“If they kick us out, we won’t have anywhere to go. We will have to go to a shelter. I don’t want to go to a shelter. I want to stay in my home,” she says.

This year in Detroit, there have been 22,000 foreclosures on properties whose owners failed to pay property taxes three years in a row. Of those, 10,000 are estimated to be occupied, meaning this year's foreclosures are set to oust about 27,000 Detroiters from their homes.

That’s a large number in a dwindling city with fewer than 700,000 residents, but the figures are set to get even worse. In the next couple of months, Wayne County's treasurer will be serving foreclosure notices on 75,000 more properties, 62,000 of which are in Detroit, according to its chief deputy treasurer David Szymanski.* With half of those Detroit properties estimated to be occupied, this means a further 115,000 Detroiters might lose their homes next year. (There are 110,000 properties in Wayne County that are eligible to be foreclosed on next year, 85,000 of which are in Detroit.)

In a city supposedly trying to attract residents rather than lose them, this means a potential 142,000 Detroiters—one-fifth of the city’s population—will be shown the door within the next year and a half. The city has yet to announce plans for accommodating those who get evicted.

Detroit’s tax-delinquent residents, who together occupy more than half of the city’s properties according to local data firm Loveland Technologies, are frequently blamed for the city’s underfunded, poorly functioning public infrastructure and are considered part of the reason the city went bankrupt in the first place.

The city’s still relatively new mayor, Mike Duggan, likes to say at press conferences and town-hall meetings that he wants to work with Detroit’s “good” residents—those who seek to pay their bills and mow their lawns. But with little active effort put into retaining residents who are behind on their bills and facing foreclosure, some are beginning to feel like the evictions are a part of a bigger ploy to rid the city of large chunks of its poorer residents—a modern-day form of forced relocation.

“It’s a tragic and extreme version of a familiar pattern,” says Cheryl Harris, a professor of civil rights and civil liberties at the UCLA School of Law. Harris calls the Detroit auction a massive form of “racial dispossession.”

Forced relocation is a sensitive subject in Detroit, where, in the 1950s, large chunks of poorer, black neighborhoods were razed to make way for highway development. Black residents were violently kept out of whiter areas of the city until the '60s.

Harris says that these evictions should be viewed alongside the “legacy of specifically racialized housing policies that put these [black-owned] properties and these [black] property owners at a distinct disadvantage within the relative marketplace, and located them as devalued to begin with.”