Plundered, by Bernadette Atuahene (Little Brown & Company, 2025), is a comprehensive study of housing in Detroit that led the author to analyze aspects of capitalism, deindustrialization and the racist policy that created a massive property tax foreclosure crisis in the city, resulting in the abandonment and demolition of close to 100,000 homes.

“Using data from over eight years of research…participation in a grassroots movement for property tax justice—this book reveals and gives a name to an overlooked but widespread phenomenon: predatory governance, which is how local governments intentionally or unintentionally raise public dollars through racist policies” (p. 12).

Atuahene describes herself as “a socio-legal scholar…focused on land stolen from Black people.” Unlike ivory-tower academics, she moved to Detroit in 2017 to study the high rate of squatters in Detroit houses. She found most were former owners who had lost the house to property tax foreclosure and had stayed there while trying to regain title.

DETROIT THEN AND NOW

Detroit is known as the Motor City. Ford, General Motors, American Motors and Chrysler auto factories once dominated the regional economy and employed most Detroit workers. City neighborhoods are still mainly small frame and brick bungalows and ranches built between 1920-1960. Although the federal government and mortgage companies redlined Black neighborhoods and community deed restrictions kept Black homeowners and renters in a few (redlined) areas, by 1970 home ownership among Black Detroit residents was 53% (of the Black population), 41% above the national average, a situation Atuahene discusses on page 41.

By the first decade of the 21st century, most of the drastically shrunken pool of high-paying factory jobs were outside the city in predominantly white suburbs. After the Great Recession, Detroit’s home values had plummeted, but the city did not reduce the higher tax assessments until years later. Between 2011 and 2015 local government had confiscated one in four Detroit homes for mortgage and tax foreclosure.

‘A TALE OF TWO GRANDFATHERS’

In Part I, “The Origin of Racist Policies,” Atuahene presents two factory workers who had achieved home ownership in Detroit by the 1950s. Despite illegally-imposed taxes on the over-valued property, and improvement loans denied in redlined Detroit, Mr. Brown’s granddaughter “Myrisha” spent years fighting for her family home, only to lose it permanently when a frozen pipe burst, covering the living room with a foot of ice. Mr. Bucci’s grandson, former Wayne County Executive Robert Ficano, moved to the suburbs when he was three years old. None of the obstacles Myrisha met affected his home. By 2020 the median home value in Detroit was $53,000. In Robert Ficano’s Livonia neighborhood it was $204,000.

Part II is “The Granddaughter’s Pain.” Myrisha was overburdened with family dysfunction, economic decline and an accumulating property tax bill that she never should have paid from the start. Woven into her story, Athuahene presents the devilish details of the state, county and municipal rules that kept her and thousands more homeowners in debt. Between 2008 and 2012 she accumulated a $6,000 tax bill but owed $9,300 from added fees and an 18% interest rate the State of Michigan charged on delinquent property tax bills.

In Part III, “Businesses that Profit from Racist Policies: Buying Stolen Homes,” Atuahene describes small- and big-time slumlords and entrepreneurs who bought up the foreclosed homes, now reverted to public ownership. Ninety-six thousand homes became Detroit Land Bank Authority liabilities by January 2016. Today, close to half the houses in Detroit are owned by non-residents. Nevertheless, a Detroit Free Press headline proclaimed: “47% of Detroit homeowners don’t pay their property taxes.” Atuahene vigorously protests this kind of victim blaming and shaming; the Free Press never did report how many scofflaw owners were non-resident slumlords and investors.

Part IV, “Government Entities that Profit from Racist Policies: The Grandson’s Plan” outlines the grand finale of Atuahene’s work: Robert Ficano (and later Warren Evans), Wayne County Executives, developed a Turnaround Plan in 2014 which placed ALL the surplus money from property tax foreclosure into a revolving fund. The fund, money mostly from the city of Detroit, saved the county from the bankruptcy and state-imposed emergency management suffered by the city of Detroit during the same period.

In “Conclusion: the Search for Justice,” Atuahene explores the racial and wealth divide between majority-white suburbs and majority-Black Detroit, extracted by land speculators and investors in addition to government taxation. Further extraction, though not discussed in Plundered, is ongoing: the millions in Detroit’s annual budgets to demolish vacant homes and manage large swathes of grassy lots—“fields,” as residents say.

RESEARCH METHODS REFLECT PHILOSOPHY

No armchair activist, now over a dozen community groups, spearheaded by Dr. Atuahene and her emerging research, began to assist individuals to regain their property and worked to change the punitive laws and eliminate gratuitous bureaucratic obstacles. The Coalition for Property Tax Justice she co-founded helped people appeal unconstitutionally high property tax assessments—still a major problem in 2024. The organization campaigned for a property tax reform ordinance, passed in 2023. They established the Dignity Restoration Fund to compensate homeowners who lost their property despite eligibility for exemptions that were a very well-kept secret. Now all property tax bills are easier to read and notify owners of available assistance. The state even dropped the 18% interest on tax arrears to a “generous” 6%; information about the mysterious homestead tax exemption is now placed on all property tax bills. In her sequel to Plundered, Atuahene will explore the Coalition’s “zig-zag journey toward justice.”

The final section, “About This Project” shows readers why this book is so powerful, beyond its immediate focus. “My interview style focuses on educing both factual details and the emotional landscapes surrounding them.” She returns her interviews to her main characters for verification, which gives respondents “a notable degree of agency in crafting their stories.” She does not shrink from presenting people in their full complexity: “anything else is dehumanizing.”

Her ending message is for all of us: “I developed the concept of predatory governance, which is governments, intentionally or not, raising funds through racist policies. That is what connects property tax injustice in Detroit to loss of wealth in other majority Black communities…people committed to racial justice must learn to recognize predatory governance, call it out, and put a stop to it. Vulnerable individuals are counting on us.”

–Susan Van Gelder