The Detroit Land Bank Authority (DLBA) presented its fiscal year 2027 budget to the Detroit City Council, detailing a significant reduction in inventory, a projected revenue shortfall, and the need to pivot from structure sales to vacant land management. CEO Tammy Daniels and CFO Reginald Scott led the presentation, highlighting progress on blight reduction and new programming, while facing sharp questions from council members on the nuisance abatement program, land sales transparency, and the long-term financial sustainability of the organization.
Thank you. They used to be messing with them. Good afternoon, CEO Daniels. How are you today? Yes, sir. Good. Make sure you hit that button in front of you so that the red turns green. Can you hear me now? I can hear you now. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. You have a PowerPoint queued up? Yes. We need some time to get that going. Give me a few minutes. Okay. We'll give you an opportunity to introduce your team and have any opening statements if you would like. Good afternoon through the chair, Tammy Daniels, Chief Executive Officer for the Detroit Land Bank. I'm joined here to my left by our C O O C FO, Reginald Scott. To my right is Carlina Toombs, who is our government liaison. She'll be running the presentation. And on Teams, we are joined by the rest of our executive team. Robbie Lynn, who runs our planning and analysis department, Gabriel Guerrero, who leads our legal team, and John O'Hana, who leads our real estate sales and marketing team. And I think it is not sharing. We need sharing capabilities. Oh you're your floor's yours. Okay. Good afternoon. This um is our FY27 budget presentation. Start off historically in 2014, the land bank was charged with helping to address the citywide bike crisis. With more than a hundred thousand um vacant and abandoned properties, our goal was clear to eliminate blight, increase occupancy, and create real pathways to home ownership. In the 12 years that we've been doing this work, we've made significant um resident first impact. We have sold and gotten rehabbed over 13,000 vacant homes. We've sold over 30,000 vacant lots that have been transformed into gardens, parks, community gatherings, and I'll note that 88.6% of those sales are to Detroiters. And we have successfully sold 123 homes through our rehab and ready program with more on the way. Currently, there are eight on our website, five of which are unsold, and they span districts one, two, four, five, and seven. So in 2024, uh 82% of our buyers were Detroit residents. So there is a repeated refrain that you know developers are coming in and they're you know benefiting from land bank programs, and that just is not accurate. Detroiters are the ones who benefit most from our programming. And um, what I'm most proud of is in uh November 2025, the uh Griswall Consulting Group found that the DLBA programs have generated more than two billion dollars and e increased home values for Detroiters. That underscores the long-term and lasting and economic impact that we have brought to Detroit neighborhoods through our work. Next slide. And that pipeline breaks down with 283 in queue for demolition. 587 are occupied. 498 are sold in awaiting closing, and we simply have 750 structures left that in our sales pipeline from a height of over 40,000 to now we're down to 750. Next slide. Our structure sales. So that's what everybody else because our inventory is now limited, our structure sales and the revenue that we generate from that is limited. If you can look at the um the chart on the side, it shows our revenue through structure sales since 2016. And right now we're projecting to generate five and a half, 5.6 million dollars, which is uh right at where we were at the very beginning of our program when we were launching many of these programs.