Downtown Detroit development offers lessons for displacing low-income residents for market-rate housing

Original article was published in MLive

By David Muller, the business reporter for MLive Media Group in Detroit

DETROIT, MI – The developer behind a project that replaced 127 housing units occupied mostly by low-income seniors with luxury apartments in downtown Detroit said the experience could be used to aid future transitions.

More than 100 low-income seniors, many with disabilities, were given in March 2013 one year to vacate 1214 Griswold, as Broder & Sachse Real Estate Services moved forward on plans to convert the Albert Kahn-designed building into luxury apartments known as The Albert. Nearly everyone found new homes, but one man died before he could move out of his subsidized apartment.

“First and foremost, the process wasn’t perfect, but in hindsight it did go incredibly well in general,” company principal Richard Broder said, adding that, “there were a few road bumps along the way.”

For social workers involved with the process, a major issue is some seniors believed they could stay, and so made little effort to find a new home. That’s because Broder & Sacshe had initially agreed to allow for about 10-20 units to be preserved as low-income senior housing for existing residents. That didn’t happen though, as federal and state agencies would not agree to new voucher terms.

“It was well-intentioned but problematic, and ultimately (Housing and Urban Development) couldn’t do it anyway,” Broder said.

But while that process was playing out, and apparently by no fault of the developers, vouchers for residents to use at a new home were not issued until about two months before they were supposed to be out of 1214 Griswold.

The other issue raised by social workers helping seniors make the transition is some construction began while seniors were still living at the building.

In early February 2014, residents of 1214 Griswold began coming in to St. Aloysius Neighborhood Services complaining that they were having breathing problems and getting headaches, according to Deacon Don Leach.

Leach said he and St. Aloysius OFS Mike Carsten walked over to the building and saw dust blowing from some of the windows. Leach then had Kathleen Ruth, the parish nurse, call the city building department. A spokesperson there told them the builders had a contract to work on the sixth floor of the building.

“So you had construction workers walking around with masks on and residents getting off the elevator with their oxygen tanks,” Ruth told MLive.

The St. Aloysius crew was poised to file a complaint with the city, but they found out that the day before, Feb. 18, the city had already enforced a stop-work order at the building.
The stop-work order expired March 31, and on April 1 work again began at 1214 Griswold.

“In a perfect world. We would’ve liked the building 100 percent empty when we started construction,” Broder said. “Having said that, we know we did all that we could and sometimes it’s not perceived as good enough. Construction is perceived as a messy business. We tried as good as we could. We couldn’t simply not do anything.”

Broder said that when issues were pointed out to them, they quickly remedied the situation. In general, he disputes the notion that the transition of seniors out of the building did not go well.

"I will tell you that perhaps part of the issue is, this is the first time this has happened in the way it has happened," Broder said.

“The other thing is, I would think, and would almost offer from the developer’s point of view, we developed, for lack of a better term, an expertise on this subject that I don’t think anybody else has, and we’re not afraid to share it collaboratively,” he said. “In my opinion there is a spectrum of results, and I would always want to be on the excellent end of the spectrum.”

Early on, Broder & Sacshe contracted with the United Community Housing Coalition of Detroit and Neighborhood Services Organization to oversee and aid in the move of seniors from 1214 Griswold. (A full fact sheet on 1214 Griswold from Broder & Sachse can be seen below).

“We got involved on the back end of providing some assistance, going in to really meet with the residents to see if they had any kind of needs in terms of counseling and such in terms of the move and what was going on,” said Wanda Bailey, of NSO.

Much of the actual effort to find 1214 Griswold tenants new homes fell to UCHC, and Broder praised UCHC’s overall handling of the move.

UCHC’s Claudia Sanford met regularly with tenants and tried to find them new housing. She said seniors are now in about 40 different places throughout Detroit.

But Sanford struggled to find a new home for Griswold resident Hershel Welch, who she said was suffering from dementia. Welch was one of two tenants still in the building after a March 31, 2014 deadline passed for all tenants to be out.

Welch never made it out of the building. The 61-year-old was found dead on April 14.
The weekend of his death, Sanford said she and a housekeeper had been unavailable to reach Welch because a management office was closed.

No one blames the development specifically for Welch’s passing; No one was there when Welch died of natural causes/heart failure according to the Wayne County Medical Examiner’s office. But it is the fact that he was still in the building and alone while construction work was being done that is at the forefront of conversation among social workers and senior housing advocates who have formed a coalition.

That group calls itself the Senior Housing Displacement-Preservation Coalition. Members include professors, nonprofit leaders, housing experts and experts on aging. They've been formally meeting for more than six months with two goals that carry complex obstacles:

• Preserve senior housing in Midtown and downtown where it can.
• Smooth the transition of seniors to new housing in instance in which preservation is not an option

Meanwhile, The Albert is open and several tenants have been living there. Construction should be complete by late summer or early fall.

Demand for the living spaces has been steady. Broder said that new units are being delivered to the market every day, and are almost instantly spoken for.

He would not disclose the cost of the investment in the development, which is across from where Quicken Loans founder and Chairman Dan Gilbert’s Bedrock Real Estate Services, which owns or controls more than 60 buildings in downtown Detroit, began redeveloping property around the same time.

“We’re really excited about the turn-around in Capitol Park,” Broder said. “We think it’s really, really exciting.”