Wayne County won't foreclose on any homes in 2020, Wayne County Treasurer Eric Sabree announced Monday.

This year, about 3,200 occupied homes — about 10,000 properties in total — were likely headed to the tax foreclosure auction, a spokesman for Sabree said Monday. County records say 32,000 Detroit properties are tax delinquent, suggest that 25,500 are occupied, and that roughly 8,300 are designated occupied and likely to be foreclosed. Sabree's spokesman notes that during the foreclosure cycle, many homeowners enter into payment plans.

The moratorium on foreclosures is welcome news for Detroit homeowners, many of whom shouldn't have owed property tax at all.

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Sabree stressed in a statement Monday that all homeowners, even those who are tax-delinquent, must still make property tax payments. Homeowners struggling to pay back taxes should reach out to his office to sign up for a payment plan, or the new Pay As You Stay program that sharply reduces property tax delinquency for Wayne County homeowners living in poverty.

Detroiters who live in poverty are likely eligible for the city's property tax exemption, which means they are not required to pay any property tax. But that exemption is chronically underused, something the city has tacitly acknowledged. Applications for the exemption are available online, but must be approved by the city's Board of Review. A survey done last year by the Quicken Community Fund found that 75% of more than 24,000 tax-delinquent homeowners would have qualified for the exemption, but did not know that it existed.

Complicating tax foreclosure in Detroit further: For years, Detroit’s property tax assessments were illegally inflated. In a recent analysis, The Detroit News found that city overtaxed its homeowners by roughly $600 million between 2010 and 2016.

Detroiters facing foreclosure are among the city's most vulnerable residents. Business shutdowns during the coronavirus outbreak may mean many low-wage workers go without pay, complicating any struggling homeowner's ability to pay property tax.

Typically, properties with two years of tax delinquency are foreclosed in March, and auctioned over two rounds in August and September. The tax foreclosure auction is intended to recoup back taxes, and put property in the hands of new owners who will pay taxes. It hasn't worked that way in Detroit, where tax foreclosure is linked to blight and abandonment.

Detroit is ground zero of the tax foreclosure crisis. At least 150,000 Detroit properties, roughly one in three, have been auctioned since 2005.

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Foreclosures have dropped by 85% since their 2015 peak, but the number of tax-delinquent Detroit homeowners has remained high. Around 30,000 Wayne County homeowners are payment plans.

Activists have urged the county to make the poverty exemption retroactive, wiping out back taxes for homeowners who should never have had to pay them. Wayne County Executive Warren Evans has supported that plan, but Sabree and Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan have said it's not fair to those who did pay.

Oakland County Treasurer Andy Meisner said last week that none of his county's property owners would lose property to tax foreclosure during the coronavirus outbreak. There are substantially fewer tax foreclosures in Oakland County.

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