31.5	A third of the properties in the city have been tax foreclosed since 2008.
	...

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