About This Case Study

In the years following the 2008 financial crisis, the city of Detroit foreclosed on tens of thousands of homes for unpaid property taxes — one of the largest waves of tax foreclosure in modern American history, falling overwhelmingly on Black homeowners. The foreclosures were formally lawful: the homeowners owed taxes, and the city followed the legal process for collecting them. But research has since established that the assessments underlying those tax bills were themselves illegal — that Detroit systematically over-assessed its lowest-valued homes, in violation of the Michigan Constitution's cap on assessed value, so that the people least able to pay were taxed on values their homes did not have. This case study works with the documentation assembled by the Coalition for Property Tax Justice, a Detroit organization pressing the city for compensation and reform, which gathers the research on the over-assessments and the foreclosures they produced.

A tax foreclosure can look like the neutral end of a lawful process: a bill goes unpaid, and the government collects. This case study asks why Detroit's foreclosure wave is an object of racial analysis — and answers with the legal scholar Bernadette Atuahene's concept of predatory governance. Atuahene uses the term for the practice by which public officials raise revenue through laws and processes — inflated assessments, tax foreclosure, fines and fees — that produce or sustain racial inequity while remaining formally legal. What makes predatory governance distinctive, on her account, is precisely its legality: there is often no broken rule to point to and no single official who declared a racist intent, only a system that extracts wealth from Black residents through ordinary administration. The analytical move is to read the foreclosure machinery as an instrument: to follow it step by step, ask who is made worse off and who benefits at each stage, and see how a process in which every step is lawful can produce a result that strips a community of its homes and its wealth. You will reconstruct the mechanism, locate the profit in it, and then weigh the remedies a local campaign is demanding.

Before You Begin

Have ready:

• Coalition for Property Tax Justice, Illegal Foreclosures — the campaign's site, documenting the over-assessments, the foreclosures, and the demand for compensation (the anchor source).
• The Coalition's research page, which collects the studies establishing that Detroit's assessments violated the state constitution, including the analysis of property-tax assessments behind the campaign.
• A note-taking surface — paper, a document, or a shared doc if you are working in a group.

A note on currency: the campaign for compensation and the related litigation were ongoing as this was written; the city's response and any settlement may have changed. Check the Coalition's site for the current status, and note the dates of the figures you use.

Before you begin, write down, in a sentence or two each:

• If a government follows the law at every step but the result is that thousands of people lose their homes, where — if anywhere — is the wrong? Can a process be unjust when no single rule is broken?
• What would it take to convince you that a tax or a foreclosure was discriminatory, when it never mentions race? What evidence would you look for?

The Exercise

Phase 1: Orientation — The Crisis and the Campaign (5–7 minutes)

Open the Coalition for Property Tax Justice's site and skim its research page to get the shape of the crisis and the campaign. Without yet analyzing it, establish in your own words: what happened in Detroit (the scale of the foreclosures and roughly when), what the research found about the assessments, and what the Coalition is asking for. Write a short, neutral account — four or five sentences — that someone unfamiliar with the case could follow.

For groups: each member drafts the account individually, then the group reconciles them into one agreed summary.

Phase 2: Close Reading — The Mechanism, Step by Step (12–15 minutes)

Predatory governance works through a chain of ordinary administrative steps. Trace the chain, using the Coalition's research. For each link, be specific about what happens and to whom:

1. The assessment. How is a home's taxable value set, and what did the research find about Detroit's assessments of its lowest-valued homes? What does the Michigan Constitution's cap require, and how did the city's assessments violate it? Why does over-assessment fall hardest on the cheapest homes — and therefore on the poorest, disproportionately Black, homeowners?
2. The bill and the foreclosure. Follow what an inflated assessment produces: a property-tax bill larger than it should be, debt the owner cannot pay, and eventually foreclosure under the lawful tax-collection process. At what point does an error in valuation become the loss of a home? What protections existed for homeowners, and why did they fail so many of them?
3. Who profits, and who pays. Trace where the foreclosed homes and the money go — the tax auction, the buyers and speculators who acquire homes cheaply, the public coffers that book the revenue. Who is made worse off at each step, and who is made better off? Name the beneficiaries as concretely as the sources allow.

Note where the data are incomplete or contested; the gaps are part of what you are reading.

For groups: assign the three links to different members, then reconvene and walk the whole chain together.

Phase 3: Applying the Frame — Predatory Governance (10–12 minutes)

Return to Atuahene's concept. Predatory governance names a system that extracts wealth from a racialized population through formally legal means, with no broken rule and often no declared intent. Holding Detroit against it, ask:

• Where, in the chain you traced, is the extraction — the transfer of wealth away from Black homeowners — actually happening? Can you point to it without pointing to any single illegal act or any official's stated racism?
• What makes predatory governance harder to contest than open discrimination? When the process is lawful and no one announces a racial purpose, where does a homeowner, or an organizer, even lodge the objection? (The assessments here were ultimately found to violate the state constitution — does that make this an easier case than Atuahene's general argument, or does the difficulty of getting that finding recognized prove her point?)
• Where does the frame fit, and where does it strain? Consider that Detroit's fiscal crisis and bankruptcy were real; that some officials may have acted in good faith under genuine budget pressure; and that "predatory" implies an intent the system's defenders would deny. Does predatory governance illuminate the case, and where does it reach its limit?

For groups: spend the first half on the first two questions together; spend the second on where the frame strains.

Phase 4: Remedies and Law from Below (optional, 5–7 minutes)

The Coalition for Property Tax Justice is not only documenting the crisis but demanding a remedy — compensation for those who lost homes, and reform of the assessment system. Using the Coalition's materials, identify what it is actually asking for, and assess it: what would the proposed remedy restore, and to whom? What can compensation reach, and what — a home already lost, a neighborhood already hollowed out — can it not? Then step back: what does it mean that the challenge to predatory governance here comes from an organized community campaign rather than from within the government that produced the harm?

Closing Reflection

In two or three sentences, complete this thought:

The step in the foreclosure chain where lawful administration becomes dispossession is __________. Reading the crisis as "predatory governance" shows __________. The hardest thing to settle, after tracing it, is __________.

Write the most precise version you can; the value is in naming exactly where the harm happens and exactly what the concept does and does not capture.

A Note on Modes

Solo mode. Work through the phases in order, keeping brief notes. The step-by-step mechanism from Phase 2 and the application in Phase 3 are the central artifacts; keep them for use with the unit's questions on predatory governance.

Group mode (3–6 people). Designate a timekeeper. Phase 1 produces a shared summary; Phase 2 works well with members taking different links in the chain and then walking it together; Phase 3 benefits from full-group discussion. If time is short, the closing reflection can be individual writing after the session.

After the Case Study

• The Coalition's research page assembles the underlying studies and data on Detroit's assessments, for learners who want to work directly from the evidence rather than from the campaign's summary of it.
• For the full development of predatory governance, see Bernadette Atuahene, Plundered: How Racist Policies Undermine Black Homeownership in America (Little, Brown, 2025) — the unit's Key Scholarship, where the Detroit research is told at length — and her article "Predatory Cities," California Law Review 108 (2020), in the unit's Further Readings.
• For the long history behind the crisis — how the property-tax system has extracted wealth from Black households since Reconstruction — see Andrew W. Kahrl, The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America (University of Chicago Press, 2024), also among the unit's Key Scholarship; Detroit's over-assessments are a recent instance of a very old mechanism.