Former Detroiter: Tax foreclosure auction does have losers

Each day I wake thankful to see a new sunrise. But I can’t help wondering what became of childhood relics like my piano. Was it destroyed?  Sold? Is someone having lessons on it, as I did when I was young? 

I don’t think the piano  was of any real value to the squatters who occupied my home for nearly two years.  It likely meant little to the investors who ended up buying my home in a tax foreclosure auction -- an auction held after I spent five years struggling, pleading and running around like a hamster on a wheel in a futile effort to keep it. .

I sought support from the Detroit City Council, the Mayor’s Office, the Detroit Police Department, the County Treasurer and non-profits set up to help. In the end, though, strangers got the prize my aunt spent more than half her life building for my son and me.

More:How flawed tax foreclosure auction cost Detroit native her childhood home

More:Detroit residents lost homes in city's $600M mistake. It's time to fix it.

My Aunt Curtis raised me from a young age. She loved me, and I loved her as a mother. My children called her Grandma.

My aunt was a seamstress at General Motors, but after her shift ended, she worked day in and day out to make things nice for us. In the small two-bedroom bungalow, my bed was in the converted attic, the largest bedroom in the house. After I grew up and moved with my sons to Memphis, we visited the house on College Street every year. When folks asked my younger son, Kyle, about his origins, he would say: “I’m from Detroit.”  

My aunt paid her property taxes dutifully most all her life, but fell behind as she reached her 80s. By the time she died and bequeathed her house to me in 2014, her back taxes and penalties far exceeded my savings. As reporter Sarah Alvarez relates in her account for the Free Press, my efforts to pay off my aunt's debt and save the house for my son ultimately failed.

Beside the house itself, I lost my aunt’s personal effects and the family heirlooms she had collected over her long life. Every day, I think of my Prince albums, my books, our family photo albums and the genealogies scrawled in the old family Bibles. 

I love Detroit and have always defended her virtue, but right now, my relationship with the city is tarnished by resentment and anger. I regret that my son, who has always been so proud to call himself a Detroiter, feels the same way I do. 

I’m angry that the police were unable to apprehend whoever gave squatters access to my home. That person and the squatters got off scott free. My children and I are the only losers.

Both my sons look to me as a failure in this. It’s true: I failed them. They know what happened to me doesn't happen to people with money, the kind of people who have flocked to the "new" Detroit.

I also failed myself. And most importantly, I failed my aunt.

She bought the house for us. She redecorated it time and again throughout the years —for us. I loved our kitchen. Her last installation were maple cabinets and slate tiled floors. The investors who bought the house told me that it was the nicest of the many that they’d purchased in Wayne County foreclosure auctions. 

It’s been a full year, and I have tried to move on, but I can’t. I still grieve the loss of my aunt and the tangible things she touched every day, which I can no longer touch.  

It makes no sense that two reasonably intelligent, educated adults could not navigate the system to reclaim their home. I called on my few connections and even had direct contact with the mayor’s executive office. I was in direct contact with Wayne County Treasurer Eric Sabree.

It wasn’t enough.

And as hard as it was for me, it must be harder still for those who are elderly or struggling with disease or developmental challenges. I can’t imagine many people jumping through as many hoops as I did, for as long as I did, to save a home in the "hood." 

There needs to be new legislation, new policies, new practices — a new culture and climate for people who look like my son and me. The city seems to bend over backward for the gentrifiers. But what of the folks who made sure they would have something to gentrify?

Sonya Mull is a Detroit native who lost a family home to foreclosure.