Detroit, MI Housing Supports

The Challenge

The City of Detroit offers a wide array of services and programs designed to address housing instability, but these supports were fragmented across various government departments and there was no central place for residents to learn about all the available services and how to get connected to them. Lacking a one-stop-shop for all services related to housing affordability, foreclosure prevention and home repair, residents missed out on some lesser-known services and unnecessarily competed for other services. 

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The Innovation

With help from the GPL, the City of Detroit procured for and collaboratively designed the Detroit Housing Network, a centralized department established to better serve residents with available housing supports. Specifically, the City released a Request for Responses (RFR) that invited nonprofit program providers to co-design the model of the one-stop-shop housing resource hubs and hosted monthly workshops with the selected providers to define program goals and outcomes, select performance metrics, set up active data monitoring to enable program improvements, and create effective referral pathways to match residents to best-fit services.

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The Results

The capacity and program efficiency demonstrated throughout the Detroit Housing Network design process gave City leadership the confidence that newly available COVID-related stimulus funds could be efficiently deployed to address housing challenges, resulting in substantial funding being allocated to urgently needed services including housing counseling, foreclosure prevention, and home repair. In addition, through the collaborative process of co-designing the one-stop housing resource hubs, both City staff and local providers are learning how to utilize the procurement process as a strategic lever to meet shared goals, reduce duplication and fragmentation, and better serve residents.

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The Challenge:

Many Detroit residents face challenges maintaining stable housing. The scale of poverty in the city has significant implications for housing affordability and stability: 34 percent of Detroit's residents live in poverty, leading to a tenuous housing market where the majority of renters and homeowners are cost-burdened. Due to these affordability challenges, Detroit residents struggle with high rates of eviction and foreclosure. Among homeowners, 36 percent of households struggle to pay property tax each year, leading to a situation in which many homes are tax delinquent and at risk of foreclosure. Furthermore, Detroit’s aging housing stock (87 percent of all housing units were built before 1960) requires critical repairs which many residents can’t afford, leading to unsafe and unhealthy housing conditions.

To mitigate housing challenges in the city, Detroit offers a wide variety of housing resources, ranging from property tax exemption programs to grants for home repairs. However, these programs are offered by various city, county, and state departments and are administered in a disjointed fashion across different public and nonprofit partners. There is no central place for residents to go to understand all of their housing options, which often leaves them confused about what services are available and how to access them. As a result, some housing programs are consistently underutilized while others have waitlists that are hundreds or thousands of people long. For example, over 3,000 residents are on the waitlist for a Senior Emergency Home Repair Grant, but over 75 percent of those interviewed had not applied for an available alternative program (a 0.0 percent interest home repair loan) and 25 percent stated they didn’t know about it, despite their likely eligibility.

To better connect renters and homeowners to the array of housing supports available, the City aimed to design and launch a new network of community organizations to serve as one-stop shops that offer core housing supports to Detroit residents. The goal of the Detroit Housing Network is to create healthy neighborhoods and advance racial equity in Detroit communities by increasing housing stability and affordable homeownership for Detroit residents.

The Innovations:

With help from the GPL, the City of Detroit procured for and collaboratively designed the Detroit Housing Network to better provide residents with available housing supports. In particular, project partners:

Released a results-driven request for responses for a new network of community organizations to serve as centralized, one-stop resource hubs that aim to connect Detroit residents with core housing supports. The City of Detroit aimed to develop and launch a new network of community organizations in order to transform residents’ experiences with housing support and better connect them to available programs. For example, a resident in need of a roof repair might have previously traveled downtown to City Hall, spoken with an administrative staffer who is not a housing expert, and may or may not have been added to a long waitlist for a home repair grant. With the new Detroit Housing Network, a resident can visit a community-based organization in their neighborhood and meet with a housing counselor who comprehensively assesses their needs. The counselor might identify that the resident qualifies for a 0.0 percent home interest loan for their roof repair (as an alternative to joining 3,000 people on the grant waitlist), and separately also qualifies for lead remediation due to having a child under age six in the home, as well as for a property tax exemption due to living in a ‘neighborhood enterprise zone.’  In this way, the Detroit Housing Network seeks to streamline the utilization of housing services in order to increase overall housing stability for Detroit residents.

Establishing a new Detroit Housing Network presented an opportunity for the City to develop an innovative request for responses (RFR) that invited provider organizations to co-design the program model such that it would utilize philanthropic funds most effectively. This represented a stark departure from the City’s business-as-usual way of procuring services, which typically defined or prescribed the program models that provider organizations must offer to clients. With support from the GPL, the City drafted a results-driven RFR that clearly defined the program goals upfront, explicitly identified the desired target population, and laid out the specific program metrics that the City wanted to track. The City also developed evaluation criteria that emphasized respondents’ experience with integrated service models and program evaluation. The evaluation rubric, unlike any used before at the City’s Housing and Revitalization Department, helped staff pinpoint their vision for ideal network partners. Ultimately, the City selected a group of community-based organizations and a network manager to plan and launch the Detroit Housing Network.

Co-designed the Detroit Housing Network program model alongside community development organizations to deliver coordinated housing support across Detroit. Together with the selected providers, the City set out on an intensive, six-month co-design process to effectively refine the Detroit Housing Network program model. With support from the GPL, the City hosted monthly workshops for all partners to work on aspects of the program design, including defining program goals and outcomes, selecting performance metrics, setting up active data monitoring to enable program improvements, and creating effective referral pathways to match residents to best-fit services. Regarding creation of the referral pathway, for example, key workshop topics included needs identification for residents, anticipated high-demand services, designing a referral database, conducting referrals, and tracking referrals.

The Results: 

Although the Detroit Housing Network is still in the process of transitioning from planning to implementation, the initiative has led to early promising results. In particular, the project has:

Created an implementation model to support increased funding allocation to housing services. In the wake of economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent rescue funds  allocated to city government, the Detroit Housing Network has helped to align more resources around housing stability. CARES Act and American Rescue Plan Act funds awarded to Detroit have been allocated to needed housing services including housing counseling, home repair, and foreclosure prevention. The capacity and program efficiency organized through the Detroit Housing Network design process gave city leadership the confidence that funds could be deployed to address housing challenges.  

Piloted a new model of collaborative co-design between the City and community organizations. The City’s Housing and Revitalization Department piloted a new approach for partnering with community organizations on both designing and delivering housing support services, collaborating with community service providers as partners actively working together towards shared goals, rather than purely as vendors delivering a service. This unified approach brings multiple stakeholders to the table to improve the management of housing resources and the quality of service provision. It is expected that this collaborative approach to service delivery will align city, county, state, and philanthropic housing resources and services to reduce duplication and fragmentation, ultimately improving accessibility of resources for Detroit residents.  

Built capacity among City staff to use procurement as a strategic lever to accomplish program goals. City staff have begun to recognize procurement as a strategic tool to improve service performance and produce better outcomes for Detroit residents. In particular, staff have cultivated strategies and skills related to explicitly identifying and elevating program goals in procurement solicitations, using data to identify opportunities for performance improvement, and collaboratively planning for services and reviewing success metrics with providers. City staff involved in this project are equipped to apply results-driven approaches to future procurements for other services and have begun to embed these practices into departmental policies and procedures.