Editor’s note: This piece is shared via Next City and was adapted from Demolishing Detroit: How Structural Racism Endures by Nicholas L. Caverly, published by Stanford University Press, ©2026 by Nicholas L. Caverly. All Rights Reserved.
For almost six decades, Daisy lived in the same brick house on a shady street in Northeast Detroit. The dwelling was a family home passed down from relatives who had been among the first Black residents on the block in the 1950s. Daisy shared the home with Melissa, her younger sister, as well as Melissa’s great-grandson.
When we met, he had just started grade one, and a bright blue tarp stretched over the roof of their home. It kept some of the rain and melting snow from trickling through the ceilings of upstairs rooms. Contractors estimated it would cost around $15,000 to reshingle the leaky roof, shore up water-damaged rafters and patch damaged plaster.
At the time, Daisy and Melissa worked as housekeepers at a downtown hotel. Together, they earned just under $40,000 that year, more than the typical Detroit household. But the pair could not afford such a large bill. Daisy’s hearty laugh filled her kitchen when she recalled how a nonprofit staffer had suggested she could take out a bank loan for the repairs. Several banks had already refused. Years passed before the household had scraped together funds to repair the roof on their own.
Daisy’s roof was not the only tarp-covered one on her block. Procured from hardware stores and online retailers, tarps were a relatively low-cost tool that people in neighborhoods across the city relied on to mitigate leaky roofs until they could afford more permanent repairs or landlords could be compelled to make good on their legal obligations to tenants under state housing codes.
In 2021, university and community researchers identified almost 40,000 inhabited dwellings with serious roof leaks, nonfunctional electric or plumbing infrastructure, and broken heating systems. Nearly half of all Detroiters lived in a dwelling with at least one of these conditions, and approximately one in six city residents contended with all of them simultaneously.
Researchers identified almost 40,000 inhabited dwellings with serious roof leaks, nonfunctional electric or plumbing infrastructure, and broken heating systems.
Nicholas L. Caverly
Conservative estimates of the cost of addressing deferred maintenance issues projected that it would take around $1 billion to ensure all Detroiters lived in structurally sound homes with watertight roofs, solid foundations and functional utilities. As researchers found, public funds allocated to home repair grant programs were insufficient to meet this need. They also noted that financial institutions frequently denied city residents’ applications for the kinds of fixed-interest loans that households in the United States conventionally rely on to shore up their dwellings.
As an administrative project, demolitions were explicitly an effort to expand Detroiters’ access to home finance. Requests for public funding to level empty buildings — to the tune of more than a half billion dollars between 2014 and 2024 — hinged on the promise that leveling empty buildings would “increase private investment” and “stabilize housing.” Teams of demolition administrators and university researchers alike kept watchful eyes on data streams of loan applications, approvals, and rejections for signs of whether this promise would come to fruition.
As banks increasingly approved loans in the vicinity where empty buildings were coming down, they confirmed hypotheses that access to financing could indeed shift. Public dollars continued to tear down empty buildings even as municipal grants for city residents to patch roofs, replace windows, and complete other essential projects to physically stabilize their homes became increasingly scarce.
By leveraging building removals to expand home finance access for Detroit’s majority-Black populace, demolition administrators sought to recalibrate a system that originated as a project of white supremacy. Between 1933 and 1968, national policies that created long-term, fixed-rate loans as a means of supporting homeownership and repair designated homogeneously white neighborhoods as the only secure locations for investment and rendered neighborhoods with Black residents ineligible.
Examining such “redlining” in Detroit and its suburbs, David Freund historicizes how the practice “helped give birth to a market that created more wealth for whites while providing a state-sanctioned platform for housing experts to argue that racial discrimination was simply a by-product of impersonal economic processes.” Though civil rights legislation made redlining nominally illegal, geographic disparities in access to home finance remain a decisive feature of racial wealth gap calculations in Detroit and across the United States.
This said, Daisy’s path to repairing her roof complicates the notion that expanding access to home finance is the only sensible route to physically stabilizing homes in places grappling with racist disinvestment.
Daisy and I met at a housing resource fair in a community center gymnasium. She went first to the table where nonprofit staff distributed information about home repair grant programs that promised low-income Detroiters resources to complete major structural repairs. Once she turned 65, Daisy’s age gave her priority standing for a grant that would cover the costs of replacing her home’s leaking roof.
But as the staff from organizations who distributed the grants told people who stopped by their table, the organizations had only enough funds to award a few hundred grants each year. Waiting lists were thousands of people deep.
Daisy and I stood next to each other in the queue that circled from the home repair grant table to the one where another agency helped Detroiters file applications for utility assistance. We chatted as the line inched forward, and I learned she had been attempting to save to fix the roof for several years. When loan officers plugged Daisy’s information into search bars, their systems usually indicated that her home was unlikely to be deemed eligible. Even when Daisy made it further in the process, approval for the funds never came through after an appraiser photographed her house on a block full of empty buildings.
Daisy and Melissa spent five years socking away enough cash to pay a roofing team to complete the job. Once they had, a crew began by sistering new beams to some rotted attic timbers and replacing others entirely. They continued by stripping off three layers of tarps, old shingles, and rotted wood decking. Finally, they built up new decking and a waterproof layer of asphalt shingles.
I arrived at the house just as the crew wrapped up their final day of work. Roofers loaded massive ladders onto the top of a truck as Daisy looked up at the new roof with joyful tears on her cheeks. She insisted that the four men who completed the job gather on her porch so I could take a picture of them with the new roof. In the image, a beaming smile fills Daisy’s face as the jet-black color of fresh shingles on her roof contrast with the weathered grey ones on the empty buildings that abutted her home.
A few years later, after demolition crews flattened dozens of empty buildings around Daisy’s home, I joined her back in the same community center gym where we first met. Another housing assistance fair, it was once again filled with a “one-stop shop” of tables from a dozen social services agencies, municipal offices, and private financial institutions. Daisy began at a table where workers from one agency helped her complete an application for winter heating assistance. She moved down the queue to a table where volunteers reassured her that she was still on the wait list for a home repair grant. On the way out, Daisy made her way to the table where bank representatives provided information about home repair loans.
Flyers greeted people with color photographs of a Black woman with greying hair standing in a newly renovated kitchen. Spotless white cabinets, granite countertops, black appliances, and other upgrades had been paid for with a $22,000 loan from the program. A representative keyed Daisy’s address into her laptop and smiled, “It looks like you’re living in an eligible neighborhood! With a home repair loan, you can make your house just like new.” Daisy declined the offer to complete an application. In her words, “We just did the roof and got the house stable. We’re good.” After that, we left.
In earlier years, Daisy had applied for a home repair loan in hopes of being able to stop her roof from leaking. But empty buildings on her block had prevented the loan from being approved. Having incrementally saved up enough to make the roof watertight before demolitions brought those structures down, Daisy was no longer interested in taking on debt.
Detroiters were not necessarily clamoring for access to home improvement loans. What they wanted were structural repairs and stable homes.
Nicholas L. Caverly
This is not to say that others did not do so — the woman featured on bank advertising certainly did. However, in gatherings frequented by Detroiters who qualified for income-based support on their housing and utility bills, home repair loans were a tough sell. As people like Daisy slowly accumulated the resources necessary to fix leaky roofs, they made legible how Detroiters were not necessarily clamoring for access to home improvement loans. What they wanted were structural repairs and stable homes.
In 2022, a set of Detroit-based foundations allocated $20 million to make Detroiters’ homes structurally sound. Initially, program officers anticipated it would take a year to identify 1,000 dwellings in need of roof replacements, foundation support, and other costly repairs. Within 24 hours, the program’s application line received more than 125,000 calls and closed with a wait list of 14,000 households.
It was in this context that municipal officials allocated $30 million in federal pandemic relief funds to home repair grants and $95 million to demolitions. Staff from multiple city departments attempted to justify the limited repair grant funding in videoconferences filled with incredulous city residents.
Administrators seemed to grow frustrated when audience members’ positions were unchanged by evidence that empty building demolitions were linked to expanded access to home finance. Audience members appeared equally unimpressed when administrators touted a repair loan program where the municipality would backstop Detroiters who could not access credit through private financial institutions.
“We don’t need loans,” someone wrote in the chat. “We need to fix our homes.” Dozens responded affirmatively to the comment.
The refrain of “We don’t need loans. We need to fix our homes” illustrates just how expanding access to home finance did not eliminate the structural barriers Detroiters navigated in pursuit of stable homes. Even when demolitions seemingly unlocked the possibility of a home repair loan, people like Daisy declined.
Her refusal is indicative of how city residents sometimes saw through the promised inclusion in home finance. They saw how predicating the structural integrity of Detroiters’ homes on the logics of financial markets crowded out other possible methods for stabilizing their residences.
Like many who Zoomed into meetings with requests that municipal administrators fund home repair grants, they imagined a world in which access to stable and secure homes was decoupled from the financial calculus of qualifying for a loan entirely.