The Detroit Housing Counseling and Homeownership Project

The Detroit Housing Counseling and Homeownership Project is a collaboration between the Center for Equitable Family and Community Well-Being, Southwest Economic Solutions, and DC Palmer LLC to better understand the homebuying experience in Detroit. Our project is using HUD form 9902 data from 14 HUD-certified housing counseling agencies to measure demand for single-family homes in the city. In addition, the project is also examining the homebuying context graduates of pre-purchase housing counseling programs face.

Accordingly, we use data from the City Assessor's Office of Detroit to measure the total volume of residential property transfers from 2009 to 2019. We further use mortgage data from the Home Mortgage Database to measure the volume of originated home purchase mortgages from 2009 to 2019. We then aggregate these measures to neighborhood clusters to measure the proportion of mortgage sales in different parts of the city.

By doing so we have identified areas in Detroit where mortgage activity is low relative to the volume of residential property transfers, and vice versa. We have created the Detroit Housing Dashboard to view mortgage activity in different parts of the city from 2015 to 2019. To use it, simply choose a neighborhood and year.

A draft version of our final report is below. On this page you can also view the community conversation we held July 21, 2021 that presented some of our initial findings. Below are profiles we have made of each of Detroit's seven city council districts that include information on the total volume of residential transfers, the median transfer price, the median mortgage amount, as well as the percent of mortgage sales from 2015 to 2019.

Detroit Dreams Deferred: Thousands Mortgage Ready but Many Miss Out

District Profiles

Community Conversations

November 5, 2021

July 21, 2021

This project was funded with a grant from Poverty Solutions at the University of Michigan, and administered through the Detroit Urban Research Center