Detroit’s top property assessor stepped out of his usual role Tuesday, walking up to the public comment microphone at City Council to deliver a warning about the condition of the city’s housing stock and to push for the return of property sale inspections.

Assessor Alvin Horhn told council members that of 6,100 property inspections his office has conducted, all but 250 involved quit-claim deeds. That means the overwhelming majority of residential properties in Detroit change hands as-is, with no guarantee that buyers are getting a structurally sound home.

“People do not know what they do not know,” Horhn told council.

Quit-claim deeds are legal, but they carry real risk in a city where single-family homes can be more than a century old. Unlike a warranty deed, a quit-claim transfers whatever interest the seller has in a property without any promises about its condition. Buyers who lack construction or inspection experience have no reliable way to know what they’re walking into.

Horhn described some of what his office has found during assessments: hollowed-out furnaces, painted-over rotten window sills, warped floorboards, and cracks in foundations that sellers had concealed. These are not cosmetic problems. A hollowed furnace means no heat. A hidden foundation crack can signal structural failure. For a buyer who stretched to afford a home, discovering any one of these issues after closing can be financially catastrophic.

The assessor’s office is required by law to review 20 percent of properties in the city every year. Over the last several years, the office has assessed more than a third of Detroit’s total housing stock. What they’ve found has driven a major shift in how properties are officially classified. Horhn said his office has downgraded 90 percent of reviewed properties from “good and average” condition to “fair and poor.”

That number is not a rounding error. It reflects the reality of what decades of disinvestment, deferred maintenance, and rapid ownership turnover have done to Detroit’s residential buildings.

“By the time we’re done this year, as part of the mayor’s executive order, more than 90% of the housing stock in this city will be in either fair or poor condition,” Horhn told council.

Horhn’s appearance at public comment was notable. Assessors typically operate in the background, crunching numbers for tax purposes. Choosing to speak directly to council signals that Horhn believes this is a problem that requires a policy response, not just better record-keeping. He voiced support for reinstating property sale inspections, a requirement that would force a review of a home’s condition before a sale closes.

Detroit eliminated mandatory presale inspections years ago, a decision that made transactions faster and cheaper in the short term. But without that checkpoint, buyers, particularly those purchasing from investors or estates through quit-claim deeds, have had little protection. Bringing inspections back would add a step to the process and impose some costs, but Horhn’s data makes a case that the current system is transferring hidden liabilities from sellers to buyers who may not be equipped to handle them.

Council did not vote on the inspection question Tuesday, but Horhn’s testimony put the issue formally on the table.

The council session also surfaced a longer-running tension in Detroit’s tax policy: the city’s property tax rates are high enough that they undercut investment even when the underlying real estate market is recovering.

The discussion was triggered by a Neighborhood Enterprise Zone application for a property in Corktown, where the owner plans to renovate and resell. NEZ incentives cap the city and county millage rate at 50 percent, significantly reducing a property owner’s annual tax burden.

Christopher Gulock, deputy director of the planning commission, laid out the numbers plainly. A Corktown property with a taxable value of $300,000 would face roughly $21,000 in annual property taxes under the standard rate. With an NEZ exemption in place, that figure drops to about $6,000 a year. That is a difference of $15,000 annually, or $1,250 a month, which is meaningful whether the owner is a homeowner trying to hold onto a renovated property or an investor calculating whether a project pencils out.

But Gulock also showed how Detroit still loses on a straight comparison with its suburban neighbors. In Novi, where the millage rate is around 31 mills, an NEZ would cap taxes on a similarly valued property at roughly 17 mills, or $2,000 or less annually. So even with the NEZ in place, a Detroit property owner at that taxable value pays roughly three times what a comparable Novi property owner would pay.

District 3 Councilmember Scott Benson framed it directly. Detroit has to compete with neighboring communities that start from a lower tax baseline.

“To compete, we have our NEZ, which still makes us three times more expensive, but what it doesn’t do is make us 13 times more expensive,” Benson said.

That framing captures the bind the city is in. Detroit’s tax rate is a legacy of decades of budget pressure, pension obligations, and a smaller tax base spread across a large geographic footprint. The city can’t simply slash millage rates without finding revenue somewhere else. But the current rate discourages the kind of property investment and ownership retention that would rebuild that tax base over time.

NEZ certificates are one tool the city uses to bridge that gap, at least for specific properties or neighborhoods. The program has been used in areas like Indian Village, Lafayette Park, and Midtown to encourage renovation and owner-occupancy. The logic is that a lower tax burden in the short term produces a renovated, occupied property that generates stable tax revenue over the long term, even if it costs the city something upfront.

The Corktown application renewed debate among council members about whether that logic holds, and for whom. District 7 Councilmember Denzel McCampbell pushed the council to think carefully as they move forward about how these incentives are structured and who ultimately benefits.

That question matters because Corktown is no longer a neighborhood struggling to attract attention. It has seen substantial investment over the past decade, including the Ford Motor Company’s renovation of Michigan Central Station, which opened in 2024 and has drawn commercial and residential development around it. Granting tax incentives in a neighborhood with significant market momentum looks different than deploying them in areas where private investment simply hasn’t arrived.

The underlying tension is familiar. Tax incentives can accelerate desirable outcomes, but they also reduce the revenue available for the services that make neighborhoods livable, schools, lighting, road maintenance, trash collection. When the city extends an NEZ, it is essentially making a bet that the long-term return on a revitalized property outweighs the short-term revenue loss. That bet pays off in some cases and not in others.

Council members did not reach a resolution on the NEZ application Tuesday. The conversation suggests the council is increasingly interested in scrutinizing these incentives more carefully rather than approving them routinely.

Both threads from Tuesday’s meeting, the housing stock crisis and the property tax debate, connect to the same underlying challenge. Detroit is a city where housing is simultaneously deteriorating and becoming more expensive relative to competing markets, where buyers face undisclosed risks and high carrying costs, and where the policy tools available are imperfect and sometimes work at cross-purposes.

Horhn’s push for presale inspections is a consumer protection argument. People buying homes in Detroit deserve to know what condition those homes are in before they commit their savings. The fact that 90 percent of the city’s housing stock will be classified in fair or poor condition by the end of this assessment cycle means that most properties carry some level of deferred maintenance or structural concern. Presale inspections would not fix those problems, but they would put buyers in a position to negotiate, walk away, or plan for repairs rather than being blindsided after closing.

The NEZ debate is a competitiveness argument. Detroit’s tax structure makes it harder to hold and improve property than in neighboring communities, and the city needs tools to offset that disadvantage. But those tools have limits and trade-offs that council members are right to examine.

Neither issue was resolved Tuesday. Both will be back.