We Live Here – Detroit Eviction Defense and the Battle for Housing Justice

by Matt Peters

In We Live Here: Detroit Eviction Defense and the Battle for Housing Justice, writer Jeffrey Wilson and illustrator Bambi Kramer have composed a collective biography of grassroots activists fighting an unfair economy. Those activists, all based in the Detroit metropolitan area, were brought together by a debt crisis that shook the nation and threatened the loss of their homes. Using graphic journalism to tell their stories, Wilson and Kramer have created an engrossing movement history. In telling that history, they often illuminate the critical links between health and housing security.

We Live Here focuses on a mutual aid group that formed in the aftermath of the 2008 housing market crash, the nationwide financial crisis that resulted after lenders pushed high-risk mortgages onto economically vulnerable borrowers, many of whom eventually fell into financial ruin—and lost their homes—as a result. Called Detroit Eviction Defense (DED), the group took shape during the Occupy Movement, the protest against social and economic inequality that began in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park in 2011. That protest quickly grew into a decentralized international phenomenon, absorbing and amplifying a long list of economic grievances, from the rising costs of higher education to the lax oversight of the global financial industry.

We Live Here opens with a brief introduction, written in conventional prose, that explains the structure and strategy of DED, describing it as “a model of place-based struggle that has won some eighty homes back from the brink of eviction” (page 5). To give context to that struggle, Wilson paints an economic picture of Detroit and its “housing history and modes of eviction” (page 5), providing facts and figures that will come to life later in graphic format.

Wilson explains that most housing dispossession takes the form of tax or mortgage foreclosure. In the case of the former, the local municipality takes possession of a house because of nonpayment of property taxes. For the latter, a private lender does the same in response to nonpayment of a home loan. In either case, the experience is largely the same for the homeowner. They get a notice of the foreclosure, after which they can leave their home voluntarily or be forced out with an eviction.

Dispossessions of both types were widespread between 2005 and 2015, reaching “[a]pproximately 160,000 foreclosures” and affecting “48% of all residential properties” (page 5). Of those homes, 27,000 experienced both a mortgage and tax foreclosures.

There were racial dimensions to this story as well, as Detroit’s Black homebuyers were often sold lower-quality homes with higher-interest mortgages relative to white homebuyers. The result was that a city once known for its high rate of homeownership, including Black homeownership, became a city of renters.

As the book switches to graphic storytelling, readers see a community of activists gathering at a church in Detroit. The occasion is a celebration event for DED, taking place in 2016, five years after the group’s founding. At the potluck gathering, activists take turns sharing their stories of successful anti-eviction efforts. Their recollections provide the backbone of the storytelling through the book’s six chapters.

The first to share a story is Bertha Garrett, whose home defense was the first effort that prompted activists and supporters to mobilize under the name Detroit Eviction Defense. Garrett’s financial troubles began when her husband William, once the owner of numerous barber shops, lost his vision and had a stroke. The medical expenses and loss of income put a severe strain on their household. Garrett’s daughter Michele stepped in and bought the house from her parents, hoping to provide a solution to their precarious financial state. But when the house’s taxes and mortgage rate increased after the sale, the situation became untenable again. The Garretts eventually received an eviction notice.

Michele’s next attempt at finding a solution was to turn to her community. She shared her story with a journalist from the Michigan Citizen, hoping to bring public support to her cause. That journalist, Eric Campbell, interviewed the Garretts to cover their story. He also put them in touch with DED. “I’ll call some friends of mine,” he told them. “They meet at the Central United Methodist on Adams Street” (page 25, quoted by Michele Garrett). It was at those meetings that DED first coalesced.

The Garretts’ case provided a blueprint for later DED efforts, and it reflected tactics that were popularized at the time by the Occupy Movement. Occupy focused much of its energy on civil disobedience and other forms of nonviolent resistance, employing tactics like sit-ins, blockades, and encampments. DED adapted many of those tactics to its own mission.

When the Garretts went to the Central United Methodist Church, they were advised by a community activist and a public interest lawyer that Bertha and her husband should stay in their home, no matter what their creditor, or any third parties involved in the eviction process, told them. In tandem with that, the Garretts and DED would mobilize neighbors and supporters to park their cars around the house and gather in their yard, thereby preventing an eviction crew from dropping off a dumpster and tossing out their belongings. They also invited TV news reporters to show up at the Garretts’ home and cover the anti-eviction efforts.

Along with the physical barriers and media outreach, DED organized a phone campaign. The group urged community members to call and show up at the Garretts’ creditor, BNY Mellon, and ask them to let Bertha and her husband stay in their home. A day of coordinated efforts—and the risk of bad publicity—was enough to pressure the bank. BNY Mellon’s lawyers offered a resolution that would let the Garretts stay in their home.

In addition to providing a blueprint for future home-defense actions, the Garretts’ story foreshadowed some of the root causes DED would see in later eviction cases. Often the people they came to defend suffered financial trouble and housing insecurity as a result of health or safety challenges.

The next chapter offers germane examples of how well-being and housing issues can be closely linked. The chapter introduces two people who lived near each other in Inkster, a town just outside of Detroit. The first person was Jerome, who had to fight to save his home after his disability benefits were cut. The second was Allison, whose living situation became unstable after she became a victim of domestic violence.

Others struggled with both health issues and systemic economic forces. One was Marie, who is introduced two chapters later. Marie lived in Black Bottom, a part of Detroit that had once been a thriving area for Black-owned businesses, including drug stores, grocers, medical clinics, and entertainment venues.

Black Bottom, though, was in the path of other Detroit residents who traveled between the city’s downtown and its suburbs. Much of it was bulldozed to clear the way for a highway project that could serve those travelers. In the trying economic times that followed, Marie bought a house that seemed affordable initially—until she learned that the plumbing and heating had fallen into disrepair while the prior owner was struggling with ailing health. Marie had to pour considerable amounts of time and money into fixing her home.

Marie suffered her own health problems later, in the form of stress-induced insomnia, as she faced sex discrimination at her workplace. With few other options in the once-bustling district, Marie decided to take early retirement to escape a hostile work environment. Afterwards, she struggled to make her house payments.

“I had always considered myself a private person,” Marie recollected (page 130). She had to go outside her comfort zone to share her problems with others, but she took the step at a DED meeting. DED helped her by organizing a phone campaign and supporting her through a negotiation process to keep her home. In Marie’s case, her foreclosed home had been sold at an auction, so her negotiations were with a real estate developer. The phone campaign paid off, and the developer, tired of the barrage of calls, let Marie buy her home back at a price she could afford.

In the stories it collects and retells, We Live Here illustrates the impact that social and economic forces can have at the individual, personal level. Those forces can upend a person’s ability to make house payments or stay in good health. We Live Here thus underscores how health problems and housing insecurity should not be viewed as personal failures but as outcomes of a constellation of causes. Financial regulations, urban planning, or the job market—to name just a few things—can impact a person’s medical or financial circumstances in profound ways.

In the book’s epilogue, Wilson returns to conventional prose to provide additional context for DED’s housing activism. He describes how Detroit’s homeowners, already beleaguered by the 2008 housing market crash, were also at the mercy of “speculation, investment, taxation, and blight removal” (page 220) that rarely took their needs into consideration. He attributes those forces to government and industry decision-makers who have pursued their own agendas in Detroit’s urban landscape, seeking to “reestablish markets, firm up the tax base, and raise property values” (page 220).

In spite of the systemic issues at play, much is still chalked up to personal choices—decisions to live above your means or live a life without adequate financial planning. In a Pew Research poll in late 2008, “People taking on too much debt” was the most popular explanation for the housing market crash (selected by 79% of all respondents), and its popularity held across party lines. Some media narratives during the market crash were a bit more generous to the many people who faced housing dispossession. Those narratives simply faulted them for being too naive in the face of morally questionable lenders.

It should come as no surprise that another common theme in We Live Here is shame. The people portrayed were often reluctant to make their situation a public cause. There was a feeling of being personally responsible for being at the point of eviction. But in many of the stories, there were two victories. The first was getting past a feeling of guilt or embarrassment—and then feeling empowered by a sense of community and solidarity. The second was defeating an eviction.

Searching medical literature for the phrase “help-seeking behavior” yields thousands of results—currently more than 180,000 on PubMed, a testament to how central it is to the success of public health and health care efforts. We Live Here takes a look at that behavior in another context—but in a context still relevant to health and still faced with the same barriers of self-blame and stigma. Its stories provide a striking view of the kind of power that can lie beyond those barriers.

Matt is a project manager and communications coordinator at Health Sciences Design, an interdisciplinary health innovation program at the University of Arizona. He is a longtime Marvel fan whose interest in comics and health communication drew him to the graphic medicine community. Views expressed here are his own.