Detroiter Kyra Sanders moved away when she graduated college in 2000.

By 2004, she moved back to Detroit and bought a condo near downtown intent on becoming part of her hometown’s rebirth.

Since then, she’s seen an ebb and flow in her quality of life: she pays astronomically high car insurance, saw a Whole Foods store open in her area to national celebration, and her property value tanked, but is now spiking.

Sanders, a social worker, has no plans to leave her condo in a gentrifying neighborhood, but understands why other people may not want to do what she did and move back to the city just yet.

“It’s a hard sell to get individuals who might be living in the suburbs to move back into these communities when schools still suck, crime is still a very real thing and we have food deserts,” Sanders said.

A new report released Monday says 25 percent of Detroiters are middle class and the city needs 27,000 more African American families to earn $46,000 or more to stabilize neighborhoods. That means more middle-class families need to move into Detroit and more families currently living in the city need to earn more money, the report says.

“Growing Detroit’s African-American Middle Class,” released by Detroit Future City, a nonprofit that conducts research to catalyze long-term revitalization of Detroit, defines the middle class in Detroit as households earning $46,100 to $115,300 per year, or between 80 percent and 200 percent of the national median income.