Detroit is running out of abandoned homes.
Over the past decade, thousands of abandoned homes have been salvaged and rehabilitated, providing Detroiters access to affordable housing options. While the declining number of abandoned homes may sound like good news — and it mostly is — it presents an unfamiliar problem: there’s simply not enough housing. To meet current and future housing needs, Detroit must create thousands of new units each year. We can no longer rely on rehabilitation alone to expand the city’s housing supply and support housing affordability.
As Detroiters start voting (absentee ballots went out on Sept. 25, and early in-person voting begins Oct. 25), they will select the leadership that will guide our city through its next chapter — and Detroit’s next mayor will face a new and pressing challenge. Detroit’s housing supply will need to be built on the 143,555 publicly and privately owned vacant lots scattered across the city. But our new mayor will have yet another opportunity, the chance for Detroit to once again turn a great challenge into a greater asset.
Our affordable housing supply must keep pace with demand
Over the past decade, Detroit has made remarkable investments in housing development and demolition. Not long ago, the land bank had more than 20,000 homes in its sales queue, but today 1,438 remain. Through a mix of aggressive rehabilitation, home sales and strategic demolitions, Detroiters have turned more than 12,000 derelict properties into new housing units, with nearly 6,000 more currently in progress. That effort — in part led by the Detroit Land Bank Authority — has helped stabilize neighborhoods, improve safety and fuel the creation of billions of dollars in wealth for homeowners across the city.
A 2024 University of Michigan report found that by the end of 2023, Detroit homeowners had accumulated nearly $4 billion in wealth through this appreciation. Subsequent Land Bank analysis found that its work has had an aggregate market impact that totals nearly 25% of this figure. Through these efforts, Detroit has drawn a rare balance: The city led the nation in home value appreciation with a nearly four-fold increase between 2014 and 2024, while remaining the most affordable city in the country, with a price-to-income ratio of 2.4 in 2024 — meaning the median household would need 2 1/2 years’ worth of income to purchase the median home. Los Angeles, for example, has a price-to-income ratio of 11.5.
But this success has brought us to an inflection point. The backlog of salvageable abandoned homes is rapidly dwindling. Just as the Duggan administration reimagined the city’s glut of abandoned houses as a platform for neighborhood revitalization, our next mayor and council will need to build upon this momentum and do the same with Detroit’s vacant land. Detroit has more publicly owned vacant lots than any other American city, and how Detroiters manage and capitalize upon it will determine whether Detroit’s housing supply can keep pace with demand.
Detroit is growing, and Detroiters are spreading out
This moment in the city’s housing future requires creativity and intentional planning. A 2023 Detroit Justice Center report found that the city needs tens of thousands of new affordable housing units to accommodate the needs of existing residents. While still working to improve the existing housing stock with a need for new safe and affordable housing, Detroit faces a housing demand triple threat in the years to come.
First, Detroit is leading the state in population growth, creating ever more need for new housing.
Second, Detroiters are spreading out. While the population isn’t shrinking, the average household size has declined from 2.7 people per unit in 2013 to 2.4 people in 2024, a change that has created the need for more than 20,000 new units alone.
Third, things are only likely to escalate in the future. A 2024 Federal Reserve study forecasts a climate-change-driven reversal of the rust belt-to-sunbelt migration. Detroit’s best tool to address this demand and minimize affordability loss and displacement is to increase the supply of safe, accessible and appealing housing.
The Land Bank is uniquely positioned to assist with this urgent need.
A multitude of useful powers
Even after selling more than 30,000 vacant lots, the Land Bank still owns nearly 60,000 parcels of vacant land, representing 41% of all vacant lots, spread across neighborhoods throughout the city.
The Land Bank’s benefits go beyond its inventory, too. It has unique statutory powers specifically designed to allow it to help with the redevelopment of urban land.
For example, unlike cities or counties, the Land Bank has the ability to offer property at discounted prices that make otherwise impossible projects feasible. These discounts and flexible sales programming are of great benefit to residents — more than 80% of Land Bank properties sold to date have gone to Detroiters.
The Land Bank’s unique powers allow it to more easily, quickly, and inexpensively clear title and assemble land. Its properties are automatically eligible for brownfield funding, making it even easier to finance new construction on formerly blighted land. The Land Bank’s collective experience in returning land to productive reuse is unmatched anywhere in the country — the Land Bank has put more property back on the tax rolls than every other land bank in the country — combined.
The Land Bank’s remaining inventory paired with its special powers offers a once-in-a-generation opportunity for Detroiters to shape a more equitable and livable Detroit from the ground up.
After years of research and engagement, including hundreds of conversations with residents and other stakeholders, the Land Bank’s leadership just launched The Next 5, the community’s five-year strategic framework for the organization. The plan acknowledges the many valid concerns residents have raised about land bank’s past work and charts a reform-based agenda guided by the outpouring of feedback gathered during the planning process.
The plan calls for the Land Bank to become more resident-centered, more transparent, more accessible to residents and more focused on leveraging vacant land to create housing, employment and recreational opportunities for Detroiters.
It aligns with and builds upon the Land Bank’s prior experience supporting infill housing, both directly and in partnership with developers, homeowners and community groups. It also informs the Land Bank’s current efforts to pivot to more fully align its operations with its inventory of vacant land to meet the need for more housing in Detroit.
Vacant lots are opportunity
The Land Bank looks forward to working closely with the next administration to grow and streamline pre-development efforts, prioritize land for affordable and accessible housing and deepen partnerships with nonprofit and mission-driven builders.
Detroit needs city policies that make it easier to finance small-scale housing, attract modular and cost-efficient builders and modernize our zoning code to allow more flexible, mixed-income development on Land Bank parcels. The city has made enormous strides in these regards in recent years, but the scope of the challenge ahead requires even more work.
As Detroiters prepare to cast their votes, they should ask candidates for their plans for the city’s housing market.
To best serve Detroiters, elected leaders must come to see vacant land not as empty space, but as the foundation for the next generation of Detroit housing ― safe, affordable, plentiful and tailored to the needs of Detroiters.
Tammy Daniels is the CEO of the Detroit Land Bank Authority. Submit a letter to the editor at freep.com/letters, and we may publish it online and in print.
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This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Detroit Land Bank chief: Detroit is running out of derelict homes to rehab | Opinion
Reporting by Tammy Daniels / Detroit Free Press
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