Three thousand Detroiters stand to lose their homes this fall, and the guy who could help fix it says he's not doing enough.

There's so much I don't understand about the annual Wayne County Tax Foreclosure Auction, which starts next month, and talking to Wayne County Treasurer Eric Sabree last week didn't help.

Sabree's office asked a judge to foreclose on around 9,000 Wayne County properties this spring. That's down sharply from the nearly 35,000 properties that were tax delinquent when the year began, and honestly I have some serious questions about all of these numbers. Next month, 3,960 parcels will be auctioned, the treasurer's office said Friday, including 1,083 occupied structures in Detroit and 115 in other Wayne County communities.

Given the average household size, and with more than a thousand occupied homes and apartments potentially on the auction block, that could mean more than 3,000 folks who currently have somewhere to live won't.

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That's a lot fewer properties than in years past. The number of homes foreclosed, and residents displaced, in Wayne County has fallen every year since the auction's 2015 peak.

This is where we are: Just 3,000 Detroiters facing the prospect of losing their homes seems like good news. Because it's better than it could have been.

Even Sabree says it's too many.

"No displacement is acceptable," the treasurer told me last week.

But when I asked whether he's doing enough to prevent it, his answer was also no.

"I don’t think we’re ever doing enough," he said.

This is what drives me nuts. I've written a lot about the auction, how it destabilizes Detroit neighborhoods and incentivizes land speculation, how auctioned properties often become blighted, how it has taken homes from folks who were legally entitled to a tax break, how some homeowners have lost homes because they couldn't pay the tax bill based on illegally high city assessments. And it's hard to find anyone who defends the auction, at least in its current format.

Yet it rolls on, year after year, dealing irreparable damage to this still-struggling city.

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Some of those property owners will get help before the auction from groups like the United Community Housing Coalition, a nonprofit that works to settle tax debt for struggling homeowners.

Sabree says some property owners view tax delinquency "as like a credit card, not because they can’t pay but because they're making choices along the way, waiting till the last year to pay (properties can be foreclosed after the third year of tax delinquency)." That's also why, he says, the number of tax-delinquent properties dropped by around 31,000 since the start of the year. "The economy is a little bit better, there’s a little more awareness, and people are making sure they’re not getting foreclosed."

Sabree says he sees preventing the displacement of Detroit and Wayne County residents as a work in progress.

"There are always ways to improve and figure it out," he said. "I believe it can be accomplished, we need to keep thinking and working until we get it all accomplished, until we get zero foreclosures."

It's worth noting that Sabree parted ways with two of his top deputies Monday, weeks before the auction starts, for reasons no one in his department has made clear.

Last year's auction netted $28.7 million, the first time in 10 years that proceeds exceeded the value of taxes owed, the treasurer's office said."Taxes can't be wiped out," Sabree said. "Somebody has to pay them."

But there are policy options that could substantially reduce foreclosure. A report published earlier this summer by Quicken Community Fund, the philanthropic arm of mortgage lender Quicken, found that 75% of tax-delinquent Detroit homeowners qualified for a state-mandated exemption poverty exemption, but the city and county have done a terrible job of notifying eligible residents.

The state Legislature could make that exemption retroactive, so that property owners who would have qualified in past years can be freed from tax bills they shouldn't have owed. It would also help to give homeowners the option to pay property tax monthly, instead of annually.

But year after year, there's little movement on the policy remedies that could make a real difference. Few of these reforms have found champions among the region's elected officials.

Sabree isn't doing enough. But neither is anyone else.

Nancy Kaffer is a Free Press columnist. Contact: nkaffer@freepress.com.