A few years ago, Alex Alsup wanted to stop an epidemic of foreclosures in Detroit. He found a way to reduce them by 94%. He and the Neighborhood Associations of Detroit based their new strategy on the New England Complex Systems Institute’s door-to-door early intervention strategy developed for combatting Ebola. By finding people who had difficulty paying their taxes before they fell behind, they were able to develop early interventions.
In Detroit, if a property owner goes three years without paying property taxes, their property goes up for auction. Trying to intervene after a homeowner received an auction notice is acting way too late. Auctions and evictions were the symptoms, but not the cause. Instead, acting early in a neighborly way was the key.
Alex was inspired by a policy that stopped the outbreak of Ebola in West Africa. Instead of waiting for people to show up at the hospital with the most severe symptoms, neighborhood teams went door-to-door. Anyone with just a fever or other early symptoms could be identified and monitored. This is how the transmission was stopped.
The same approach in Detroit resulted in early help to those who were having financial problems and prevented a descent into debt and foreclosure. Detroit offers property tax exemptions to low income homeowners, but this program is not widely known about, leading to compounding tax debts that many residents could have avoided entirely. Alex’s program aims to inform and assist homeowners with the exception process.
