Minimum Bids
“What do you do when someone falls behind on their property taxes?”
That seemingly simple question – answered in Michigan state law by Public Act 123 of 1999 – has spawned a Powers of Ten-like level of detail in Detroit and Wayne County and all of Michigan.
The more you zoom in or out of the system that strives to answer that question here, the more complications and complexity you will find.
For ten years I’ve worked to reform and reduce the harm caused by Michigan’s tax foreclosure system, primarily in its manifestation and destruction in Detroit. In that time I’ve developed countless diagrams and charts to explain its operation both to myself and to policymakers, community organizers and leaders, citizens, elected officials, to name a few.
Those charts explain the movement of debt, money, responsibility, property ownership, people, and more through the tax delinquency and foreclosure system. Of course, none of those charts are as impactful, or get the point across as effectively, as the images I’ve collected for GooBing Detroit. Nothing helps convince someone that this system is out of control, or to connect these charts to reality, better than those images.
But I thought I would do something a little different here and present a collection of the charts that I, and others, have developed to explain the tax delinquency and foreclosure system in Michigan. Most of these are charts I’ve developed, but not all.
I’ve stripped these charts of any details or language. Just shapes and lines and arrows.
All of these depict different elements of the tax delinquency and foreclosure system – as I said above, they explain the movement of debt, money, responsibility, property ownership, people, and more.
These charts are lifeless, but at each pivot point, or circle, or box, or arrow, someone’s life is changed. Perhaps not perceptibly at first, but it is changed.
The operation of the tax delinquency and tax foreclosure system in Michigan is complicated. What it does to people, how it manifests in communities, in property ownership, in the tax base of cities, is complex.
The people who created PA 123 and the modern tax delinquency and foreclosure system in Michigan did not understand that distinction. Most policymakers still don’t.
My frustrations with the tax delinquency and foreclosure system have been less with the system itself than with the people who’ve operated it. The system can be modified and controlled to produce better outcomes. How to do that is not unknowable, and changes over recent years have done exactly that. But it’s a little like the coronavirus pandemic in that most government for years said “Hey it’s the law what can we do?” and just let it run wild when, in fact, there were many things that could have been done and that would have produced better fiscal and humanitarian outcomes in the end.
It’s just a choice. What do you care to spend your time and energy solving? The answer for too long was “not tax foreclosure.” That has changed in recent years, but a lot of the damage that was done cannot be reversed. Of course, that is what GooBing Detroit shows.
