Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan promoted a Poverty Solutions study which shows that Detroit homeowners’ home wealth rose by $700M in 2023. At a well-attended news conference in Detroit, Duggan highlighted that Detroit homeowner occupants gained nearly a 10% increase in one year, and Black homeowners see 75% of total gain, amassing $3.2B in added home wealth since 2014, nearly doubling in value.
“This is about the people who stayed in Detroit and have been able to accumulate wealth. Those who stayed are probably grateful that they did,” he said. “Isn’t this the city we are trying to build?”
The Ford School’s Jeff Morenoff led the study. He explained the methods his team had used to define wealth, and noted that based on that criteria, it showed that the neighborhoods which once had the lowest property values have gained the most since 2014.
“We also turned our attention to equity. And our study shows that gains were made across racial and ethnic groups, across areas of varying poverty, and across neighborhoods throughout the city,” he told the news conference. “It’s a great story.”
The study showed that the 2023 growth is on top of the $3.9B in home wealth that was revealed last year by a previous Poverty Solutions report that spanned the nine years between 2014-2022. Now looking at the entire decade of 2014-2023, the updated study, “The Growth of Housing Wealth in Detroit and its Neighborhoods: 2014-2023,” shows that Detroit homeowner occupants continue to see large annual gains in home value with no signs of slowing.
Anticipating the news conference, Duggan stated, “In my first State of the City Address in 2014, I asked Detroiters thinking about moving out to give us some time to show we could work together to turn our city around.”
Demographer and Founder of Data Driven Detroit, Kurt Metzger co-authored the report, along with Christina Shaw, Financial Analyst with the City of Detroit. The updated study incorporates data on warranty deed sales from the Wayne County Register of Deeds from 2014 to 2023.
Both reports can be found on the UM Poverty Solutions website. Key takeaways from this year’s report include:
- The estimated net value of owner-occupied homes in Detroit increased from $4.2 billion in 2014 to $8.8 billion in 2023, a $4.7 billion or 112% increase in housing-related wealth over the past 10 years. This figure exceeds the 94% growth in housing-related wealth between 2014 and 2022 that we estimated in our previous report.
- Black homeowners continued to have the largest share of net housing wealth in the city, representing 75% of all housing wealth generated in 2023. The net housing value of Black homeowners grew from $3.4 billion in 2014 to $6.6 billion in 2023, a $3.2 billion or 94% increase in net housing wealth.
- The increase in home sale values was largest in neighborhoods that had the lowest property values in 2014. In these neighborhoods, home values increased by an average of 276%, a growth rate that was 2.75 times larger than that of neighborhoods with the highest property values in 2014.
- Median home values grew the most in neighborhoods with the highest poverty rates in 2014, where they increased by 264%, a growth rate that was more than 2.5 times higher than that of neighborhoods with the lowest poverty rates .
The Mayor attributed the neighborhood rebound to committed residents who fought for their communities and did the hard work to keep them stable as the city worked to recover. The study also cited the dramatic reduction in tax foreclosures in Detroit as a key factor in determining the net wealth gain. Since 2016, the City and a coalition of partners has helped to reduce tax foreclosures by 96%, also helping thousands more longtime Detroiters in possession of their homes.
