In late November, the Urban Praxis Workshop hosted a panel “Post-Crisis Housing Markets and Housing Insecurity. Reporters covering housing issues from The Detroit News and the Detroit Free-Press along with scholars and organizer Wade Rathke discussed growing housing insecurity across the country and the conditions faced by those living in Detroit. Panelists: Wade Rathke, ChiefContinue reading “Post-Crisis Housing Markets”
For nearly four decades, speculation in the lower Cass Corridor wreaked havoc on residents and shredded the community fabric that held it together. By the early 2000s, the area was largely deserted except for low income apartment buildings. The primary speculator in this neighborhood was the Ilitch family, the owners of a national pizza chainContinue reading “Development Creep: 40-years devaluing Detroit’s lower Cass Corridor”
Over the next year, the Urban Praxis Workshop is featuring two speculator owned Detroit properties per week. These images will appear on our social media feeds with an initial post on Instagram @urbanpraxiswork, on the Urban Praxis Workshop Facebook page, and a link to the Instagram post on Twitter. We hope you will follow andContinue reading “#dismantlingdetroit”
In 2017, we had the pleasure of working with Detroit videographer and filmmaker Justin Ivory and Space Monkey Productions. Ivory is working on short documentary on the housing crisis in Detroit and focused some of his work on Detroit Eviction Defense and the case of the Bishop who lost his house in a foreclosureContinue reading “Animating the Housing Crisis – video”
The Urban Praxis Workshop and the University of Michigan-Dearborn hosted a community forum on Race and Region in late March. It was a discussion that drew on the power of legacies and their monuments, the necessity of new metaphors in engaging white supremacy, the resonance of past experiences and present engagements with racial division inContinue reading “Race and Region: It’s still standing but no one is standing still”
The city of Dearborn continues to wrestle with its racist reputation nearly 40 years after its 15 term segregationist Mayor Orville Hubbard died. This struggle is personified in the city officials insistence on keeping a life-size bronze statue of Hubbard on display in public space. Nearly 200 people gathered at the University of Michigan-Dearborn toContinue reading “Infrastructures of Violence and Inequality”
“In Detroit, land contracts outpace all other types of lending instruments for housing. … These instruments are incredibly flexible and allow for the possiblity of homeownership, but that flexibility also offers a lot of opportunity for exploitation.” In late December, Urban Praxis’ Josh Akers was the guest on Wade’s World, a weekly broadcast on KABFContinue reading “On Speculation and Organizing”
Originally posted on DETROITography:
History is the most crucial context of any city. In thinking about the “lifecourse of place,” or the evolution of a particular geography over time, socio-demographics provide deep insight. Detroit’s Black community was restricted in where they could legally purchase housing, so there had long been a concentration of Black households…
Speculators have remained a consistent part of Detroit’s bankruptcy and post-bankruptcy stories.
The line between speculation and investment can seem arbitrary. In fact, some of the largest speculators in the city of Detroit often characterize their activities as investment.
Urban Praxis