This story was co-published in collaboration with Shelterforce, the only independent, non-academic publication covering the worlds of affordable housing, community development and housing justice.

Tahira Ahmad, 66, inherited her childhood home in Detroit when her mother died in 2009. She has fond memories there; the home had a makeshift bar in the basement, and her father would throw parties and family get-togethers with food and dancing. He took pride in keeping the lawn trimmed and would compete with a neighbor to see who had the best yard.

But Ahmad’s childhood home is currently sitting vacant, uninhabitable due to repeated basement flooding. Ahmad believes her childhood home was once worth about $40,000, but now is only worth around $10,000 as a result of all the damage. She says that the city’s tax assessor found the value was somewhere between $15,000-$20,000. She owed $1,500 a year in property taxes on the home, more than she could afford. But it was lowered in 2023 with the help of the Coalition for Property Tax Justice, a Detroit-based advocacy group, who helped her file an appeal. She now pays $800-1,000 a year.

She currently lives in a different home, where leaks and collapsed ceilings have left it in need of about $30,000 in repairs. Ahmad believes this home is also overassessed and estimates she’s overpaid more than $30,000 in property taxes between the two. Now, she’s asking the City of Detroit to reimburse her so she can afford the repairs. “I’m hoping that they have a heart and repay us. All I want them to do is give me back my money that they took,” Ahmad says.

Thousands of residents of the Detroit metropolitan area have faced foreclosure on their homes for unpaid property taxes. The city’s current mayor claims the problem of uneven property tax assessments has been fixed, but advocates say the assessment system is still far from equitable.

According to a 2018 paper by property law scholar Bernadette Atuahene and economist Timothy R. Hodge, between 2011 and 2015, Wayne County – which includes Detroit – foreclosed on 100,116 Detroit buildings for property tax debt. It amounts to about a quarter of the 384,675 total properties in the city.

The paper found that this was a dramatically higher rate of foreclosure than any other American city. In 2015, Detroit had 3,949 foreclosures per 100,000 people, compared with 52 in New York City, 48 in San Francisco and 8 in Los Angeles.

“Detroit is ground zero for this national problem, because nowhere in America have we seen the level of foreclosures as we have seen in Detroit,” said Atuahene, whose research led her to found the Coalition for Property Tax Justice in 2017, at a rally held in the city last month. She said that the property tax foreclosures that Detroit has seen since 2008 have not occurred since the Great Depression.

The city’s current mayor claims the problem of uneven property tax assessments has been fixed after a citywide reassessment of properties in 2015, but advocates say the assessment system is still far from equitable.

After the mayor’s office denounced the results of a 2024 study from the University of Chicago that found over assessments were still happening, saying it was inaccurate, the city was pushed by advocates and elected officials, including Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib in a letter, to solicit its own study.

A 2023 tax reform law finally forced the city to conduct that study. Released in February by the International Association of Assessing Officers (IAAO), the study found that on average, the city’s tax assessments were accurate — and that as a result, the city was not in violation of the law.

Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan’s office seized on the study to claim that there was “no systemic overassessment” in the city. “This puts the issue to rest once and for all,” Chief Assessor Alvin Horhn said in a statement.

Advocates for property tax reform disagreed with the city assessor at a June 4 City Council hearing. Chris Berry, a professor at the University of Chicago, called in and said that the IAAO study shows that assessments in Detroit still do not meet industry standards and that lower valued homes are still being overassessed.

At the hearing, city assessor Alvin Horhn said that the industry standards in question are based on an ideal model that does not take into account the nuances of Detroit properties. He said the changes he was being asked to make were not in the city’s control.

“Some of the things we’re being asked to do we simply cannot do,” Horhn said at the hearing.

Despite the fact that foreclosures fell overall between 2015 and 2017, advocates with the Coalition for Property Tax Justice say the vast majority of homes valued under $50,000 are still being over-assessed and that more valuable homes are still being under-assessed.

“The average hides things,” Atuahene said at the rally of the IAAO’s findings.

Atuahene referred to tax foreclosures as “an act of extreme legal violence” that should be imposed with extreme caution. “In Detroit, this legal violence has been exercised with extreme recklessness.”

Atuahene alleged in her research that Wayne County was violating the state constitution through its property tax assessments, because of a provision that says homes cannot be assessed for more than 50% of their fair market value. For this reason, the Coalition and homeowners who advocate through it refer to the city’s property tax regime as an illegal one.

In 2016, the ACLU and NAACP Legal Defense Fund sued the Wayne County treasurer, alleging that its property tax assessments had over-assessed homes in low-income, Black neighborhoods. According to the lawsuit, the city had failed to reassess the homes after the 2008 recession, when home values declined. The lawsuit alleged that this had a disparate impact on Black residents and violated the 1968 Fair Housing Law. It also alleged that the city was not providing a financial hardship exemption for property taxes.

Mayor Duggan, who took office in 2014, vowed to reform the city’s property tax system. Between 2015 and 2017, tax foreclosures of owner-occupied homes fell by 88%, from 6,408 to 768.

As part of a 2018 settlement of the lawsuit, low-income homeowners could avoid foreclosure resulting from overdue taxes by paying the county a one-time payment of $1,000. The city also agreed to make it easier to file for a property tax exemption for low-income residents. The city agreed to exercise the right of first refusal to buy back foreclosed properties from the Wayne County treasurer’s office. Then, the city would sell them to a nonprofit that offered them back to the original homeowners for $1000, a program it assured would run through 2020.

In 2023, Detroit’s city council passed an ordinance that allows the city council to hire an independent assessor to double-check the assessor’s office. It also allows for an expedited review process if homeowners want to appeal.

“Even though the assessment regime has gotten better over time, the city of Detroit is still assessing its residents aggressively,” Michael Hartt, chief of staff for the Coalition of Property Tax Justice told Next City/Shelterforce.

In an interview with Next City/Shelterforce, Detroit chief tax assessor Alvin Horhn said that previous failures in tax assessments were a result of the city’s bankruptcy and a lack of resources to conduct accurate assessments.

“City government had fallen apart, and that includes the assessor’s office,” Horhn said. The state tax commission took control of assessments until 2017 and the city did a full reappraisal under the authority of an emergency manager. Horhn says that his office uses data on home sales across similar Detroit neighborhoods to help make sure assessments are accurate. He said that the assessments are not done property by property, both because it doesn’t have the resources to do this and because Michigan law requires the city to assess classes of properties rather than individual units.

“There isn’t a 100 percent perfect way of doing it, other than do individual appraisals for every house,” he says.

He believes that the changes that the Coalition for Property Tax Justice is requesting would require a change in state law.

At a May 16 rally at the Detroit Public Library attended by Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, antiracism scholar Ibram X. Kendi and Atuahene, homeowners spoke up about ongoing foreclosures. They demanded that the city acknowledge assessments are still uneven, work to fix it, work to implement reforms from the 2023 ordinance, repay homeowners whose homes have been foreclosed and end foreclosures resulting from property tax delinquency.

Alex Nichols, a homeowner who spoke at the rally, spoke about her childhood home being foreclosed upon. Nichols said she requested a property tax exemption from the Wayne County treasurer that showed the office that she has a medical disability, but it did not stop the foreclosure. She has been staying with relatives since her home was taken.

“This is not the Detroit I know. I felt alone, I felt ashamed, I felt I let my siblings down,” she said at the rally.

On top of the property taxes she owes on two homes, Tahira Ahmad took out a mortgage to pay for a sump pump to keep the basement in her childhood home from flooding further. It costs a little over $200 a month, paid out of her only source of income: her $1,000 monthly social security disability check.

When asked why she doesn’t sell her childhood home to help with the cost of repairing her current home, Ahmad said she still wishes to bring it back to its former condition.

Her parents wanted her to keep the home in the family. Her father had a job at the Chrysler factory that was once nearby, when the city was still a hub for the automotive industry.

When she filed her appeal, the city acknowledged some of the taxes she overpaid. Compensation would help pay for repairs.

“I have to rebuild it to where it was, at least comparable to where my parents had it before I leave this planet,” she says. “Because I have pride in the neighborhood. You know, this is our city. This is our neighborhood.”

This post was originally published on Next City.