Newspapers have drastically cut their staffs over the last thirty years, mainly because most of their advertising revenue has fled to the Internet, and no one has yet adequately figured out how to make that pay. But there is still a fair amount of good journalism being done.
And one reporter whose work I never want to miss is the Free Press’s John Gallagher, who for years has done a superb job reporting in depth on Detroit.
Yesterday, he had a fascinating long story about mortgages. Kurt Metzger, who I think of as our area’s Great Demographer, recently noted on Facebook that Detroit, which was long known as the capital of home ownership, has now become a city of renters.
Twelve years ago, the Black home ownership rate was more than 54 percent. Nine years later, that had fallen to 44 percent. The Great Recession and job and income loss were a major factor. But the economy has come roaring back, or so we are told. But when it comes to mortgages, African-Americans seem to be falling further behind.
Gallagher reported that two years ago, the most recent year for which full statistics are available, white folks were granted almost as many mortgages in the city as black — even though whites are barely ten percent of the population.
Nor are all mortgages created equal; most white buyers in the city got what are called conventional mortgages from private lenders. Blacks, on the other hand, more often had to get government-backed mortgages from organizations like the VA or FHA.
You may think this is a case of racism rearing its ugly head– and you can never completely rule that factor out. But I don’t think that’s most of what’s happening here.
As Gallagher reports, there are two big factors. Most African-Americans who can afford to buy homes are buying them in the suburbs. Many more blacks got mortgages just in Southfield and Redford Township than in Detroit. A significant number of African-Americans who are trying to get mortgages in the city are being turned down because they have bad credit.
Others had a troubled work history, had been in the criminal justice system, don’t have enough income to qualify – or all three. There are ways to help people in those situations.
Gallagher talks optimistically about one of those, a partnership between Quicken Loans and the Detroit Land Bank Authority called Rehabbed and Ready.
But buried in his story is a statistic that shows how less than complete Detroit’s much-heralded comeback is. There are 297 census tracts in the city. Almost half saw no mortgages at all in 2017. Nearly a hundred more had a token one to five.
There were only nine census tracts in all of Detroit that saw 20 or mortgage loans written that year – mostly the posh addresses near the riverfront and places like Palmer Woods.
What this says, of course, is that while Detroit’s situation has markedly improved since the bankruptcy, it is still a boutique comeback extending to the downtown, midtown and a few nice neighborhoods – less than ten percent of the entire city.
Here’s the truth, and the bottom line. Mayor Mike Duggan and a lot of good people have made a tremendous difference. But Detroit is still a city where car insurance is unaffordable, where the schools, while improving, aren’t good enough, and where a huge percentage of the population is very poor and there are too few jobs.
What Detroit needs is metropolitan government in some form. The metropolitan area wouldn’t exist without the city. We are all part of it; we all need to do our part and pay our share if we want not only the central city but this entire area, and state, to have much of a future.
