Detroit has demolished its way into housing scarcity. Just stunning stuff. Like being next to plentiful fresh water in the midst of a drought and deciding to just boil it all off. I guess we still have time to do that, too, though.

In light of the current economic turmoil, it's fortunate that, after the long fallout from the 2008 financial crisis and municipal bankruptcy, Detroit long ago confronted the impossibility of doubling down on the auto-centric orientation & thinking that had so thoroughly failed the city.

Thing not clicking for me in White Lotus this season is that it seems like Tim Ratliff’s crimes are all legal now. Like, what’s he so bent out of shape for? Chill dude.

I probably started watching Peep Show in 2018. My repeated viewings since then have worn it into a mental river rock of unparalleled smoothness.

www.nytimes.com/2025/03/20/a...

As Detroit government officials deal with the deaths of two children who froze in their mother’s van because the family was homeless, they are ignoring the imminent expiration of a critical tool that’s helped end homeowner displacement from tax foreclosure:

detroit.substack.com/p/how-to-res...

Today @ 12:30 EST: I'll be talking about the state of tax foreclosure risk & the windfall profit recovery efforts in Detroit alongside folks from Outlier Media & Detroit Justice Center. Timely, as Detroit homeowner tax delinquency reversing years of declines. Will explain why.

Commentary in Detroit media: We're infiltrated by unaccountable privatized police forces and surveilled by corporate interests.

Also commentary in Detroit media: RoboCop is a shameful movie and offers nothing of value.

This map uses tax bill mailing address data from Regrid (www.regrid.com) to identify all single family homes in Muscogee County, GA where the tax bill is mailed to an address >50 miles away from the home itself.

regrid.maps.arcgis.com/apps/instant...

What’s the fastest way to radicalize older relatives? Gifts that require them to remember a password and download an app.

On Dan Campbell after last night’s Lions game:

I think you can sum up refinement culture in sports by saying it's about "playing the rules, not the game.”

Which is to say, you're not just (or maybe even foremost) playing your opponent, you're playing against the rules of the sport itself.

Hence:

Great piece from Chuck Marohn on Substack today. He's exactly right about Detroit in the excerpts below.

clmarohn.substack.com/p/how-fannie...

Nationally, immigration talk is mired in negativity & vilification, and claims of resource & housing scarcity. But in Detroit immigrant communities have put neighborhoods on their backs and rehabbed their way out of housing scarcity with scant government support:
detroit.substack.com/p/zooming-in...

Sorry, are we talking about some other city here?
Tax foreclosure and eviction displaced tens of thousands of low and moderate income Detroiters from 2008-2019. The displacement of low income Detroiters already happened.

www.freep.com/story/news/l...

Detroit vs Everybody isn’t a t-shirt — it’s this.

The rehab & re-occupancy of vacant homes in Detroit since the pandemic continues to amaze me.

Research I've been working on shows 17,000 homes that were vacant in 2019 are today re-occupied and, most encouragingly, the majority are owned by Detroit residents.

detroit.substack.com/p/detroits-s...

A new report from at Regrid: Owned Away From Home

The report used our nat’l parcel data & found 1 in 4 U.S. homes are owned outside their local area:
5% of homes are owned out-of-state, while 19.5% have owners in a different zip code in the same state.

storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/90e2...

I have an opinion piece in the Detroit Free Press today on the City’s land value tax proposal, which I support.

www.freep.com/story/opinio...