Detroit Home Repair Landscape: A Review and Considerations for Community Based Collaboration

Abstract

This essay reports on learning about housing justice, inclusive and responsive design, and campus-civic collaborative relations over the course of a year working with the United Community Housing Coalition (UCHC), the housing nonprofit organization of Detroit, Michigan. It will begin with a presentation of home ownership and inequity in Detroit, followed by consideration of the deliverables we adapted and redesigned and responses to them. The voice above is Ms. W, a single Black mother of three children, after we (UCHC) helped fund and install a new central air unit in her home. UCHC’s repair program’s phone number isn’t shared publicly due to the limited eligibility requirements and fear of creating false hope in ineligible clients. I’m not sure how she got the number because she wasn’t eligible to receive repairs: she wasn’t a previous client of our agency and she had back taxes owing on her property. But such voices and experiences are at the very core of the efforts summarized in this work, telling us when it is successful and reminding us of its limitations. Before considering in more detail the dialogue with people seeking assistance from and providing input to housing justice organizations, let me set the stage so that the structural injustices they confront can be clear to the reader, and the organizational landscape can be surveyed.