Hello everyone. This week has had the most variation in tasks with my fellowship at Dream. From raking up grass at a house that hadn’t been cut in 3 years, to meetings, to data entry and flow chart making, I really have done a lot. What I’ve learned the most from this week was through transcribing interviews, particularly the interview of one of the highest leaders in Dream. I learned about the history of housing in Detroit and how it continues to affect communities of color today and how that tied into the intention of Dream’s work.
From what I gathered from watching hours of this leader’s interview, personal details and specifics excluded, was about the systematic way that not only the government but also realtors and bankers/loaners segregated Detroit through redlining. Banks would refuse to loan to people of color if they were going to move into specific areas and even would do the same for commercial businesses. Realtors would also use the fact that black people were moving in to a neighborhood to get the surrounding white people to move elsewhere to sell to them. This caused the house value of the neighborhood to go down with so many vacancies. The problem continued to spiral.
Since this didn’t happen that long ago, the housing crisis–that affected the black community disproportionally– exacerbated the issue of vacancies and home value. That’s where I see Dream come in. They renovate houses and sell them to families in the Muslim Center’s neighborhood. They also have many vacant properties that aren’t being currently renovated that they do upkeep on compared to the houses that are city owned that the city doesn’t give attention to. Dream is also trying to jumpstart more commercial business down their main road Woodrow Wilson that was also hurt by redlining and other racist policies and acts.
With COVID everything had to shut down: only 5 people allowed in the Masjid at a time. This did slow their work but did not stop it or the community’s dedication to the work. I’ve seen that through the different people I’ve talked to over the last few weeks and look forward to hearing more over the weeks to come.
