The City of Detroit’s Financial Empowerment Center started providing professional, one-on-one financial counseling as a no-cost public service in early 2020. From the start, Detroit’s new public service had a particular focus on assisting homeowners with low incomes who were at risk of property tax foreclosure.

With generous support from the Wells Fargo Foundation, the CFE Fund partnered with the City of Detroit to study the benefits of the connection of Detroit’s property tax relief programs to FEC financial counseling. The study combines original qualitative research with a unique analysis of administrative data to explore the experiences and outcomes of homeowners participating in FEC counseling, with an eye toward informing future programming across the broader national field.

This overview highlights key findings from the study to date; the CFE Fund will release full findings from the study, which was conducted by MEF Associates, later this year.