Ten Years of Listening to Detroit
By Eric Shaw
Office of the Vice President for Research
A decade of the Detroit Metro Area Communities Study
When COVID-19 shutdowns began in March 2020, city leaders and philanthropic organizations faced an urgent question: How bad was the economic fallout for Detroit residents, and how fast was it getting worse?
Within days, researchers at the University of Michigan had an answer. A rapid-response survey of more than 2,000 Detroiters found that half believed they were more likely than not to run out of money within three months. One in five said they definitely would. More than a third of people employed before March had already lost their jobs.
The speed of that response wasn’t luck. It was infrastructure—a panel survey called the Detroit Metro Area Communities Study, or DMACS, that had been tracking the experiences and priorities of a representative cross-section of Detroit residents since 2016. When the pandemic hit, the team pivoted from its planned survey to capture what Detroiters were facing in real time.
That kind of responsiveness is what DMACS was designed for. Now marking its 10th year, the survey has fielded 22 waves of data collection, contributed to more than 40 academic papers and 45 published reports, and been cited more than 525 times in local and national media. Over that decade, more than 5,000 Detroit residents have participated in the survey, a panel large enough to identify citywide trends while also zooming in on differences by neighborhood, age, income and race.
Bridging the gap
DMACS grew out of the Detroit Area Study, a U-M social science training program launched in 1951 that produced decades of research. In 2016, professors Elisabeth Gerber and Jeffrey Morenoff reimagined it with a sharper focus: getting insight into the hands of city leaders and residents, not just academic journals.
The survey is jointly supported by Poverty Solutions, the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, and U-M’s Institute for Social Research. Mara Cecilia Ostfeld, research director at the Center for Racial Justice and a survey research expert, now co-directs the project alongside Morenoff.
“Public meetings and city council sessions tend to amplify the loudest voices, but they don’t necessarily represent what most Detroiters are experiencing,” Ostfeld said. “A representative survey lets us hear from people who might never show up to a public comment period—renters, shift workers, new residents—and bring their priorities into the room where decisions are being made.”
What distinguishes DMACS from one-off polls is its combination of scale, representativeness and continuity. The panel includes roughly 2,000 adults per wave, drawn from randomly selected addresses across the city so results reflect Detroit’s adult population. Surveys are offered online and by phone, in multiple languages, with incentives that help achieve strong response rates among diverse groups that include renters and homeowners, newcomers and longtime residents and people across all seven city council districts.
“Public meetings and city council sessions tend to amplify the loudest voices, but they don’t necessarily represent what most Detroiters are experiencing. A representative survey lets us hear from people who might never show up to a public comment period—renters, shift workers, new residents—and bring their priorities into the room where decisions are being made.”
From data to decisions
DMACS data have informed decisions ranging from philanthropic investments to city council resolutions. When the Gilbert Family Foundation committed $12 million to the Detroit Eviction Defense Fund to expand legal representation for tenants facing eviction, DMACS findings on housing instability and eviction risk were part of the evidence base. The Detroit City Council passed a resolution supporting the National Infrastructure Bank Act of 2021, with DMACS data on housing cost burdens providing context for the city’s needs.
The survey’s reach extends beyond housing. A 2023 wave found that 39% of Detroiters used grocery home delivery, a finding that led the brief’s authors to engage with Shipt, a grocery delivery service, in efforts to expand affordable, reliable delivery regardless of zip code. In a city where many neighborhoods lack full-service grocery stores, that kind of researcher-to-industry conversation is part of what DMACS was designed to enable.
The survey has also shifted narratives. A 2024 wave examining why some Detroit residents of voting age said they were unlikely to cast a ballot found that the most common reason was distrust in the political system, not apathy. In fact, about two-thirds of those unlikely to vote reported engaging in other forms of civic activity, from talking with neighbors about local issues to donating to causes and religious organizations.
“Local election turnout is historically very low in Detroit, which has led to people believing Detroiters are not civically engaged,” said Sarah Alvarez, founder of Outlier Media, a nonprofit newsroom that has partnered with DMACS on election coverage. “But what DMACS shows is that people are incredibly involved—in their churches, on their blocks, donating time and money. They tend to trust their neighbors more than elected officials.”
A recent example: homeowners insurance
A DMACS survey of 2,270 Detroit households, fielded from January to March 2025 in partnership with Poverty Solutions and funded by Rocket Community Fund, illustrates how the panel generates actionable findings.
The survey found that only 74% of Detroit homeowners had homeowners insurance, compared with a national average of about 88%. Among homeowners without mortgages—who face no lender requirement to carry coverage—38% were uninsured, roughly double the national rate of 19.5% for mortgage-free homeowners.
The reasons were largely economic. Forty-one percent of uninsured homeowners said insurance was too expensive. Among those who had never applied, nearly half cited cost. Among those who once had coverage but dropped it, 59% said premiums became unaffordable.
The findings fit a broader pattern: about one in four Detroit homeowners spends more than 30% of household income on housing costs, including taxes, utilities, repairs and insurance. Previous DMACS work found that more than 38,000 Detroit households, or about one in seven occupied homes, live in housing needing at least one major repair, such as a failing roof, broken plumbing or serious electrical problems.
These data points don’t prescribe a single policy response, but they give policymakers, funders and advocates a clearer picture of what residents are experiencing and where resources might be directed.
An invitation to researchers
DMACS operates as a buy-in panel. In practice, that means partner organizations, including university researchers, city agencies and nonprofits,can pay to add questions to an upcoming DMACS wave instead of fielding their own citywide survey from scratch. The model allows the core infrastructure to support a range of public-interest research while keeping costs manageable for partners who couldn’t otherwise afford representative data.
Partners receive assistance developing survey questions, access to standard demographic and household variables, a weighted data file and a topline report. Past partners have included the Kresge Foundation, the Detroit Health Department, Knight Foundation, the City of Detroit and Outlier Media.
The team is seeking new research partners. Faculty, city agencies, nonprofits, and philanthropic organizations interested in adding questions to future waves can contact [email protected].
“Any single survey is a snapshot. But ten years of data from the same population lets you see how experiences change over time including whether a policy is working, whether a neighborhood is changing and whether people’s sense of possibility is expanding or contracting. That’s the kind of evidence that can actually inform long-term decisions.”
Looking ahead
In 2022, with National Institutes of Health funding, the DMACS team launched the Michigan Metro Area Communities Study to extend similar methods to Flint, Grand Rapids and Ypsilanti. Early findings from those cities have examined how trust in government relates to lived experiences of institutional harm. In Flint, for example, residents who lived through the water crisis were more likely to express skepticism about government motives—attitudes sometimes dismissed as “conspiracy thinking” but grounded in recent, well-documented failures. The work complicates simplistic narratives by showing how distrust can be a rational response to real events.
For Detroit, the 10-year mark of the survey represents not an endpoint but a foundation. The same infrastructure that answered urgent questions when the pandemic hit is now positioned to inform decisions in calmer times and to pivot again when the next crisis comes.
“Any single survey is a snapshot,” said Jeffrey Morenoff, professor of public policy and sociology and DMACS co-director. “But ten years of data from the same population lets you see how experiences change over time including whether a policy is working, whether a neighborhood is changing and whether people’s sense of possibility is expanding or contracting. That’s the kind of evidence that can actually inform long-term decisions.”