Before she became a professor at USC Gould School of Law, Bernadette Atuahene published groundbreaking research in the Southern California Law Review (Vol. 91, No. 2, 2018) exposing racialized property tax inequity in Detroit.
An acclaimed property law scholar, Atuahene discovered that, between 2009 and 2015, the City of Detroit overtaxed 53-83% of its residential properties in violation of the Michigan State Constitution, which says no property can be assessed at more than 50% of its market value. Even worse, Wayne County has foreclosed on one in three Detroit properties for failure to pay these inflated taxes, displacing over 100,000 residents since 2009. In a study titled Taxed Out, Atuahene and her co-author Christopher Berry found that if the city had correctly assessed those taxes, the county would not have foreclosed on 25% of the lowest-valued homes between 2011 and 2015.
Because she was a community organizer in South Los Angeles before she went to law school, Atuahene was compelled to take action. “I could not have access to reams of empirical evidence showing illegally inflated property taxes were routine and do nothing,” says Atuahene.
So, in 2017, Atuahene founded the nonprofit Institute for Law and Organizing (ILO), which works at the intersection of law, research and community organizing to protect homeownership for Black people.
ILO’s first campaign, the Coalition for Property Tax Justice, involves USC Gould students through the Public Interest Housing Practicum. With 15 grassroots organizations, the Coalition was launched to stop unconstitutional property tax assessments, stop property tax foreclosures and win compensation for impacted homeowners.
One Coalition initiative, the Property Tax Appeals Project (PTAP), was designed by students about six years ago and is almost entirely student run. Law students at USC Gould and elsewhere put together appeal letters, collect evidence focusfor appeals, design arguments and present arguments at the Detroit Board of Review hearings every March.
This year alone, PTAP appealed illegally inflated taxes for more than 550 homeowners — a record — and prevented 13,000 tax foreclosures. ILO also secured tax exemptions for low-income residents, advocated for the expansion of housing assistance that resulted in $4.4 million in federal relief, and laid the groundwork for a program that compensates low-income residents who lost their homes.
In addition to working with PTAP, students also assist with research, legal writing, lawsuits, community organizing and drafting laws.
“The structural change needed to ensure the end of illegally inflated property taxes came when the Detroit City Council passed a property tax reform ordinance in November 2023, authored by law students,” Atuahene says. “This first-of-its kind measure places the burden of correctly assessing properties on the City rather than the homeowners.”
Now, ILO is scaling its model, because Black and Latino homeowners nationwide pay a 10-13% higher property tax rate. USC Gould students are already involved with programs in Chicago and Milwaukee.
Carus Newman, a 2L involved in the practicum, says: “The PI Housing Practicum challenged me to learn a lot about property tax injustice and to apply the skills I learned in the first year of law school to make a real difference. The practicum showed me how to organize in order to create change and gave me the confidence to tackle systemic issues of inequality.”
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