Booked on Planning

Gentrifier

• Booked on Planning • Season 4 • Episode 12

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What happens when you win a "free house" in one of America's most complicated real estate markets? Author Anne Elizabeth Moore pulls back the curtain on her experience receiving a donated house in Detroit through a writer's residency program that promised to solve her housing concerns while supporting her creative work. The dream quickly unravels as Moore discovers her "free" home carries hidden costs—not just financially, but ethically. With journalistic instinct and careful research, she uncovers that her house had been taken from Tamika Langford, a Black woman who had been making regular tax payments but lost her property through county foreclosure without proper notification. Moore's memoir takes us beyond her personal housing saga to examine the broader landscape of Detroit after the housing market crash. 

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Stephanie Rouse:

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Stephanie Rouse:

You're listening to the Booked on Planning podcast, a project of the Nebraska chapter of the American Planning Association. In each episode we dive into how cities function by talking with authors on housing, transportation and everything in between. Join us as we get Booked On Planning. Welcome back, bookworms, to another episode of Booked on Planning. In this episode, we talk with author Anne Elizabeth Moore on her book Gentrifier, a memoir. We've only covered a memoir one other time on the show, but they have such a unique perspective to offer. Anne has a very interesting perspective with having won a free house in Detroit during the aftermath of the housing market crash.

Jennifer Hiatt:

I really enjoyed this style and pacing of this book and really shows you how it actually feels to move to a new city and a new neighborhood and all the trials and tribulations that she went through in her two years with her quote unquote free house and how complicated, both actually and emotionally, everything turned out to be.

Stephanie Rouse:

I think Anne, being a journalist, definitely shaped her response to finding that the house she was given was actually somebody else's house. Instead of just turning a blind eye and selling the home, she took the time to seek out the owner and get her story.

Jennifer Hiatt:

And we also want to point out here at the top of the episode that Anne wrote a follow-up piece for the Guardian. That is also a must read if this topic is of an interest to you, and we've linked that in the show notes as well. And I'd recommend reading the book first and then the article personally, because the book kind of leaves you with some questions and then the article wraps up those questions. So let's get into our conversation with author Anne Elizabeth Moore on her book Gentrifier, a memoir.

Stephanie Rouse:

Anne, thank you for joining us on Booked on Planning to talk about your book Gentrifier a memoir. You wrote this book to document your time living in Detroit in a house that you won. Can you start off by giving our audience an overview of what that program was, that resulted in you moving to Detroit and what made you decide to apply for it in the first place and make the decision to follow through and move?

Anne Elizabeth Moore:

Absolutely, and thanks for having me. The organization was actually a great idea, as all sorts of organizations are that eventually crumble, and they were intending to offer like free long-term housing for writers, almost like a permanent writing residency, and I had been urged to apply by someone that was on the board, and then what was interesting about my situation was that I apparently did so really quickly and then completely forgot about it. So then they started announcing finalists, or like the amp up to announcing finalists, and I was like, oh, I should have applied for that. That's such a good idea.

Anne Elizabeth Moore:

Like giving a house to a writer is such I love everything about that.

Anne Elizabeth Moore:

It resolves so many issues about blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, or you know, I sort of bought into the fantasy of it in that moment.

Anne Elizabeth Moore:

And then once they started announcing the actual names of the finalists, I was like, oh, now I have to really think about this because my name was on there. But one thing to keep in mind was that it was like close to a year between the application and then the announcement and a bunch of other stuff happened in there. So I actually had several years to think about it before the actual move and the whole time, of course I was like no one gives away houses, so how is this going to fall apart? But you know, the only way out is through right, like there is always going to be something interesting. That happens when you are at least kind of offered what appears to be a flawless solution to all of your problems in a city where housing and access to housing is a major central concern. So at some point I was like I just I'm on this ride and I just have to stay on the ride.

Jennifer Hiatt:

As you mentioned, the ride took you to Detroit and one of the observations that you've made multiple times throughout the book is that Detroit did not really seem like a place that cared all that much about reading books or, to be honest, your overall journalistic profession in general. So how did you cope with that, as you were coming up with that realization while still trying to create a sense of place which I thought you did an amazing job and support around the literature and the writing and the bookmaking processes? How did that all come together? How did you work through that?

Anne Elizabeth Moore:

Well, the lack of books and the sort of diminished participation in book culture and reading in Detroit really is entirely manufactured, and that's also kind of made clear in the book, but it's hidden in discussions of education policy and questions about school library access to book.

Anne Elizabeth Moore:

So, while I was there, even though residents themselves are totally happy to read and like excited about whatever weird things their neighbors are up to which I, as you suggested, tested multiple times they're completely willing to like buy into whatever it is the weirdo is doing, even if that's books. A group of students, while while I was there, actually sued the public school system for not providing them a standard high school education, which prompted the governor to declare that students have no right to education. Middle school and younger school libraries were being emptied. While I was there, I personally led a drive to put books into a school library that didn't ever have them, and so these are failures on an institutional level and, I think, across a couple of institutions that then make it appear on an individual level that books aren't that necessary or interesting. The real problem is not prizing education or literature or even access to reading materials across a spectrum of ages.

Stephanie Rouse:

And what I found really interesting about your book was describing how you really became part of this Bengali community that was on your block, that they kind of pushed their way into your lives almost it seemed like they were more than happy to invite you to their events and to develop this relationship with some of the younger girls on the block. But you ultimately left Detroit because you felt kind of alone and isolated. Can you talk about the differences in feeling welcome in the city versus kind of your immediate neighborhood and why there's that stark contrast the city versus kind?

Anne Elizabeth Moore:

of your immediate neighborhood and why there's that stark contrast.

Anne Elizabeth Moore:

Yeah, I mean, when it becomes clear that an institutional failure is taking place, whether that's at the city level, which I think is a big problem in Detroit, or at the county level, which is an even larger problem, I'm worn down by having to sort of constantly navigate the system that's made deliberately impossible to deal with.

Anne Elizabeth Moore:

And I'm like a white English speaking native born person, and so doing that and then feeling like I have to then figure out a way to translate certain documents into Bengali or explain to my neighbors how to legally install a fence, so that was just wearing. But also it became just very depressing to go to public events or spend time in large groups of people where everyone was being worn down by these same systems. At some point that sense starts to feel like America in general right now, where you're just like oh there's, I can't, I don't even know what I could do, like I'm so tired of struggling to survive that I can't even figure out a way to make anyone else's life happier. So ultimately I made the decision to leave but have been able to maintain my relationships with my neighbors to some degree, so being aware that my neighbor. Girls were getting to an age where they were going to be using social media more often, made the move a little bit easier.

Stephanie Rouse:

Have you kind of kept abreast of what's happening in Detroit enough to know? Has any of that been changing in the last couple years? Are they moving past some of those institutional issues that are making it challenging to kind of create community there?

Anne Elizabeth Moore:

There have been a couple of different things that have taken place, in particularly to better issues that are making it challenging to kind of create community there.

Anne Elizabeth Moore:

There have been a couple of different things that have taken place, in particularly to better support the various immigrant populations. Now it is possible to get documents in Bengali and there are translators available at many events, if not all of the events that the city supports. I think that's just again on a city level and not on a county level, which means, of course, that a lot of the housing stuff is left out of that property tax stuff and property maintenance stuff. But on a city level I think it's become much easier. Not only that, but the area that I was living in was designated Banglatown, I think. Actually, I was on vacation while that happened, so I think it was during the time that I was living there and having the city prize, that particular community within a city that has one of the largest Black populations in the country, I think does something to the way that people engage with the city, and so all of that has been super helpful. The housing policy is a totally different story.

Jennifer Hiatt:

One of the stories from the book that kind of broke me. When the city would like put up the signs that said, hey, the street sweepers are coming, like move your car and then nothing, or they would come and do like the one side of the street, or even worse, you have horrifically broken sidewalks that no one can actually safely walk on and they come and patch two sections in front of nowhere. And to your point earlier of just like how are you even supposed to feel any optimism when city services are broken down so hard? I just couldn't move past it.

Anne Elizabeth Moore:

Yeah, all of that was heartbreaking and I cannot believe that I am a person who will cry when street sweepers don't show up.

Anne Elizabeth Moore:

But it devastated my neighbors and people were like so excited Because I mean, first of all, a lot of the women in my immediate area, the couple of houses around mine they just they didn't leave their house, they were, you know, housewives, so it was like a major event in their day and we're all very excited about it and it felt like a parade Each time they put up the new signs and then nothing, and then having to explain later, for example, the fence situation, that legally we needed to deal with this kind of permit or maybe we should get permission from this guy or make sure you actually own the land before you do this.

Anne Elizabeth Moore:

It was really hard to then explain why we had to follow the rules, but that the city itself didn't care, and that became so depressing and so disheartening and it just it didn't end. I think now some of that has ended, but I I think some of the reason that it has ended is not only like the Banglatown designation, but income rates were on an upswing in my neighborhood as I left, and so I think that that is not about suddenly prizing the Bengali community of Detroit. It's about average income levels and people's ability to start tossing around their wealth totally justifiably to get stuff in their neighborhood taken care of. I don't think the system itself is that much better, but things have shifted a teeny bit.

Jennifer Hiatt:

Yeah, it's always a little disheartening when you learn that investment comes with income levels rising and disinvestment is what happens any other time. At one point you were invited to participate in a discussion about bringing awareness to local neighborhood concerns. It was actually hosted by a political candidate whose platform was supposedly to try and help the community. You shared that it would be easier for journalists if city council meetings were transcribed and available online. But you were attending this meeting as a resident, not a journalist, which I think was kind of an important perspective shift. And then, when you shared your profession, you were asked to leave because potentially you could write about it. You had said that you were not planning to, but because there was potential that you could, you were told to get out. What was the concern that they had about writing about the problems facing the neighborhood? When they hosted a public input session to talk about the problems facing the neighborhood?

Anne Elizabeth Moore:

I mean when you put it that way. I don't know, but it was very, very common, I think, because of the manufactured scarcity of literature and writing and journalism manufactured scarcity of literature and writing and journalism I think it was very common for business leaders and business owners to see journalists as the enemy Again. This is another thing that you know was tested in Detroit and then is now playing out in the rest of the country, that we've now come to a point where reporters and journalists and anyone that's seen to be, you know, on the sort of fact finding side or the investigative side, is the enemy, because they have the potential to say something that is less than positive about what you're doing. You know, I saw it over and over and over and I kind of use that one particular example in the memoir as the one where it was most clear.

Anne Elizabeth Moore:

But there were a number of people that just refused to answer questions once they found out I was a journalist, which I don't know why else I would have been asking in many cases, and it was very difficult to even think about trying to write journalism in Detroit while at the same time trying to function as a member of society there. And then what do you do, are you like? Well, I guess I don't have to work. That's cool. It's not like there were a ton of journalism jobs in the city anyway, but yeah, that's another thing. That sort of felt like it contributed significantly to my sense of isolation and frustration.

Stephanie Rouse:

So you already mentioned earlier how the housing piece of all of this is still technically broken. I think there's a few aspects that we'll get into, one of them being the mortgage lending practices and financing in Detroit, which was kind of shocking to read the section where you present that red lining was still in effect even just 10 years ago. And then there's all these questionable financing mechanisms like land contracts that often took significant amounts of investment from people and then didn't result in a home, but there was a quick and loan program that, as you were leaving the city, that was starting to help provide more stable financing in the city. Do you see that there are more ethical lending practices today, that they're kind of moving past some of that very detrimental housing practices?

Anne Elizabeth Moore:

Yeah, I'm not sure on average how people are getting housing purchases financed these days, because you really have to be living there, you have to be operating in community with people to really get into the nitty gritty of how they're paying for something. And I'm just not there. But the Quicken Loans program has emerged into this thing that we see nationally called Rocket Mortgage, and it to some degree seems to be working. On the other hand, quicken Loans was one of the sort of major instigators of foreclosures in the city, and so there was this sense that they were trying to kind of buy back trust and you know I'm a total cynic about people with a ton of money to throw around, and so I never felt like that was really the best way to go.

Anne Elizabeth Moore:

But one thing that I know really the best way to go, but one thing that I know and that I've talked to a lot of people in sort of housing justice spaces about, is the private mortgage, which is a completely like, fascinating, mind-blowingly interesting way of transferring wealth from one person to another, and it's usually used for family members. When I moved to New York, I bought this house under a private mortgage and it's been so fun, first of all to write a check to an individual every month that I know and not a bank that's going to do some kind of evil thing with it across the board and not going to, you know, suddenly increase rates or whatever. And it's actually been so pleasurable that we're talking about sort of continuing that relationship into the future. I was sort of trying to seed more and more the idea that this might be a way forward for a lot of folks in Detroit, but again, I'm not sure how much that took.

Jennifer Hiatt:

Like land contracts should be so much more regulated than they are. It's horrific that someone can take your down payment even people who are like genuinely trying to do good with a land contract which probably isn't many people, but they do exist, I'm sure for either party overall to do great, because land owner can just end at any time, so the person who's trying to buy has no security under that. You know at least with a mortgage like you know that they have to go through a process and it has to get noticed. You don't really have to give a lot of notice with land contracts. It's wild.

Jennifer Hiatt:

No, it sounds like a private mortgage is a better way to set up. Basically the same thing.

Anne Elizabeth Moore:

Yeah, because it is structured, it is regulated and the penalties are exactly as clear as they are in a real mortgage. But our bank mortgage I should say but yeah, with a land contract it was a pretty common scam for a while and I don't know how common it is, but I'm positive it still happens is that a house would be listed under sort of a rent to own agreement or something that like obscured the fact that it was a land contract and then you would move in with a down payment. The idea was that you would pay off a little bit every month, like a mortgage does, and then eventually you would own the house and that was all stipulated in the land contract that you signed. Yeah, you can be evicted at any time. There's no authority, that sort of checks over a land contract to make sure that no weird clauses got stuck in there, and pretty frequently people would just advertise the same house over and over and over as available for a rent to own situation.

Anne Elizabeth Moore:

Housing scams are so common in Detroit. I don't even remember whether or not I put this in the book, but someone listed my house as a rent-to-own option and I got an email from someone at one point that was like so when do I get the keys? And I was like I don't know you, nor do I have any idea what you're talking about. And he was like oh yeah, no, I paid X amount of dollars on such and such date. Here's the receipt that you gave me. But I was talking to your partner, bill, and he said I could move in. He just was going to email me back about the date and I was like this is A super bad, but B. There's no mechanism that I can even go through as the homeowner to clarify that I didn't do this. We had it taken down from the website, where it was still listed as available, but it essentially was just his down payment was lost, his plans to move were screwed and there was nothing anyone could do about it.

Stephanie Rouse:

You did cover that in the book and I thought that was just such an incredible story that people are out there doing that and I don't know if it would be investors. But in an article that you wrote as a follow-up to the book, you put that a staggering 90% of all properties between 2005 and 2015 were investors buying in bulk. So I think that even limits the opportunity in Detroit for better lending practices like the private mortgage.

Anne Elizabeth Moore:

Exactly when you have people who and the same thing is happening with like farmland up where I live now in upstate New York when you have people whose job is to try to profit from vast amounts of land, they don't care about ethical lending practices. They care about making as much money, accruing as much resources as quickly as they can and turning it over as fast as possible. There are a couple different things about how that plays out in Detroit and in Wayne County, which sort of covers the exact area of Detroit, including the two cities that are inside Detroit. Yeah, it's very frustrating. I'm getting all worked up again just thinking about it.

Jennifer Hiatt:

And it does seem that the relationship between the county and the city was suspect at best. Maybe I don't know how to put it, but the city really had no control, which I get that in a lot of places counties are I mean here in Nebraska it's the same counties are the entity that has control over housing, but in a place where the city and the county were basically the same, it felt like the city either did not care or had no real power over the ability to correct these issues either. And as a employee who works for a city that takes up a good chunk of our county, a lot of people don't know to reach out to the county, so we get a lot of calls that have to be managed by the county. You would think that city people would have more control over that.

Anne Elizabeth Moore:

Yeah, it's super weird and then it's confusing for residents and, considering the amount of grifters who have been involved in both city government and then state government but then less obviously also in county government, what you have is a lot of people like blame gaming each other so that there's not even really a traceable line to follow when you have a grievance or a problem or there's a clear legal violation.

Jennifer Hiatt:

Many of the residential blocks in Detroit have empty lots where houses once stood. Of course and I have been to Detroit a few times and, honestly, the impact of just seeing this kind of neighborhood devastation is profound. I will not ever forget the first time I was visiting a friend Uber took me through his neighborhood and his was one of only like seven houses standing in a three block area. I remember it. So can you talk about how it impacted your perception of your neighborhood when you were first there, but then, of course, the city as a whole?

Anne Elizabeth Moore:

Yeah, for sure.

Anne Elizabeth Moore:

And I will start by acknowledging that there is a part of me that loves when things get that weird, like all of the sudden to have a clearly housing-oriented neighborhood like many of the spaces in Detroit were one of the most populated cities in sort of years past be just decimated to the point that they're often, you know, one or two houses separated by several yards on a block and then just nothingness or overgrowth, or sometimes a house that is about to be torn down or that is on the list to be torn down will be sort of overgrown and there will be a tree coming through it or something. And that is on the list to be torn down will be sort of overgrown and there will be a tree coming through it or something, and that is an aesthetically fascinating situation that is also sociologically a absolute, terrifying nightmare. It felt often like I had been dropped into some horror movie or some science fiction movie where all of a sudden everyone was gone, but also their houses were gone, like all history of people was gone, and you know what that means. I think for a lot of people that live there to feel that expanse of weirdness is that you're constantly reminded of the loss of the people in the city who couldn't survive the constant pummeling from the city government and the county government and left, went to go live with family elsewhere, tried their luck renting in a different part of the country.

Anne Elizabeth Moore:

But I think when you don't live there, it's very easy to experience it on a purely aesthetic level, unless you are an urban planner or someone who sort of pays attention to stuff like that. And so then we had stuff like the ruin porn that made in 2014, made Detroit such a popular place for urban spelunkers, who really didn't acknowledge the loss of human lives and culture and vitality that those things represented. Yeah, so that's a complicated one, because it is really unique. It's like driving through the Badlands, which I you know, I'm from South Dakota and I always forget, before I get to the Badlands, that it is gutting, it's jaw dropping and a similar thing would happen every other day in Detroit, and also that it represents a very serious problem that needs to be addressed, still to this day. It needs to be addressed.

Jennifer Hiatt:

Yeah, we've talked about herbicide on this podcast before or the intentional destruction of cities, most often associated with war, but that's generally how I felt going through some of that. And my friend had one request on the whole vacation. It was that I did not take any pictures of any of the ruined buildings because the ruined porn was so popular at the time. Yeah, he was like please just show my city in a light that doesn't look like that, because there are a lot of beautiful things about Detroit too, so feel that that, because there are a lot of beautiful things about Detroit too, so feel that, yeah, absolutely it is.

Anne Elizabeth Moore:

It's a. It's an incredibly complicated thing. I think now it's evened out a little bit. That's ruined. Porn does not necessarily drive interest in the city, but it is something that we have to have a much stronger ethic around thinking about and talking about when we, when we do so.

Stephanie Rouse:

I feel like we've made it quite far into this conversation without bringing up gentrification when your book is called Gentrifier. But you point out early in the book that your role in gentrification is complicated. Towards the end of the book it becomes more clear why. Can you explain why it's not as straightforward as a commonly understood definition of gentrification?

Anne Elizabeth Moore:

Absolutely. I mean, gentrification is tricky, in the first place because no one means the same thing when they use the term. Really, there's sort of a commonly understood notion of it, often about white people living in places of visible poverty. That is sort of understood to be a sense of gentrification. And then the potential for money to start flowing through a place that has not seen investment in a while. And those are both like a walking around with your pals kind of like you point to the fanciest house on the block and you're like, ah, gentrification. But that really only describes a very slim portion of what gentrification looks like and how it operates.

Anne Elizabeth Moore:

And what I began to see at first when I moved into the house was that nobody had wanted to live in my house. It had gone up for sale several times. So the city gave it to the organization for a dollar $500. I don't remember what the initial investment was, maybe it was $5,000. And then to support the program of giving that house away to a writer. So then it's a more complicated thing than someone going in and trying to take a step back even further to figure out how the city had come about acquiring that property in the first place. And that's where I think notions of the house that I was living in had been at one point abandoned, and then it had been put under a foreclosure notification, but then it was sold in a somehow murky off-the-books way from some guy who saw it and had keys to it, apparently, who then sold it to a woman named Tamika Langford. And Tamika Langford bought it, entirely believing that she was participating in an above board legal exchange of money for property, and then continued to make regular payments on the back taxes that were owed which was why it had been foreclosed on in the first place or was under foreclosure in the first place and paid her down payment and the whole thing. Every time she made a payment on the taxes would visit the county office. The county never bothered to inform her that, in fact, this was a house that was already under the foreclosure property, was a house that was already under the foreclosure property, and so, at some point, without her knowledge or consent, the property was then relisted on the auction website and put up for sale again.

Anne Elizabeth Moore:

Now, that was the first time that it was up for sale in the 2010s. I think that happened in 2012. And then it went up again the next year, in 2013. It was given to the organization that gave it to me in 2014, I believe.

Anne Elizabeth Moore:

So then, the question of how we think about gentrification in relationship to this particular problem set of experiences is that the city was going to take that Black woman's house, no matter what, and they were going to ensure that someone with some kind of status or power or renown would move into it, and so they gave it to someone.

Anne Elizabeth Moore:

Who was going to give it to a writer, right? I'm not convinced that they believed that all of the writers would be white, and we were not, but the city saw a way to get rid of someone they saw as undesirable and bring in someone that they thought was gonna make their lives easier. I'm sorry, I just said the city, and I mean the county, and like it's all really complicated, deliberately complicated so that I can never give you the clear answer, but the bottom line is that gentrification, to my way of thinking now, is a series of systemic policies that try to push out people in poverty and bring in people with some kind of privilege, whether that's racial or financial or cultural or whatever, and that is something that I definitely participated in without being aware of any of the existence of a single one of those structures.

Jennifer Hiatt:

Yeah, actually one of the questions you posed pretty early on is if gentrification is the replacement of lower income residents of a home by middle-class ones, or folks of color by white folks, or of immigrants by non immigrants. Is it possible for gentrification if there's no competition for housing? But in reading your follow up article, there really is competition for this housing in some way. Originally I was like, well, were you able to reach some kind of conclusion on that question, but now it's like it's a whole separate question. Like you said, it's about the systems that are working against people, not necessarily the competition for housing that is there.

Anne Elizabeth Moore:

Yeah, and I talked to Tamika Lanford specifically about that house. Do we want to talk about ways of making sure that we can get you? You know that house had been sold by then. But like, do you feel like that's what you need to to be done with this? And she sort of said, yeah, I'm owed a house, I am owed a house by the city and she completely at one or two, maybe three tops, you know, with interest. But she was in deliberate competition for my exact house in a process that was absolutely 100% shielded from me until I went through a whole legal process to clear the title and then another whole process to track her down, even though I had been told she was dead in that legal process to track her down, convince her to talk to me and get her story on tape.

Jennifer Hiatt:

Yeah, it took effort on your behalf and I'm also a lawyer, so I get really mad when the legal process is used to protect people, and I know it always is. But what if it wasn't you right? What if it was somebody who was just happy to go through the quiet title process with a law firm? That's suspicious at best. With what was there. It was like quiet titlecom, yeah yeah, and you could have just moved on with your life and you could have just been like okay, well, I got the house and I sold it, and if you hadn't had a journalistic instinct to continue forward, this would still be happening with that particular house and nobody would be even aware of what happened here. Like we would have just ripped a house from someone and no one would have been the wiser.

Anne Elizabeth Moore:

Yeah, and that obviously does happen every single day. Still, I was shocked that no one wrote about the quiet title process. I was shocked that no one wrote about it as a follow-up to the Detroit housing crisis, which, whatever, it's not like that's over. But I have been shocked that there's been no light shown on the quiet titling process besides what I committed to paper myself.

Anne Elizabeth Moore:

And yeah, it's because when you are in the situation where you need to quiet a title, you just want to pay your money, get it done.

Anne Elizabeth Moore:

You're like already in legal and possibly financial straits and you just you got to believe your lawyers, because they're lawyers, they don't lie to you. Except for that, my lawyer told me a woman was dead when she was in fact alive, and kind of angry at me, angry at them. That's kind of the thing that makes the sort of Detroit housing crisis so complicated is that the system itself is deeply corrupt, filled with graft and cruelty and problematic as hell. But then there are these individual companies that pop up to like snake their way through it and make a buck off of the confusion and the overwhelming speed of the county's foreclosure decisions, and those are the people that want to kick the journalists out of the room, right? That's why we don't know that this happens all the time. Yeah, so it's a very, very multifaceted like that. It's just going to take years and years and years to clean all that up so that it's both comprehensible and fair and you know that there's any transparency to it.

Jennifer Hiatt:

I had hoped that the Supreme Court case, the US Supreme Court case.

Jennifer Hiatt:

It went up on foreclosures because in the city of Detroit a woman's home was foreclosed on over a very small amount of money, like $900 that she had in back taxes, although she thought she was up to date on her taxes because, again, no notice, and then the county foreclosed on her and then sold her house for hundreds of thousands of dollars and then kept all of that money through the court system, which, by the way, michigan courts did not necessarily support her. In that claim, which was again wild to me she hadn't had the resources to take it all the way to the Supreme Court and get the ruling that they got, which was that's a takings and you cannot just take people's hundreds of thousands of dollars for $900 in back taxes. We wouldn't be aware again that this was happening. But also that didn't bring people to the realization of what was going on. We have an entire Supreme Court case about it and yet nobody is like what the hell is happening over there or in any other small town. It's infuriating obviously Infuriating.

Anne Elizabeth Moore:

I will add something to your fury that when I published the piece in the Guardian it was immediately sort of seen as like elucidating and frustrating and did sort of shed light on a bunch of aspects of this stuff that we did not understand. And then, pretty soon thereafter there was a targeted, mostly Twitter campaign that sort of then spread to other forms of media to denounce the piece and me, which then suggested that I kill myself, and it was sort of picked up by bots in a campaign that sort of followed the timeline and structure of the campaign against Amber Heard and the Johnny Depp case, which then it turns out is something that is just, is a service that you can purchase. It's something that you can provide as like a PR fix. I don't have any evidence that the county was behind this and it starts to sound like a conspiracy theory, but the campaign did spread from social media to my unlisted phone number and then I had people calling me and giving me my home address. So I did have to leave town for a couple of weeks. I did have to have an armed guard watching my house and during that time I could have been promoting this, talking about the ideas, whatever. I was essentially silenced fairly permanently on this and I think that changes the game a little bit.

Anne Elizabeth Moore:

As I said, I don't have any evidence that the county was behind this, but I did FOIA information. I did a FOIA request for information about me personally and Tamika Langford after the piece came out, and there was all sorts of obfuscating techniques that were thrown in my face, and so I also don't have any evidence that they were not involved in something like this, and I think that is a real problem. When we start to think about the potential and the ease with which governments that are not operating in the best interests of the people are then using contemporary media campaigns and threatening and harassing techniques to shut down dissent, then we have a much, much, much bigger problem than like your urban policy sucks. Then it's like your urban policy is meant to destroy people's lives and to profit from them for as far as they can into the future, and that is your policy. It's not just failing, it's to make people as miserable as possible so they leave and you can sell the land for much more money.

Anne Elizabeth Moore:

So that's my, you know, sort of short diatribe about how the reason that we don't end up hearing about a lot of this stuff is because there are a ton of ways that the people who are sort of thinking about and writing about this stuff get silenced, in addition to it sounding kind of boring. You know like I want to write about the quiet title process. Well, no publication on earth is going to let me do that. Publication on earth is going to let me do that.

Stephanie Rouse:

Well, and also on that I mean, and through your experiences, you highlight the differences. I think everyone that followed what's happened in Detroit just understands that it's the mortgage companies that foreclosure was mainly happening because of their unethical practices. But it really wasn't. It was a lot of the tax foreclosure and it was the county that was more responsible for displacing all these families during that time.

Anne Elizabeth Moore:

And still today it sounds like yeah, and I think you know there has been an organization pushing legal reforms forward for housing related issues for years and their efforts just keep getting stymied. But it is true that, like, where this whole magilla of problems becomes hopeful is when you realize that like, oh, these are actually public policy issues and there are theoretically ways of responding to that in a democracy. It's just that is also a long process that doesn't really give people the immediate restitution that they require. Give people the immediate restitution that they require.

Jennifer Hiatt:

So, as we've been discussing, ultimately, after many issues regarding your quote, unquote free house, which, by the way, was also like $20,000 in roof repairs you were able to sell it and move away from Detroit and I think it's fair to say that it seems like the experiment with the organization ultimately was not successful. But would it have been? Do you see a scenario where this type of program could have been successful in areas that need to bring in people for excess housing without all of the corruption?

Anne Elizabeth Moore:

When I wrote the book I did.

Anne Elizabeth Moore:

Part of the reason for writing the book in the way that I wrote the book was to have something that could kind of feed a conversation about ethical housing for artists.

Anne Elizabeth Moore:

But the fact that the organization itself fell apart immediately when I moved in means that that wasn't ever going to be the correct configuration of people, and I would also say that the organization did not fully comprehend the array of issues behind this and so didn't do the policy advocacy, economic education, neighborhood investment, campaigning that would have been required to make something like this work.

Anne Elizabeth Moore:

While I saw a way for that to be true in 2020 when I was writing the book 2021, I do not believe it is possible now because we will have to reinvigorate support for the arts, which is going to take a really long time. We will have to reinvigorate a conversation around equitable access to housing. We will have to resolve the rest of the housing crisis before we start getting to questions about like, where are artists going to live? And then I think we also are going to have to do a lot of education and thinking and feeling around how we interact and respond to our neighbors. I am just currently not feeling like housing for artists is the number one priority, but obviously it is my number one priority. So it's complicated, like everything else I've said today. It's just complicated.

Stephanie Rouse:

And as this is Booked on Planning, in addition to your book, which we always recommend our listeners check out, what other books would you recommend our readers get a copy of?

Anne Elizabeth Moore:

Well for sure Matthew Desmond's Evicted is absolutely bedrock here for understanding any sort of housing policy whatsoever. I had read that several years before the Detroit situation even was on my radar, but then also after the Detroit situation was on my radar and I moved to New York, I experienced eviction a couple of different times and that book was constantly churning in my mind. It just described the process and the emotional toil and expense so well that I think that everyone should read it. But absolutely for sure it has to be bedrock for urban planning, as well as Brian Goldstone's New there Is no Place For Us, which does a really excellent job of tracking several families as they experience houselessness in Atlanta. You know, carrying the stories of individual people living in real cities I happen to think is the most important way to develop effective policy. But also keep in mind that I'm not an urban planner, even though I secretly would love to be.

Stephanie Rouse:

What's interesting is our author from two episodes ago suggested that second book. There Is no Place For Us, and I'm pretty sure we've had evicted a few times because it is an amazing book.

Jennifer Hiatt:

Amazing. He's on my favorite podcast, which is this Is when it Gets Interesting. Matthew Desmond is the featured interviewer for this week, so Well, anne.

Stephanie Rouse:

Thank you so much for joining us on the show to talk about your book Gentrifier memoir.

Anne Elizabeth Moore:

You are so welcome. I really really enjoyed it.

Jennifer Hiatt:

We hope you enjoyed this conversation with author and Elizabeth Moore on her book Gentrifier a memoir. You can get your copy through the publisher at catapult books, or click the link in the show notes below to take you directly to our affiliate page. Remember to subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts and please rate, review and share the show. Thank you for listening and we'll talk to you next time on Booked on Planning. Thank you.

People on this episode

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Jennifer Hiatt

Co-host
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Stephanie Rouse, AICP

Co-host