Hundreds of Detroiters are getting the deeds to homes they thought they had lost to foreclosure.

The City of Detroit, Quicken Loans Community Fund, United Community Housing Coalition, and dozens of Detroiters are coming together Saturday to celebrate the success of the Make it Home program — an initiative started in 2017 that helps occupants stay in, and purchase, their tax-foreclosed homes.

More than 40 Detroiters will receive the deed to a house lost to tax foreclosure this year at the Saturday ceremony. Since the program's inception, 267 people have received a deed to a home that would have otherwise gone to auction.

"For years, residents of foreclosed homes were pitted against anyone who wanted to buy a home in the auction. It was Detroit versus Everybody. Our program gives residents the first option to buy their home, giving justice to low-income homeowners and creating ownership opportunities out of the trauma of foreclosure," said Michele Oberholtzer of the United Community Housing Coalition.

"This program works," she continued, "because it’s good for everybody: The resident buys their home, the neighborhood keeps a family, the city avoids blight, and communities are stronger for it. It’s a win-win-win."

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Utilizing the Right of Refusal, a provision within Michigan's larger tax reversion law that allows governmental entities to buy foreclosed properties pre-auction, the City of Detroit, with $1.3 million in funding from the Quicken Loans Community Fund, scooped up the occupied foreclosed homes, thereby diverting them from the auction.

Deeds were issued in January to United Community Housing Coalition, a local nonprofit, which has been charged with holding them until the occupants repay the purchase price (a range between $1,000 and $8,000).

The payments — the payback of the zero-interest community loan fund — then go into a revolving fund, ideally to buy and save more homes next year.

"We’ve really worked really hard and very intentionally over the past couple of years at the Community Fund to make sure we’re really aligning ourselves with all of the resources that we have as a business, to make sure we are being as impactful as possible on some of these real systemic challenges," said Laura Grannemann, vice president for strategic investments for the Quicken Loans Community Investment Fund, explaining the organization's decision to donate funds over the years to the program.

Grannemann explained that her team originally came to focus on tax foreclosures about five years ago when Dan Gilbert was a cochair of the Blight Removal Task Force. At the time, the task force helped to sponsor Motor City Mapping, a data company that had volunteers go door-to-door to track the conditions of parcels across the city.

The undertaking, according to Grannemann, highlighted a statistic they couldn't get over: 86 percent of blight comes from property foreclosure.

"Tax foreclosure was the logical next step, so we spent the last five years really deeply researching the tax foreclosure cycle, we’ve collected a ton of data from Wayne County itself, we’ve worked with the City of Detroit and folks like United Community Housing Coalition to really deeply understand the problem."

Make it Home, a public-private partnership is the result of these conversations.

In the first year, the community fund donated $300,000 to help the city to pull the homes of 80 participants, all of whom were non-deedholders (i.e. rental and probate cases, where the occupants didn't realize their landlords had failed to pay property taxes). Of that initial group, 63 are now in possession of the deed to the home that had been foreclosed, and 16 are on payment plans working to get the deed.

In 2018, the program expanded to include a total of 519 participants — this time a mix of non-deedholders, but also deedholders who had gotten behind on taxes and would have been eligible for a poverty tax exemption but didn't get one because of a lack of information around the program.

Of last year's program, 204 deeds have been transferred to the occupants — including those who will be getting their documents Saturday.

The program, celebrated as a success given the number of occupants who have been able to get their deeds, is often used as a comparison to the efforts of the Wayne County Land Bank’s Right of Refusal program. The county's program, the subject of a Free Press investigation published Thursday, has been criticized as a vehicle more favorable to developers than former occupants. In 2017, WCLB pulled 64 occupied homes from the auction, with only 20 percent — 14 people — receiving deeds to houses.

"Most important, Make it Home is a program that prevents foreclosure and we want people to be able to stay in their homes," said Arthur Jemison, a top Detroit housing official, who helped create the initiative. "In addition to that goal, this program allows renters to become homeowners and build equity in their neighborhoods. It also puts them in a better position to participate in revitalization efforts taking place in the city as investors in their neighborhood."

To help with that second goal — further investment in the neighborhoods by homeowners — Quicken Loans Community Fund announced a new initiative Saturday. The organization will be giving $300,000 to United Community Housing Coalition, which will go toward grants and interest-free loans for Make it Home participants to make repairs on their properties.

Interested participants, who have successfully paid back their original loan and gotten their deed, can apply for up to $10,000 to improve their homes.

"Once housing stability is provided, this repair program provides new homeowners an opportunity to make their house a permanent home for themselves and their families," Quicken Loans Community Fund said in a statement.

According to Grannemann, $5,000 will be provided as a grant and homeowners can apply for an additional $5,000 in zero-interest loans.

"We’re really trying to be thoughtful," said Granneman, "about how we approach challenges in the city like lack of great stock, like tax foreclosure."

Contact Allie Gross: AEGross@freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter @Allie_Elisabeth.