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Detroit is spending $184M on sewer connections.It won’t say where.
Free if a contract reaches your alley. $5,000 to 25,000 if it never does. No application, no list, nobody is told either way, so I reverse-engineered the City’s selection model from its own open data and scored every address in Detroit.
Three real addresses, three different answers
- 1A likelihood, not a maybeAlley cave-ins, block-group income, council district and distance to contracted work, the four criteria DWSD publishes, measured at your address and compared against the 138 alleys it actually chose. Validated at p < 0.0001.
- 2Then the call, scriptedThere is no list to look up, so the answer always ends in a phone call. Every number here comes with what to say, the three things to ask, and what to have written down before you hang up.
- 3And everything else that reaches youSix segments of pipe, who owns each, and every City program checked against this one address, plus the 45-day damage claim, which is a different pot of money and a deadline most people miss.
The money is not going where the basements flood.
Blue: every home that told the City it had water in the basement since 2023. Orange: the 138 alleys in the first round of contracts.
Water in a basement · 14,115 reports Alleys contracted · 138
- 1.0%
- of the 14,115 basement-flooding reports are within 200 m of a contracted alley
- 2.5×
- fewer flooding reports around the chosen alleys than around the City's earlier alley projects (p<0.0001)
- 0
- alleys chosen so far in Districts 2, 3, 4 and 5, including District 4, which the City's own plan named a priority
Nobody else can answer this
The City publishes the criteria but not the list, and the 30,000+ failed-connection data points behind it are in none of its open datasets, I checked all 782. Reconstructing it from what is public is the only way a household can see anything at all.