How Outlier is helping Detroiters get millions of dollars back from Wayne County

Last October, Detroit local and property data analyst Alex Alsup published a Substack with an eye-catching headline: “2,400 Former Detroit Homeowners Might Be Able to Recover a Total of $20M in Tax Foreclosure Profits.”

That’s a lot of people owed a lot of money. While more than 11,000 Detroit homeowners lost their homes to tax auctions during that period, per Alsup’s analysis, 2,400 is the number of homes sold for more than the tax debt owed — and because of a state Supreme Court ruling, those former owners could be eligible to claim those profits back. Alsup, who has spent a decade working on tax foreclosure reform, wanted the thousands of former homeowners to get the money they were owed. But for that to happen, they needed to know they were owed money and needed to submit an initial claim to the Wayne County Treasurer’s Office by March 31, 2025.¹

Alsup built a map and dashboard to show where the eligible properties were, and how much former owners might stand to gain. He shared the data behind the dashboard, including owner names, with housing counseling organizations, hoping they might have some contact information for at least some homeowners. But there was no guarantee the former owners were still in Detroit. “I expect finding the people owed this money will be very difficult,” he wrote.

Alsup also shared that data with Outlier, the nearly decade-old nonprofit newsroom in Detroit (he’s previously collaborated with the outlet as part of their Txt Outlier program to get people essential information, supplying Outlier with delinquent property tax data so residents can find out if their home is at risk of tax foreclosure). Some in the newsroom began thinking about how they could contact these former homeowners at scale and get them the necessary information to file claims before the deadline. That kicked off a months-long community outreach initiative that complemented Outlier’s service journalism about how to file a claim.

“Public outreach efforts like this are in Outlier’s DNA,” said Koby Levin, an Outlier senior reporter. From its earliest days, the organization “focused on providing information that would be immediately useful to Detroiters going through housing distress.”

But this outreach effort broke new ground for Outlier. “We’ve never attempted such a large-scale systematic outreach,” Levin said. Outlier partnered with the Detroit Justice Center, a local nonprofit that had access to LexisNexis records with certified contact information. Justice Center staff members (and Detroit Documenters) put hours into searching for contact info from Alsup’s list of names on Lexis, and that heavy lifting “unlocked this project,” Levin said, helping them find numbers for about 80% of the people on the list (though some of these were still incorrect or disconnected). He built out a master spreadsheet (dubbed “the machine” by project manager and Documenter Shiva Shahmir) to keep track of 2,700 owner contacts and key information linked to those 2,400 properties while also reporting on stories of the foreclosure crisis that emerged from the community outreach.

From December 2024 through early April, more than 200 volunteer and paid phone bankers placed thousands of calls: over 4,000 including repeats, and 2,163 excluding repeats, according to Shahmir.

Through those calls, Outlier and partners ultimately reached “481 people who were collectively owed almost $5.9 million,” Levin wrote. (That number, he emphasized to me, represents the number of people Outlier and partners were able to give information to start their claims — there’s no guarantee that many claims were submitted. Outlier hopes FOIA can later give a more concrete sense of how many people filed claims, but doesn’t yet have that data.)

The initiative is a case study in how a local news outlet on the cutting edge of nonprofit news embraced a new application of its mission to serve and inform its community, taking on work at the nexus between journalism and housing advocacy in partnership with other local organizations.

After the project was conceived, in December, Outlier’s business team secured a $75,000 grant from the Rocket Community Fund, a local foundation specializing in housing advocacy. That grant was “intended to ensure we were able to hire a project manager, host volunteer events and pay volunteers, and cover any other project related costs,” said Outlier’s chief of revenue and operations Erica Schopmeyer. Beyond covering Shahmir’s paid, part-time position, the funding allowed Outlier to pay phone bankers, feed them, and rent space when needed. (Some phone bankers declined payment, preferring to volunteer.)

Some phone bankers, like Levin and Shahmir, were local reporters and Documenters. (News outlets in the Collaborative Detroit Newsrooms network also picked up the story from a reporting perspective, Levin said.) Meanwhile, other community organizations, like Central Detroit Christian, the United Community Housing Coalition, and Democratic Socialists of America, also hosted phone banks. “There’s no way that Outlier staff alone would be able to make all the necessary calls,” Levin said.

Whenever a former homeowner shared an email with a phone banker, and the phone banker entered it into an outreach Google form, the homeowner would receive an automated email from Levin’s address “with key information and an explanation of what they need to do to initiate a claim.” During the most successful phone banks, he said, “the sender sent between 50 and 100 emails as volunteers entered the results of their calls.”

All that phone banking led to plenty of callbacks. As project manager, Shahmir bought a flip phone to field those, and received more than 200 individual contacts over two months from people asking questions about the form. Detroit Housing Center’s call center shared the load of fielding callbacks. Other partners including Bridging Detroit and MACC Development offered in-person help with the form and free notary services.

Detroit Justice Center is taking the lead on helping heirs and beneficiaries with next steps in claiming funds. The Outlier team, meanwhile, recently met with phone bankers about possible next steps or other projects to tackle. The news outlet may “bring this group back when it comes time to communicate with the folks who did submit their claims,” Levin said, “to provide information to help them get across the finish line.” (Claimants will hear what they’re owed from the Wayne County treasurer by July 1, 2025; to receive a check, they’ll then have to file a motion in the 3rd Circuit Court to get a judge to approve their claim.) Schopmeyer added that the news outlet is “currently working to secure additional funding for the next phases of the project, which will take at least though Q1 of 2026.”

For any news outlet considering a community outreach initiative along these lines, Levin said, it’s critical to have “a carefully thought out infrastructure to gather information” — for Outlier, having people submit information via pre-filled Google forms that were then added into the master spreadsheet worked well, helping track how many people they’d reached and who needed a call back, he said. (The spreadsheet “included individuals’ former addresses and parcel numbers, the amount we think they’re owed, whether they’re deceased based on our Lexis searches, their phone number based on Lexis searches, an ‘outreach status’ based on form responses for that individual, and links to outreach forms.”) He recommends doing a few test runs before scaling up to dozens of people making calls, he added.

Alsup, for his part, told me he was “very happy to see Outlier take on the task of tracking down these former homeowners.”

“When relying on the efforts of multiple community organizations and agencies, it’s always helpful to have someone kind of conducting — centralizing the data tracking (who’s been contacted, who hasn’t, who’s filled out the necessary paperwork, etc), as well as messaging to some extent,” he noted. Having Outlier play that role helped make this scale of outreach possible.

Most of the people contacted had never heard of Outlier before, and the phone banking resulted in a huge number of potential sources for future stories about housing distress, while also expanding the number of Detroiters who understand what Outlier does. People “had a reason to talk to us,” Levin said. “We were providing them really valuable information,” and some of those contacts wanted to share their stories. Many “were really eager to talk about something that had happened to them…something that had been haunting their life for years, but that is really no longer part of the public discourse.” Phone banking calls helped inform Levin’s reporting on topics like the hurdles heirs face claiming money and scammy organizations trying to take advantage of people by taking a cut in exchange for helping them file a claim.

“If we want to talk about reaching communities that are traditionally viewed as underserved or hard to contact and hard to include in the reporting process, this project did that to an extent I’ve never seen in my time as a journalist,” he said. “That will continue to be a resource for us, because we now are sitting on the list of hundreds of people who have experienced housing distress in Detroit — which is correlated with many additional problems and opportunities to help people and to understand the dynamics of housing in Detroit.”

Many of these conversations were painful. People often asked if they would get their houses back, and it was hard to tell them no. “If you’re talking to somebody who’s owed $20,000, which is a pretty meaningful amount of money for most people, their house today is maybe worth five or 10 times that, and they don’t get that back.” The conversations left Levin with a deeper sense of how the foreclosure crisis continues to shape Detroit.

Being involved in this outreach, Levin said, reinforced his belief in Outlier’s approach to journalism: the idea that “if you provide information to people that is useful to them, that has journalism dividends.” But he emphasized that “providing Detroiters with useful information is an adequate ‘journalism dividend’ on its own,” even when it doesn’t result in reporting tips.

“It would have felt like malpractice to have this information and not try to give it to people,” he said.

1. That deadline would be extended to April 8 at the last minute due to a bomb threat.