Detroit homeowner Marcus Weems needs our help

Marcus Weems was stressed.

In January 2021, the longtime Detroit resident was still recovering from a bout with COVID that had left him hospitalized. While he was still struggling to regain his health, Marcus decided to take a chance and buy a house from a private seller on the city’s west side.

Even though it was a fixer-upper, Marcus thought he’d finally realized the American dream.

“When I bought the house,” he says, “it came with some property taxes, but I had a clean title and everything.”

But later that year, Marcus, 59, sensed that something wasn’t quite right. One day in the fall of 2021, he got a letter from someone who had supposedly purchased his house through the local county treasurer’s auction.

“I was like, ‘How did this happen?’” Marcus says. “I didn’t get a chance to get on a payment plan or nothing. I was like, ‘Wow. I didn’t get any warning that my house was going into foreclosure.’”

Finding himself in a precarious position, Marcus knew he needed help.

“I was in a pickle," he says. "I was in a real bind.”

That’s when he reached out to the United Community Housing Coalition, which was able to get the sale reversed.

Marcus was ecstatic. With the house finally officially in his name, he started to scrape together the resources he needed to fix things up.

But then in the middle of a brutal windstorm last summer, a huge tree fell onto his house, causing extensive damage to the roof.

“Talk about adding insult to injury,” he says.

Now with summer coming to an end and autumn quickly closing in, Marcus needs our help to fix his roof and hopefully get a new furnace before the Michigan weather takes a turn for the worse.

If you can, please help Marcus get his roof repaired before another Michigan winter arrives. And even if you can't donate, please help us spread the word.

Thank you!

Sincerely,

Dave Mesrey