City of Detroit wins legal protections for tenants in Real Token properties
Yolanda Williams and her family have lived in a house on Abington Street on the city's west side for nearly 50 years.
"This is the only house I've ever known. This is my neighborhood, my community," said Williams.
Their home is one of hundreds that are included in a sweeping lawsuit filed by the city of Detroit against Real Token, LLC. The lawsuit targets more than 400 homes across the city, citing the company's numerous code violations and unsafe living conditions.
"It's a security thing because we're scared over here because we don't know what to expect," said Williams.
Detroit Corporation Council Conrad Mallett says the company uses a network of 165 different LLC groups to avoid any kind of accountability or recourse for their tenants.
"These properties are in such a degraded state that there's no way that interested owners, no matter whom they farmed out the responsibility, would not know that their tenants are living in substandard housing," said Mallett.
On Wednesday, city officials announced major legal protections for those residents by safely withholding their future rent payments.
"They need to not pay their rent in August to Real Token; they need to put their August rent into an escrow account," said Mallett.
This temporary restraining order stops Real Token from collecting rent from any of its impacted tenants until those buildings are repaired and a certificate of compliance is issued to each of them.
"Not only are the tenants not to pay rent, once the rent is paid into the escrow account, no evictions can occur," said Mallett.
Mallett says this move is designed to push the company to finally address the nearly $500,000 in violations as soon as possible.
"The improvements have to occur, and we're not going to accept that it's going to take seven months, eight months, nine months. None of that," said Mallett.
City officials say they plan on doing door-to-door canvassing to make sure each impacted tenant knows how to set up an escrow account and gets everything figured out before their rent is due.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
CNN
12 minutes ago
- CNN
Trump administration targets Harvard's patents
The Trump administration is opening a new front in its battle with Harvard University on the issue of patents, marking a new escalation with the elite school that could result in the loss of additional federal funding or intellectual property rights. In a Friday letter to Harvard President Alan Garber obtained by CNN, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick writes that the Trump administration believes the university is 'in breach of the statutory, regulatory, and contractual requirements tied to Harvard's federal funded research programs and intellectual property arising therefrom, including patents.' The Commerce Department, Lutnick said, is issuing an 'immediate comprehensive review' of Harvard's federally funded research programs. The secretary said the administration was also initiating the 'march-in' process under a law called the Bayh-Dole Act that lets universities patent research and inventions. That means that if Harvard has failed to disclose or patent its inventions, the federal government could take ownership of the patents or grant third-party licenses. The letter, first reported by Reuters, marks the latest action by the Trump administration to exert pressure on the school. The Trump administration has frozen billions of dollars in federal funding for research and has targeted the school's ability to host international students. Harvard and the Trump administration are currently embroiled in a pair of lawsuits. Still, officials remain optimistic about the prospects of a deal with Harvard to restore funding to the school and drop lawsuits and investigations. The Trump administration has recently struck multimillion-dollar agreements with Columbia and Brown universities. 'While there's a lawsuit pending with Harvard, and I'm sure that lawsuit will play out, I do hope that Harvard will continue to come to the table with negotiations. Those talks are continuing, and we'd like to have a resolution there, outside of the courts,' Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a phone interview with CNN last month. Harvard has sent some signals it is willing to work with the Trump administration, including last month when The Harvard Crimson reported that websites for Harvard College centers serving minority and LGBTQ students and women disappeared. The White House welcomed that development, viewing it as a goodwill gesture that one official described as 'good news.' McMahon last month also pointed to the departure of the heads of the university's Middle Eastern Studies center as a positive step.
Forbes
12 minutes ago
- Forbes
Obama's Flirtation With Supply-Side Economics
In his first term as president, Barack Obama extended the reduction in the top rate of the income tax to 35 percent through 2012, two years past the 2010 expiration date that his predecessor, President George W. Bush, had set. Obama presided over the lowest estate tax rate since Herbert Hoover's time, 35 percent in 2010 and 2011. (In one year, 2010, the estate tax rate was zero for those who elected to take it.) And Obama temporarily cut the payroll tax rate by about fifteen percent. In our new book Free Money: Bitcoin and the American Monetary Tradition, we ask why gold peaked after a phenomenal rise, as Obama got going, and why Bitcoin, though founded in 2009, took into Obama's second term to sport extreme price appreciation. We ask why the Great Recession bottomed early in 2009 and never came back (though the recovery was slow). A big reason for these things is that Obama was coquettish, 2009-12, toward supply-side economics. The marginal rate of the income tax, the top estate tax rate, and the payroll tax are three classic targets of supply-side economic policy. These tax rates are to be cut as the top priorities of supply-side economics. The theory is that each of these tax rates distinctly discourages the production and the seizing of initiative in the economy; therefore, cutting them enhances economic activity to an uncommon degree. The primus inter pares of supply-side economics is the marginal rate of the income tax. In a graduated tax system, the marginal rate is that which hits only earners of highest income. Cutting this rate encourages economic activity in two distinct ways. First, a cut in the top rate is the most powerful among all possible rate cuts in a graduated scale, on a simple percentage basis. A cut of 4.6 points from 39.6 to 35 percent (that of the W. years), for example, increases marginal after-tax 'take-home' income from 60.1 cents to 65 cents on the dollar—an increase of 8.2 percent. In comparison, a cut in the bottom rate of 10 percent (that of the W. years) by 4.6 percentage points to 5.4 percent increases marginal take-home income from 90 to 94.6 cents on the dollar—an increase of 5.1 percent. Given progressive income taxes, equal rate cuts mean more at the top than at the bottom. Second, those who are subject to the highest graduated rates—the highest earners—by definition have the most ability and desire to avoid, legally, those rates. High earners do not even need the money. They can decline to earn, change the way they earn (taking advantage of lower rates elsewhere in the tax code), the timing, shelter the stuff, whatever. The highest earners are most adept when it comes to making money. They can slip the top rate because they have the savvy and inclination to do so, and because the tax code gives them ample opportunity to represent income beyond declaring it ordinary. (Forget about closing these loopholes without lowering rates—an inevitable lesson of tax history.) Obama maintained a cut in the marginal rate of the income tax through the entirety of his first term in office. Undoubtedly, this was a central component of this president's strategy to get re-elected. When the Republican opponent in the 2012 election, Mitt Romney, made his gaffe about 47 percent of the electorate's not having to pay any income tax, Obama must have smiled. Obama had ensured that by keeping the top earners' tax rate reduced, top earners paid an outsized share of income taxes. Low top tax rates, high top-earner tax revenue—he knew the verity would hold. Let us be clear: keeping top tax rates down got Obama to a second term. The estate tax is another classic supply-side target. Work and earn your whole life, have the government take it away: a major disincentive to acquire. A reduction in the estate tax prompts, once again, precisely those who are capable of succeeding greatly at enterprise to do just that. Lots of people succeeding at enterprise spells a good economy. Obama took the estate tax to zero. If one took the zero rate, heirs did not get the step-up basis in capital gains. If one did not take the zero, again Obama's rate (of 35 percent) was the lowest since 1932. Supply-side essence, from President Obama. Obama cut the employee portion of the social security tax. For decades, supply-siders have identified the social security tax as one of the best illustrations of the problem facing modern tax-heavy economies. Social security taxes, paid by employer and employee, are a 'wedge' that interposes itself at the place where employee and employer would normally meet to contract labor. Cutting the rate leads to greater employment, and greater returns to both parties, employer and employee. The Obama cut would have been more purely supply-side if it had included the employer side as well (and been permanent), but a rate cut is a rate cut. More people contracted to work because their take-home pay was greater because of the policy. And employers could settle at slightly lower wage rates because their employees were taking more home after-tax. Barack Obama giving a clinic on supply-side economics! One can say that tax cuts are Keynesian. It is true that every tax cut makes the beneficiary spend more than before. But the effect is the absolute least at the marginal rate, and the least in general when the cuts are in rates of a progressive tax system. The JFK tax cut of 1964 that reduced progressive tax rates remains an exemplar of Keynesianism—actually it doesn't, thanks to Kudlow and Domitrovic, JFK and the Reagan Revolution—because of misinterpretation. A cut in progressive rates disproportionately has supply-side, not demand-side effects. Obama maintained cuts in progressive tax rates. Obama did much of this without Republicans forcing his hand. The Tea Party sweep of 2010 brought in a new Congress in 2011, after Obama had settled on most of his accommodations of supply-side economics. Politicians in foxholes—which is to say facing re-election—may talk a Keynesian game (it soothes the chattering classes). But when they act, they take supply-side economics into their confidence.
Fox News
12 minutes ago
- Fox News
WATCH LIVE: Dekalb County Police give update after shooting near Emory University in Atlanta
Authorities confirmed a lone shooter is dead, and one police officer was injured "in the course of the response."
