The Metro: Detroit keeps rewriting its rental safety law. Landlords keep ignoring it
Reporter Aaron Mondry has spent years chronicling Detroit’s housing — evictions, development, the city’s rental rules — for Outlier Media. He joins The Metro to discuss why a 40-year-old safety law still doesn’t work, and the families left living with the consequences.
Aaron Mondry, senior reporter with Outlier Media, appears on WDET's The Metro to discuss his reporting on housing, June 9, 2026.
For four decades, Detroit has had the same law on the books: a landlord can’t rent you a home until the city has inspected it and proven it is safe to live in. But almost nobody follows it. Today, roughly one in seven rentals actually meets that bar. The city rewrote the law in 2017 and again in 2024 to raise that number, yet it has barely moved.
Detroit is a sharp version of a problem you will find in many cities built on old, cheap housing. The law says, fix the place up, but the math says, don’t even bother. In other words, it can cost more to bring an old house up to code than the rent will ever pay back.
Here’s what that looks like in one house, near the Bagley neighborhood: Windows nailed shut, no heat on the second floor, sewage backing up into the basement.
Senior reporter Aaron Mondry at Outlier Media has uncovered these findings and reported on that family in the Bagley neighborhood. He joined Robyn Vincent on The Metro to discuss how the law is failing renters and landlords.
Later in the hour: Mondry has also reported on Detroit’s Right to Counsel program — the free lawyers who help tenants fight eviction, now facing a funding cliff. Chief Judge William McConico of the 36th District Court joins us to speak on what his courtroom would lose if that money runs dry.
Hear the full conversation using the media player above.
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