Dead Bodies, Wild Dogs, Squatters in Government-Owned Detroit Houses

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These occupants don’t own the properties where they live. They’re not paying rent to the owner either. Their homes on Alpine Street, a Free Press analysis shows, bookend one of the City of Detroit’s highest concentrations of squatters, people who live in homes owned by the Detroit Land Bank Authority.

There are as many as 4,300 houses just like these across the city.

Many squatters once were the homeowners, but lost the houses to foreclosure. Others simply broke in and stayed. Along this four-block stretch of Alpine, squatters occupy 20 land bank properties, according to its records.

Ordell and Wardell Belt, twin brothers in their 60s, live in a small frame house without water or heat, but they have a pup, Scandalous, chained up outside for protection. Wardell did time in federal prison for armed bank robbery; Ordell said he was shot by police as a teenager and is too embarrassed today to describe what happened, other than he regrets what he did.

The twins have lived on Alpine most of their lives, and Ordell once owned their house.

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Welcome to the worst squatter problem in the nation.

The Detroit Land Bank owns nearly 30,000 residential structures in the city, and with as many as 4,300 of them occupied — it’s a magnitude unlike any other place.

Squatters are a tricky problem: remove them and add to the city’s homeless population and its massive inventory of abandoned buildings. Let them stay, and the land bank is summoned often to investigate what some of its occupants may be up to: dog fighting, prostitution, drug dealing, overdoses, gambling, gun possession or running a chop shop.

Detroit police also are called regularly to land bank properties to investigate dead bodies — at least 50 homicides over the last four years.

In one case, remains were found in a garbage can in a garage. At another house, police found the bodies of a mother and her 4-year-old daughter stashed in a basement.

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Life as a squatter is a struggle: Some are extremely poor, their only income a federal disability check. Some have no heat or water.

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On Quincy Street, several miles north of Alpine’s concentration of squatters,there’s the mother and her four young sons, whose land bank house is next to a vacant commercial parcel with a population of foxes and piles of discarded tires. The smell of rubber drifts to her front porch, and she hears the foxes’ high-pitched yelping. Something, at one point, killed their dog. The mother and the boys blamed the foxes, but a state Department of Natural Resources official said a feral dog attack is more likely.

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“Without legal occupancy, they can’t get water, they can’t get utilities. What you end up with then is the most dangerous situation — people hijacking neighborhood utilities, especially in the winter, which is dangerous to occupants and the neighborhood.”

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Among one neighbor’s concerns: bonfires on the front lawn, loud parties, screeching tires, and car repair and resale business at the house. The neighbor said the occupants had chipped at the curb with sledgehammers to make room for a bigger driveway.

“They have cemented half of the front yard,” a neighborhood resident of 22 years said in a handwritten note. “Flat bed trucks come in + out dropping off cars. … They drag race up + down Forrer. … The backyard is nothing but cars, trash + dog waste.”

And what did the land bank do? It’s selling the house to the occupants for $1,000.

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Josh Akers, an assistant professor of urban and regional studies at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, said the land bank’s approach to squatters is both good and bad.

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The land bank has developed two programs to turn its occupants into homeowners. But they have been slow to make a difference.

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Since launching the buyback program in late 2015, occupants of 465 houses have paid $1,000 to the land bank for their houses. To stave off future foreclosures, participants must save $100 a month for a year, pay their first property tax bill, and complete home ownership classes.

They don’t get the deed to the property until they’ve paid their taxes and finished the classes.

As of mid-July, occupants of 278 houses had received their deed, while three dropped out. The land bank expects the occupants of another 50 houses will get their deeds in August.

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A second program for land bank occupants, Bridges to Homeownership, is sputtering along. The Black Caucus Foundation of Michigan, a politically connected charity, originally created Bridges to buy land bank houses, fix them up, and sell them to the occupant on a land contract. It was billed as another way to nudge squatters toward legitimacy.

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The Free Press reported in April that Bridges wrongly evicted some squatters and flipped houses to developers for thousands more than it paid for those properties. Bridges, in turn, accused the land bank of undercutting its progress by not selling it enough houses.

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According to summaries of its 2017 investigations, obtained by the Free Press under the Freedom of Information Act, the land bank or the Detroit Police Department were called out 456 times to investigate suspected drug houses, illegal dumping, dog fighting, a chop shop, gang activity, prostitution and other questionable activity.

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Last year across the city, police or the land bank also found guns, ammunition, illegal utility hookups, cash and lots of drugs — marijuana, heroin and cocaine, and scales to weigh it all.

One house, on Collingham Drive near Gratiot and 8 Mile on the northeast side, was the subject of 16 police runs during the first three months of 2017. And the property was the site of five fatal overdoses in five months.

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During one such check, an occupant of a house on Wisconsin Street on the west side said he had permission to be there from the aunt of a friend named Will. Later, the occupant said it was Will’s mother who gave the OK. But he didn’t know the women’s names. He said he didn’t know Will’s last name, either.

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From 2014 through January, Detroit police have investigated the homicides of at least 50 people whose bodies were found on or near land bank properties. They’ve found bodies inside land bank houses, on a front porch, hidden in overgrown grass and weeds, slumped over in vehicles, and one concealed by branches and brush — a woman with a hole in her chin.

They investigated the case of a demolition contractor who tipped over a foul-smelling garbage can at a land bank property and saw the body of a man fall out. They found a body burned head to toe, the injuries so severe they weren’t initially sure whether the victim was male or female. They found a man’s body, dressed in multicolor boxer shorts, “in a state of decomposition” with miscellaneous flies and larvae.

Victims were shot, stabbed, strangled. One 7-year-old malnourished boy, Immanuel Foster, was tortured and later died. The land bank house where police found the boy beaten and burned is still standing — and it’s occupied.

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When the Free Press visited the house near Grand River on the city’s west side in May, a man named Reginald said the occupant was hospitalized, and he was just keeping an eye on the property for his friend, also Reginald.

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Reginald said he doesn’t have electricity or water — but he fills juice bottles with water at a friend’s house. He has kerosene lamps, too.

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Alpine is squatter central. Once filled with families and children, it’s a tattered neighborhood of small houses, many deserted, and vacant lots. There’s hoarding and heartbreak on Alpine.

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