Vote NO on Proposal N

Defeat Proposal N – make the banks pay reparations for the blight they created!

Vote NO! on $250 Million Bond

Mayor Duggan and the corporate controlled City Council once again are trying to get Detroiters to vote for a $250 million loan to tear down houses in our city. This will be a high interest loan that will cost taxpayers almost $500 million by the time it is paid off.

• A NO VOTE will decrease property taxes in 2020 from 9 mils to approximately 6 mils. A Yes VOTE will keep mils at 9 or higher. So this is a new tax, despite Duggan’s claims.

• Prop N does not guarantee jobs nor does it guarantee thousands of houses will be renovated. These are empty promises told to get people to vote for it. Read the proposal carefully.

• The COVID-19 pandemic is cutting Detroit’s income. If the City can’t pay back the loan + interest will they go back to court to steal even more of the retirees’ pensions?

• The City has made no attempt to go after the owners of these neglected, abandoned properties to make them pay for the blight they created. Make them pay!

• Mayor Duggan and his cronies refused to use $263 million of Federal Hardest Hit Homeowners funds to keep homeowners in their homes. This created most of Detroit’s “blight.” Those hundreds of millions of tax dollars were funneled to overpriced demolition companies.

• The City’s Auditor General Demolition Report found legal and regulatory violations and significant cost overruns.

We, the people of Detroit, have other needs including:

• Funding a low-income home repair program for seniors and others, which keeps homes viable for families instead of becoming more blight.

• Addressing many street and sidewalk repairs, removal of thousands of dying trees and other services.

• Paying back the City workers’ pensions and health trust billions that were taken from 30,000 retirees.

• A blight elimination program that dismantles houses so that materials can be reused creates more jobs and is less expensive than demolition. It also helps reduce the effects of climate change.

 

The banks are criminals – statistics from
Detroit News Special Report on Foreclosures, June 2015

1. More than one in three Detroit homes were foreclosed the between the years 2005 and 2015. Since 2005, 139,699 of Detroit’s 384,672 homes were foreclosed because of mortgage defaults or unpaid taxes.

2. There were 65,000 mortgage foreclosures since 2005 to 2015. Fifty-six percent of all mortgage foreclosures are now blighted properties or have been foreclosed again for nonpayment of taxes; 13,000 homes are slated for demolition at a projected cost of $195 million. Of the 84,000 properties on the city’s blight list, 76 percent are foreclosures.

3. Of all mortgages written in 2005 in Detroit, 68 percent were subprime, compared to 27 percent statewide and 24 percent in the U.S., meaning that they were at interest rates at least 3 percentage points higher than the national mortgage interest rate.

4. In Detroit, which formerly enjoyed the highest rate of African-American homeownership of any U.S. city, $4 billion in subprime loans were written in the four years before the 2008 housing and financial crash. 78 percent of foreclosed homes financed through subprime loans are now in poor condition or tax foreclosed. All banks and lenders were active participants in the subprime market because the rate of profit on subprime loans when sold to investors was eight times greater than the comparable rate on traditional fixed-rate loans.