Feds give Detroit $347M for flood prevention efforts

Flood damage in Detroit | Ken Coleman photo

Nearly $350 million in federal funding will help Detroit residents and businesses be better prepared for future flooding events.

On Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) presented the city of Detroit with a check for $346.8 million in disaster recovery funds connected to flooding in Detroit and surrounding communities in August 2023. 

Over a three-day period that month, severe storms across the region overwhelmed the capacity of the sewer system, resulting in street and freeway flooding, as well as considerable backups into residential and commercial basements, triggering a disaster declaration for nine counties, including Wayne County.

According to a press release, data indicated that of the nearly 6,000 homes that experienced flooding damage in August 2023, 5,000 were in the city of Detroit. 

At Wednesday’s presentation, Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan said the federal funding will address failing decades-old alley sewer lines in the city that were a major cause of the basement backups.

“We have 1,800 miles of old alley sewer lines built 70 to 90 years ago for a city of 1.8 million residents. With 700,000 residents today, there is no way we’d be able to address a problem of this magnitude without significant federal support,” said Duggan.  “We now have the resources we need to make a significant impact on this problem.”

Duggan, a longtime Democrat who announced in December he would run for Michigan governor as an independent, said he wants to use a “significant portion” of the funding to prioritize repairing and replacing failing alley drains, with a goal of addressing blockages at 10,000 Detroit homes over the next two years.  

Duggan said he also wanted to prioritize a portion of the HUD funding toward construction of new flood-resilient affordable housing, which Kera Package, HUD’s deputy assistant secretary for grant programs, said aligned with the fund’s mission.

“CDBG-DR provides critical funding to not only repair damages from severe storms, but also to increase community resilience in the face of future flooding events,” said Package.

With the issuance of the funds, the city now has 120 days to create an Action Plan to determine how specifically the funds will be used. As part of that process, the city plans to host community engagement events to collect feedback from residents.