Detroit Today: Access issues persist despite Detroit’s stabilizing housing market
Black people in Southeast Michigan still must overcome large obstacles to achieve home ownership in the City of Detroit and the Metro area, according to Detroit Future City CEO Anika Goss.
Home sales have gone up in Detroit, as found in recently published Detroit Future City reports. Along with that, demand for home ownership from African Americans in the region has increased significantly.
While Detroit still has some of the highest rates of Black homeownership around the country, many Black Detroiters are trying to recover the losses they netted from the 2008 financial crisis. They are often denied mortgages despite being able to afford a home.
Listen: Why Detroit’s housing market is stabilizing — and why many still can’t access it.
Guests
Anika Goss is the CEO of Detroit Future City, a local think tank, which recently published two reports on home sales and home ownership in Detroit and the Metro region. She says although more homes are being bought in the City of Detroit, these sales aren’t always made available to Black residents already living in the city.
“We’re not seeing the mortgages approved at a much higher level,” says Goss. “The housing stock for the neighborhoods that we’re seeing is going up, but we’re not seeing Black homebuyers in those neighborhoods.”
Chase Cantrell is the founder and executive director of the housing assistance nonprofit Building Community Value. He says while the market has been stabilizing, there are too many homes that are unaffordable because they require a lot of money in repairs — creating a lack of move-in-ready homes.
“We have a supply problem in the City of Detroit,” says Cantrell.
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