Close

September 30, 2017

Closing Thoughts

There is one more day until the end of our official fundraiser.

In the 3 years that Tricycle Collective has supported families through the auction, we have seen a tipping in the odds against residents and into the favor of investors. We have gone from winning 8 out of 11, to 18 out of 31, to 20 out of 50. It used to be that information was the biggest gap between a person and their deed, now, more and more, it comes down to money. We are doing what we can.

As always, The Tricycle Collective partners with and supports the important work of United Community Housing Coalition, the local organization that has helped over 2,400 Detroit families save their homes and has created the beacon that is the Tax Foreclosure Prevention Project. At UCHC, one out of every three clients working to save their home in the tax auction has ALREADY LOST their home in September. That is unheard of. That is terrifying. That is our current reality.

If you don’t happen to be a tax foreclosure expert, it can seem somewhere on the order of impossible or unbelievable that YOU may have any significant ability to affect this issue. If you do happen to do this work, you know that you lose more than you win and very little about it is logical or fair- but that it is not the case that there’s nothing we can do about it. All of the homes that are lost in the auction would have been lost anyway had we done nothing, but many of the homes that are preserved would have been lost if we had not supported. That is the way that we find purpose in our work.

If you feel moved to contribute, you can take comfort in knowing that 100% of your donation is going to a Detroit family in a foreclosed home and that they will get their money before the October auction is over. This is now, this is real, this is deployable support exactly where it is needed.

We thank you for nudging the scales up ever so slightly toward keeping Detroit at Home.

 

-Michele Oberholtzer

Leave a Reply