By Adam Barrett
Since we are upon the one-year anniversary [of the freezing death of two young children – ed.], and since we now finally have a new mayor in Detroit who claims to be a “grassroots progressive,” I would like to remind people of the tragedy that occurred last February, sparking a sudden conversation about the obvious homelessness problem in [former mayor] Duggan’s Detroit, by republishing a blog post I originally wrote on DetroitersForTaxJustice.com.
At that time, local zionist oligarch Dan Gilbert was hurriedly demolishing the old juvenile detention center before anyone could wonder whether it could’ve been used as a homeless shelter; it sat directly across the street from the Greektown Casino garage, where those two homeless kids infamously froze to death in early February, 2025 while huddling for warmth in their mother’s minivan.
In fact this was the view their mother might have had from her van as she and her children sheltered from the physical cold of Detroit’s winter, and the metaphorical cold of Detroit’s socioeconomic climate for the working class.
In the same city that so loudly and so constantly trumpets the great progress of its business elite and oligarchs like Dan Gilbert as a “comeback,” families and children in poverty are literally kicked to the side. It’s only when we are forced to step over their frozen corpses—and when certain politicians are running for mayor or governor—that we hear about any effort to address homelessness. But even then it is still merely taken for granted as just an accepted, permanent issue that will never really be fixed.
Dan Gilbert recently purchased the parcel where the juvenile jail sat, in order to make it part of a larger project that he has planned for the spot—a project that as usual will be heavily subsidized by the taxpayer. But allow me to interpret this image of the Wayne County Juvenile Detention Facility even further, since we do not have a press in Detroit that will frame anything in a way that might cast our dear local oligarchs in an unflattering light.
In 2018, Dan Gilbert bought Wayne County’s so-called “Fail Jail,” the unfinished, flawed, and way over-budget construction of a new county jail, as well as the land under it. In exchange he would build the county a new jail on land outside of downtown, and he promised to do it cheaper. He argued that if we truly hoped to revitalize downtown, prime real estate should not be used for penal facilities, but rather more welcoming commercial enterprises. His argument was sound, but his plan was self-serving. (2018 was also the same year that Gilbert sold Greektown Casino).
By September 2024, the new jail that Dan Gilbert built for us to replace the “Fail Jail” was also clearly a fail jail. The first Fail Jail was abandoned because costs were approaching $400M, yet this new one has cost us $670M and contained several flaws, greatly delaying its completion. Gilbert’s Fail Jail was just as over-budget and overdue as the original Fail Jail…so much for the “smart businessman” showing us he can do it better than the “inefficient public sector!”
Once inmates were moved in, conditions were so bad that they protested by breaking the sprinkler pipes to cause floods, and sheriff’s deputies were quitting in despair. A follow up to that story detailed even more problems at Dan Gilbert’s new Fail Jail, including lack of privacy, inadequate conference rooms, and nonfunctioning toilets in cells, forcing inmates to defecate in bags. There was also an unusually high number of inmate suicides noted, which is always suspicious.
The former Wayne County Juvenile Detention Facility is part of the Wayne County Jail system, and both are funded by the same property tax millage. All the while as these boondoggles with the new jail unfolded, Dan Gilbert enjoyed the fruits of tax captures taken from the jail millage. In other words he has arguably profited off of the suffering of jail inmates under inhumane conditions in our detention facilities.
According to a report by Detroiters For Tax Justice, $6.4M from Detroiter taxpayers’ contribution to the county jail millage was looted by tax captures and tax abatements for developers (largely Gilbert) from 2015 to 2023, while conditions in the jails have worsened. The old jail has been in the news for years due to understaffing, overcrowding, and lack of heat in the winter. The juvenile detention center was in the news in 2023 for multiple inhumane conditions.
In a better world this taxpayer-built juvenile facility could have been kept open to serve as public housing, or at least shelter for homeless families, including the children who froze to death across the street from it while it was being demolished. But because Dan Gilbert needed that site for his new development, it had to go. Meanwhile, Detroit has by far the worst ratio of vacant-homes-to-homeless-people in America: according to the United Way, there were 116 vacant houses for every homeless person in Detroit in 2023—to say nothing of our vast surplus of vacant office space and commercial space!
Vacant office space is something else that Dan Gilbert also specializes in; part of the reason he wants the RenCen [Renaissance Center] demolished is because it makes it harder for him to charge premium prices for space in his new Hudson’s site office tower if there is so much other vacant office space nearby. Furthermore, part of the reason they’re telling us the RenCen can’t be converted into affordable housing (as many suggested) is because that would spoil the market for the more profitable luxury housing that developers are pushing.
The lesson here is this: Detroit has far more than enough available building space to put a roof over everyone’s head very easily, but it’s being held hostage in order to protect the profit margins of zionist oligarchs like Dan Gilbert. Because according to the rules of capitalism, nothing is allowed to happen unless someone can profit from it. It’s just like that part in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath about the hungry who must starve when a profit cannot be squeezed from an orange:
But in Detroit it’s not oranges, it’s housing. Then you also have the land speculators in Detroit hoarding property—the biggest and worst of which is the Detroit Land Bank itself—holding property hostage, and swiftly demolishing houses in order to create artificial scarcity so the real estate market can get a boost. They’re playing a shell game with housing for investors’ gain, while Black Detroiters live in cars.
Meanwhile City Council has thrown over a BILLION dollars in tax incentives at private developers since 2014 to build so-called “affordable housing,” and yet Detroit still has rampant homelessness, evictions, and a child poverty rate at 44%! School Superintendent Vitti admitted last year there were 3,182 homeless DPSCD students, but researchers think it could be up to 14,000.
Since I originally wrote this piece a year ago, more revelations of the depravity of Mayor Duggan’s and Council President Sheffield’s Detroit have come to light. The poverty rate for 2024 was revealed to have risen to 34.5%—the highest since 2017—and the child poverty rate for 2024 was found to have spiked from 44% to an astonishing 51%. This, while Duggan and the local media continued to insist that Detroit was doing better than ever, touting ribbon cuttings and stats like Detroit’s Moody’s credit rating going up, or the City’s $105M budget surplus in 2025 – a grotesque example of money withheld that could have gone to public housing. Now there are also reports coming out of the abhorrent conditions inside the shelters that Duggan and Sheffield constantly claim are the answer, the abusive treatment people experience there, and of the people living in cars outside of the shelters because there is no room inside.
Now there’s news of all the residents at the Leland House being evacuated overnight by force after DTE suddenly cut the power off, rather than waiting for eviction proceedings. And Mary Sheffield’s still refusing to support anything but her watered-down version of the Tenants’ Rights Ordinance that the Detroit Tenants Union has been trying to get in place for years now.
Worse yet, it was revealed that Sheffield was spotted at a glitzy campaign event in the lobby of the Leland just weeks before the power was cut, showing off renderings of a gentrified Leland while the unsuspecting residents still lived upstairs. The building is already heading to auction, fueling suspicion that the entire plan was “gentrification by evacuation.” Meanwhile other buildings in the city ripe for gentrification are without heat in winter.
Whoever’s still saying that Detroit is undergoing a “comeback” is ignoring the blatant inequality of starving and freezing people right in front of our eyes, and that includes our new Mayor Sheffield. The current situation is a moral outrage of historic proportions, and if you’re an elected official and you aren’t actively fighting against this apartheid then we might as well consider it your legacy.
Just a few months prior to the two children freezing to death at Greektown, Mayor Duggan told a San Francisco paper in a glowing interview that Detroit doesn’t have a homeless problem; that we don’t have tent cities. Just because Detroit’s tent cities aren’t as visible as those in San Francisco doesn’t mean we don’t have them. Just look on the freeways! Just look inside the parked cars and vacant buildings! These are the Hoovervilles—or should I say, Dugganvilles—of our time.
At his press conference after the Greektown tragedy, Duggan lied and said there were shelter beds available at the time. There really weren’t. Anti-homelessness advocates have also begged the city to give out hotel vouchers during these cold snaps, but Duggan said there were none available. A couple days later, a water main flooded out an entire neighborhood in Southwest, and Duggan got right on TV to say that all those displaced will be put up in hotels.
Meanwhile Greektown Casino stepped up efforts to repel homeless people from its premises.
Even right-wing wife beater Charlie Leduff recently chimed in with his own brutal reporting on the issue, asking why hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants flow in to Detroit to address homelessness, “but the city can’t keep a hotline open past 6pm in the dead of winter” and families are turned away, left to freeze to death in vans. He called it Detroit’s “homeless industrial complex,” claiming that “the grifters in this homeless racket are a roach horde feasting on the city’s most vulnerable,” observing how Detroit suspiciously spends more per capita on the homeless than Los Angeles, which has a much higher homeless population.
In a follow-up story by BridgeDetroit, they reported that a 2017 study said one chronically homeless individual costs Michigan taxpayers just over $35,500 a year in aid, while keeping that person housed only cost around $12,800.
In response to this sudden flurry of critical coverage, the City’s social media propaganda department quickly began blasting out all kinds of “good news” on affordable housing and efforts around homelessness—including this video of grieving mother Tateona Williams being given a new home:
Yes, you too can own your very own home in the New Detroit, and all it will cost you is two of your offspring freezing to death in front of the whole world. Obviously we are happy for her, but what is the City doing about the other thousands of homeless in the city? We need *structural* change, not one-off Cinderella stories. You cannot fix social justice issues with social media posts…this was clearly election campaign PR for Mike Duggan. Yet the City keeps pumping out social media posts exclaiming how much they’ve invested in “affordable housing”…
They’ve spent $1.2B of our tax money on incentivizing private development projects to get a couple so-called “affordable” units out of each luxury building, when our very own Detroit Housing Commission is in shambles because it was defunded by the Duggan administration for over a decade.
And Ms. Williams’ children were not the only two homeless people to die in a car last February for lack of housing: “Chuck” of Vernor Avenue fame also passed away with his two dogs from asphyxiation while sleeping in a running car:
No mainstream media picked up the story of Chuck’s death. Had they done that, people might start to really question the validity of the corporate propaganda that keeps claiming Detroit is on the rebound, and Duggan would have to really do some serious damage control for his gubernatorial campaign.
Meanwhile activists reported that the displaced victims of the big flood in Southwest Detroit, who Duggan made a big show of taking care of and putting up in hotels, were being fed cold hot dogs, and other prison-style food. And let’s not forget the instance of “gentrification at gunpoint” that claimed the life of Sherman Lee Butler in 2024.
In the face of all this corruption and greed meant to keep the few fed while the many suffer, our leaders still offer us only lip service and band-aids. When the people are kept starving, denied the social food of resources that rightfully belong to everyone while the rich are given more than they need, they will eventually satisfy their hunger on the grapes of wrath. Detroit—and America itself—is barreling down a dead-end path.
The fact is that even if our leaders managed to provide enough shelters for the homeless, that does not attack the root cause of homelessness; it merely allows people to be comfortable while remaining homeless. To solve the underlying cause of poverty and homelessness, we must dissolve the structural economic inequality that creates it: capitalism. Great wealth cannot exist at the top without there also being great poverty on the bottom. It comes down to distribution of wealth, and when wealth is mostly hoarded by a few, it creates scarcity for the many.
The nonprofits are not free of blame here either. Sure, some provide critical resources to the homeless, but they are never seen in the halls of power challenging the status quo to dismantle root causes of poverty, because they depend on those same capitalist structures for their funding.
The only way to end this cycle is for our elected leaders to take the politically risky position that the rich no longer need to be rich, and make arrangements for a fairer distribution of resources. Tax incentives for billionaires cannot possibly fit within that model, and our current leaders clearly lack the political courage to stand up to their oligarchic benefactors. Some of them even enjoy things the way they are.
Nine-year-old Darnell Jr. and two-year-old A’millah Currie were forced to die in a van in order to preserve the profitability of resource hoarders like Dan Gilbert. Detroiters For Tax Justice and the Moratorium Now Coalition have called on City Council to declare a state of emergency for housing in Detroit and turn away from trickle-down “Dugganomics” solutions. So far there has been no response of any substance from them, or our new Mayor Sheffield.
Adam Barrett is a Detroit resident and a member of Detroiters for Tax Justice and Moratorium NOW! Coalition
