DETROIT — Hundreds of Detroit homeowners in danger of losing their properties flocked Thursday to hearings that offered a last-ditch chance to avoid foreclosure and to keep the houses from adding to the city’s already huge glut of vacant dwellings.
The homeowners nearly filled a long conference room in Detroit’s Cobo Center while waiting for their cases to be heard. Many hoped to work out payment plans to ease their tax debts under new laws signed this month by Republican Gov. Rick Snyder.
“Everybody does have a story. Most of them are probably true, because you couldn’t make them up if you try,” said Eric Sabree, Wayne County’s deputy treasurer of land management. Officials expect more than 14,000 property owners to seek help over seven days of hearings that run through Feb. 6.
“We have to collect taxes by law … but we definitely do not want to take the property,” Sabree said. “We want to show options that people have to save their properties.”
More than 60,000 of the county’s 76,000 foreclosed properties are in Detroit, threatening neighborhoods that have yet to recover from the national mortgage crisis.