This story is part of a series that highlights the challenges and solutions around housing in Southeast Michigan and is made possible through underwriting support from the Oakland County (Region L) Regional Housing Partnership.
The Casa Del Rey Apartments building at 111 Oneida St. in Pontiac is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is believed to have been the largest apartment building in the city when it was constructed in 1929. The building is notable for having been designed by architect Robert O. Derrick, who also designed Greenfield Village. However, until quite recently, Casa Del Rey had sat vacant for 20 years, falling into disrepair.
The building's fortunes have turned around, thanks in part to two new initiatives that are seeking to boost Oakland County's affordable housing supply. In November, developer Coleman Allen LLC broke ground on a $15.5 million rehab project that will reopen 50 apartments in 2026 for residents making 80-120% of the county's area median income (AMI).
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Steve KossThe Casa Del Rey Apartments building in Pontiac.
Ronita Coleman, cofounder of Coleman Allen LLC, says she wouldn't have learned about the property if not for the recently established
Oakland County Land Bank Authority (OCLBA), which holds tax-foreclosed properties for productive reuse. And she says the project wouldn't have been financially feasible if not for a $3 million low-interest loan from the new
Oakland Together Housing Trust Fund, which has reserved millions to support affordable, attainable, workforce, and mixed-income housing.
"It made the numbers work," Coleman says. "With a lot of these old projects, you can build a new structure and it'd be cheaper than revitalizing the existing structure, in some cases. And because the cost is so high to revitalize, you need that last piece of funding that will get you over the hump, if you will. So [the housing trust fund has] been very instrumental in making this project successful."
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Steve KossRonita Coleman in the Casa Del Rey Apartments building.
The land bank and the housing trust fund are two examples of how Oakland County has adopted innovative new approaches to solve its
housing affordability crisis since County Executive Dave Coulter took office in 2019. Kirsten Elliott, CEO and president of the Troy-based
Community Housing Network (CHN), says that before Coulter's tenure, the county was solely focused on promoting home ownership, with no resources reserved to support rental or affordable housing. She says Coulter shifted that focus, and she believes the county has put additional emphasis on housing affordability as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
"All of a sudden, housing affordability wasn't just hitting people who were paycheck to paycheck or low-income," she says. "It was hitting everybody, and the need for stable housing became such an apparent, timely, needed thing immediately that you couldn't ignore it anymore."
Oakland County Land Bank Authority ramps up
OCLBA Executive Director Jill Robinson says she established a "quasi-land bank" when she joined the county 10 years ago, getting county treasury-owned properties in order and developing new guidelines for their sale. ("We stopped selling properties for $100 just to whoever was interested in them," she says.) But she says her ability to grow that incarnation of the land bank was limited because "politics were different back then."
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Jill RobinsonJill Robinson and Ronita Coleman at the groundbreaking for the Casa Del Rey redevelopment.
"Land banks exist because there are properties that just don't seem to have a lot of value or are difficult to develop at the time," she says. "And the county, 10 years ago, maybe didn't want to acknowledge that that existed in Oakland County."
Since the OCLBA was formally established in 2022, Robinson has been able to formalize and expand her work, and to seek funding through Michigan's State Land Bank Authority. OCLBA may acquire properties through tax foreclosure, private donation, or market purchase. It can also "bank" properties to be assembled for a larger development project. In selling these properties, OCLBA prioritizes public use and ownership, neighborhood revitalization, generational wealth-building, and housing production or rehabilitation.
In 2023 and 2024, OCLBA secured over $1.3 million in blight elimination grants from the state land bank. OCLBA's notable accomplishments so far include: funding the demolition of Pontiac's closed McCarroll School and Emerson School, the former of which is to be replaced by a
youth recreation center; stabilizing and selling two properties in Pontiac's GM Modern Housing District; and the Casa Del Rey project, which Robinson calls her "biggest win."
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Steve KossRonita Coleman in the Casa Del Rey Apartments building.
"[Casa Del Rey] is a 50-unit apartment building smack in the middle of a neighborhood that has been there for 100 years," she says. "If that had been demolished, that would have been two houses rebuilt. Renovation gives us 50
missing-middle housing units that can be there for another 100 years."
Robinson says 95% of OCLBA-owned properties are in Pontiac. She says she hopes to continue being a "collaborator" with Pontiac city staff, repurposing OCLBA properties in ways that address the housing crisis and fit the city's needs.
"I see us working together to get maybe a qualified developer pool so we can assemble properties together and say, 'Hey, we have 25 properties here. This is what the city wants built. Can you do it?'" Robinson says.
Oakland Together Housing Trust Fund moves quickly
The Oakland Together Housing Trust Fund is even younger than OCLBA, but it's accomplished a lot in a short time. The fund was launched in 2023 and funded with $18 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds, plus an annual $2 million appropriation from the county's general fund. It provides low-interest loans, usually with rates around 1-2%, to bridge financing gaps for housing developments that de-concentrate poverty and provide affordable housing for the county's workforce, among other priorities.
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Khadija Walker-FobbsKhadija Walker-Fobbs.
"If you have a good project, we want you to come talk to us," says Khadija Walker-Fobbs, neighborhood and housing development officer for the county. "And I think that's a little bit of a shift from maybe before. Just based on feedback we've heard from developers, it was kind of like, 'Oakland County is a little hard to deal with. They're not really interested in affordable housing projects.' We want people to know we're open."
Since the fund was established, it's given loans to nine housing developments that will bring a total of 649 new housing units online. 438 of those units will be reserved for residents making 80% or less of the AMI. The trust fund loaned a total of $23.6 million to those projects, which will bring a total investment of $180 million to the county.
Walker-Fobbs says several of the projects the trust fund has supported reflect "a new vision" for "what affordable housing needs to look like," influenced in part by her lengthy professional background in human services before she joined the county in 2023. She says that vision involves building communities that offer supportive services for residents with unique needs. For example, the trust fund provided a $3 million loan to the Oakland Woods development in Pontiac, which will renovate 216 units catered to older adults' needs. The Wellspring development in Southfield, which received a $2.6 million trust fund loan, will offer services for residents recovering from opioid misuse.
The most groundbreaking such project supported by the trust fund is a pair of Rochester Hills developments, Walton Oaks and Auburn Oaks, which will include condos and single-family homes reserved and customized for adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). The trust fund provided a total of $1.7 million in loans to the two projects. In considering the two developments, Walker-Fobbs says she and her colleagues heard moving testimonies from parents of children with IDD.
"A lot of the parents were aging, or maybe they were single parents," she says. "They were just in tears saying, 'We don't know what's going to happen when we pass away,' or, 'There's not somebody else to care for our child, and we want to make sure they don't end up homeless.' And so this whole development is finding a solution for that."
The Cooney family of Rochester Hills is one of many breathing a sigh of relief since Walton Oaks and Auburn Oaks got underway. 33-year-old Matt Cooney, who has Down syndrome, will own a home at Walton Oaks. He'll share it with three others with IDD, two of whom are already his friends. On-site staff will provide services for Cooney and other Walton Oaks residents. Cooney's parents, Pete and Tracy Cooney, are 69 and 64.
"We were originally thinking, 'Well, Matt will just live with us forever,'" Pete Cooney says. "And then we're like, 'Wait a minute. We're getting up there, and we're not going to be around forever.' And so we want to make sure that Matt doesn't get blindsided if something happens."
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David MingleMatt Cooney sits in an excavator at a groundbreaking event for Walton Oaks. Oakland County Executive Dave Coulter is at bottom right.
The elder Cooneys say securing a permanent home for Matt Cooney has given them peace of mind. Matt Cooney says he's "very excited" to have a place of his own.
"I like to work on my goals," he says. "And my goals when I get into my new place, most importantly, are to decorate my apartment."
Walker-Fobbs sees the trust fund's accomplishments so far as just the tip of the iceberg. She hopes the fund could also serve as a model for funding affordable housing outside the traditional mechanism of U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development dollars.
"I think it's going to have a further reach even than Oakland County," she says. "... I got a call from somebody who was interested in Maryland, like, 'What are you guys doing?' And I think if we can prove it works and we can show it, then people are going to be more willing to make investments in ways that look like this."
Housing navigation efforts
Beyond the large-scale, development-oriented efforts of the trust fund and OCLBA, other efforts within the county are aiming to make it easier for people to find housing and housing assistance. At CHN, Elliott and her colleagues are overseeing two pilot projects related to housing system navigation.
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Kirsten ElliottKirsten Elliott.
"There aren't enough resources for people to access housing resources when they need them, and the systems that are there ... are, I believe, intentionally burdensome to make it difficult for people to access the services," Elliott says. "The way that we have funded housing and affordable housing in our country, for time immemorial, has been literally this hodgepodge. ... It's almost like we've got this big monster with all these nodules on it."
The Michigan State Housing Development Authority has funded CHN to oversee a pilot that offers assistance for Section 8 housing voucher recipients in Oakland and Macomb counties to move into communities of higher opportunity and upward mobility. Pilot program participants receive a higher-than-usual voucher amount, as well as assistance from CHN staff in finding a landlord in their community of choice.
Elliott says program participants have been able to move into more affluent areas of the county, such as Rochester Hills and Troy. She says the overall goal of the program is to help participants "become a vital part" of their new communities.
"A housing coach is almost like how some people get life coaches," Elliott says. "I want to make this change in my life. I just need somebody to help me be accountable and to show me: What do I need to know, and how do I clear out all of the extra gunk so I can get into my intended purpose?"
CHN's second housing navigation pilot focuses on improving the way the health care system handles older adults experiencing homelessness. The
Michigan Health Endowment Fund has funded the
Michigan Coalition Against Homelessness to carry out the project, with CHN as a sub-grantee. Elliott says older adults are a population of particular concern, as it's expected that
one in five Americans will be 65 or older by 2030.
"It's our fastest growing homeless population, and it is a population that is most at risk of homelessness," she says. "And there are also high health care integration issues. So how do we get these two systems talking to each other so that we can better serve them?"
CHN staff are working with local health care workers to ensure that they're prepared to better assist older adults who may be discharged from a hospital into homelessness. And on the other side of the equation, CHN staff are also working to make sure their own colleagues are well prepared to address the needs of older adults experiencing homelessness.
"Older persons are starting to really become a big part of our system," Elliott says. "They have different needs, right? And so it's important to have our workers understand the difference: What is Medicare? What is Medicaid? How does all of that work?"
Whether it's a housing navigation pilot, the housing trust fund, or the OCLBA, stakeholders agree that cooperation across a broad slate of players is necessary to advance innovation in solving Oakland County's housing challenges. Elliott describes a collaborative mindset as "one of the big secrets to our success." Coleman has seen the fruits of collaboration firsthand in the events that led to Casa Del Rey getting its first spruce-up in two decades.
"This couldn't be done by one sole source of funds or a couple," she says. "It was collective. And you can see that with the relationship between Oakland County Housing Trust Fund as well as the land bank, because if they weren't on the same accord, this project wouldn't have gotten done."
Patrick Dunn is the managing editor of Concentrate and a freelance writer and editor. He lives in Ypsilanti.
Casa Del Rey photos by Steve Koss. Matt Cooney photo courtesy of David Mingle. All other photos courtesy of the subjects.