By Jason Grotto, Bloomberg Equality, March 9, 2021
It’s the last weekend of the month, so Di Leshea Scott’s Saturday begins with a long wait at the post office to get a money order for her rent. From there, she drives north to hand-deliver it at a drab office building just outside Detroit’s city limits. As always, this ritual leaves her angry and frustrated; her landlord refuses to give her a lease, she says, or to make basic repairs. When it rains, she needs three buckets upstairs to catch leaks. The back porch is collapsing before her eyes.
She stands outside the landlord’s empty office and sighs, then moves a welcome mat aside and flings an envelope with her money order under the door. Another $825 destined for someone else’s bank account.
Despite its flaws, Scott clings to her little two-story Tudor on Lawrence Street with a devotion that’s hard to fathom, until you know the house’s ownership history. She’s renting a home she used to own. Wayne County took it away from her in 2013, after she fell three years behind on her property tax payments. Her house, which she’d bought in 2005 for $63,800, was auctioned off by the county and snapped up by an investment company for less than $5,000. Scott lost every cent she’d put into it.
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