Detroit still needs more affordable housing, and it needs a plan to get there. Those are the conclusions of each of two recently released reports analyzing Detroit’s homeless support systems and affordable housing landscape.
The city itself commissioned one of the reports, hiring a consulting firm to suggest a five-year strategic plan to “prevent and end homelessness” in Detroit with the Homeless Action Network of Detroit and the Detroit Continuum of Care, a collection of stakeholders in Detroit, Hamtramck and Highland Park.
The city deserves credit for making the report public because its findings are not always flattering.
First the good news: The number of unhoused people in Detroit has potentially declined over 50% between 2014 and 2022. The percentage of once-unhoused people who find permanent housing has also improved.
Fewer people may have experienced homelessness, but the quality of care and help for people who were experiencing it declined. People who went unhoused complained of abysmal conditions in shelters, long wait times to get housing referrals, rude treatment from staff and few wraparound services. People remained unhoused twice as long for a median of 69 days.
A lack of coordination among partners might be partly to blame. “Roles (in the homelessness system) were not clear, sometimes to the entities themselves, but also to other partners,” the report’s authors write. This lack of clarity made it hard to hold organizations accountable and advance a shared vision.
A report is just a report, but this one might make a difference in part because one of the problems the authors called out was a lack of strategy in tackling homelessness. The city let federal money dictate what services they offered and didn’t put enough skin in the game themselves. Less than 5% of public funding for programs in the system come from city or state revenue sources, the report says.
Julie Schneider, director of the city’s Housing & Revitalization Department, said they’ve spent much of the last three years prioritizing their response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, the city and its partners are ready to get behind a collective strategy.
“Our focus is changing to a post-pandemic world,” Schneider said. “And that’s why we’re really trying to develop this strategy now.”
Once the crisis of homelessness is over, Detroiters still struggle to find housing they can afford, so says another report on Detroit’s affordable housing ecosystem from the Detroit Justice Center.
Developers have created thousands of new units in the last decade — many of which are technically “affordable” — but a sizable affordable housing gap still remains in Detroit. The report estimates around 83,600 households can’t afford market-rate housing without spending more than 30% of their income on rent. There are 37,000 existing and planned affordable units in the city, leaving a more than 46,000 unit gap.
The report says Detroit doesn’t have a viable long-term plan to bridge this gap either, saying the city is too dependent on subsidies from the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program to build new housing. The subsidies go toward new developments that lock-in low rents typically for 15-30 years. But that’s the problem: They expire. A lot of regulatory requirements also makes those projects expensive to build.
The Detroit Housing Commission could be an important safety net for people facing housing insecurity, but it is falling short in a number of areas.
Schneider agreed that there needs to be more affordable housing in Detroit, and that federal funding priorities have shifted dramatically in the last couple decades and that LIHTC is now the primary financing tool it offers. She added that the city has been thinking more expansively about this issue, offering a downpayment assistance program and even working with the Detroit Justice Center on a framework for community land trusts.
“I really think it’s important that we’re providing affordable housing for a broad range of incomes because people at all income brackets are cost-burdened,” she said. “It’s important to have a diverse set of options. That includes LIHTC, that includes community land trust and that also includes creating homeownership opportunities for people.”
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