Detroit, MI
Crack ‘blew up’ Detroit 40 years ago. Families, justice system still dealing with fallout

Detroit — Crack cocaine hit Detroit like a bomb 40 years ago, destroying families, straining law enforcement and causing paradigm shifts in the criminal justice system and popular culture.
The crack explosion in the mid-1980s spawned millionaire kingpins who waged violent turf wars, along with countless small-time dealers and addicts. The epidemic led to strict laws that swelled the prison population in Michigan and nationwide, while music industry and Hollywood icons built careers rapping about the dope game and the violence surrounding it.
While crack remains easily available, it’s not the drug of choice for most users now, according to law enforcement and survey data. Pills, heroin and other “downers” — often laced with fentanyl — have supplanted crack as the top-selling drug nationwide and locally, with methamphetamine entering the Detroit market in large quantities for the first time this year, according to Detroit police officials.
On Jan. 5, 1986, The Detroit News published a front-page article headlined, “Addictive new ‘crack’ cocaine sweeps Detroit.” Federal authorities said they had heard reports of the drug surfacing in Detroit sometime in 1984 or early 1985, with its popularity spreading rapidly during the summer of 1985.
In 1987, with turf wars raging as gangs jockeyed for position in the lucrative new drug market, Detroit recorded its highest-ever homicide rate of 63.5 per 100,000 residents. A 1989 report by the U.S. Attorney’s Office found Detroit, which at the time was the nation’s sixth-largest city in population, ranked first in the United States in crack cocaine abuse.
The 1991 movie “New Jack City,” in which a band of crack dealers commandeer an apartment complex called “The Carter,” was based on the real-life takeover of the 52-unit Broadmoor Apartments on Detroit’s east side by the Chambers Brothers gang, the organization that’s credited with introducing crack to Detroit.
The era known as the crack epidemic, which lasted from the late 1980s to the early 1990s, was the result of multiple economic and social factors, according to Wayne State University sociology professor Khari Brown, who said the drug had a particularly devastating impact on Detroit.
“Crack hit cities like Detroit just as deindustrialization was happening across America,” Brown said. “The factories all shut down just as Black people were starting to benefit from the Civil Rights Movement. Just when the Black community was starting to get a foothold, and starting to get those good factory jobs they’d previously been shut out of, companies started shipping jobs to other countries or mechanizing.
“While this is happening, crack enters the community, and it’s highly addictive, creating a lot of addicts, and giving people who have no jobs an opportunity to make a lot of money fast,” Brown said. “At the same time, culturally, you have rap music that’s encouraging young African American males to sell drugs, telling them that it’s cool to join gangs, and shoot people up and go to jail. At the peak period when crack was in the streets, you had gangsta rap, which was a matter of art imitating life, and life imitating art.”
The crack problem wasn’t confined to Detroit or African Americans, said Steve Dolunt, a former Detroit police assistant chief who began his career in 1985.
“We’d arrest a ton of people from the suburbs,” said Dolunt, who retired in 2017. “White males, White females. A lot of truck drivers would stop for hookers and smoke rocks with them. We had doctors from St. John’s Hospital (on Detroit’s east side); they’d get off work and stop for a quick rock. The crack epidemic hit everyone; it wasn’t just Detroit, although that’s where most people came to get it.
“It was like a factory — a lot of the crack houses had slots in the door; people would just go up, put their money in and get their rock.”
Dolunt said when he was a young officer patrolling the city’s west side, the Chambers Brothers gang controlled the Jeffries Projects.
“It was just like ‘New Jack City’ — maybe the movie was exaggerated a little, but the Chambers Brothers did take over whole floors of those high-rises,” he said. “I felt sorry for the old people who had to live there, or the people who were just trying to raise families. But they were scared to say anything to us, so if we didn’t catch these guys actually selling dope, there wasn’t much we could do.”
‘Like nothing before’
Illegal narcotics still flood Detroit and other communities, urban and rural.
Fentanyl overdoses have resulted in thousands of deaths, while addiction to heroin and other drugs continues to cause heartache and destroy lives — but crack created a unique set of problems, said Ray Winans, a former member of the Head Bangers Seven Mile Bloods gang who sold crack for years, starting as a child.
“There were drugs on the street before crack, but when crack hit, it blew up like nothing before,” said Winans, who at age 14 killed a crack addict by bludgeoning him on the head with a hammer.
Winans was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to prison until his 18th birthday. Upon his release, he continued selling crack, which landed him in and out of jail and prison until he quit in 2009.
“Crack is the drug that took the backbone of the Black community, the Black woman, out of the home,” said Winans, who mentors gang members and drug dealers as part of his Detroit Friends and Family Community Violence Intervention program. “When a woman would be hooked on heroin, that was a physical high, and a lot of them when they had kids, or had something else happen to wake them up, they’d get themselves together and get clean.
“But crack is a psychological drug; you get that first high that’s better than anything you ever felt in your life, and you keep trying to chase that,” Winans said. “When I sold crack, I’d see women selling their bodies — willing to sell their children — for a rock. People sold their souls for crack. It destroyed the Black community.”
Hot new product
Crack cocaine first turned up in 1981 in Los Angeles, San Diego and Houston, and by 1985 it was widely available in Detroit and other cities across the United States, according to the U.S. Office of Justice Programs 1985-86 National Narcotics Intelligence Report.
By July 1986, crack had permeated Detroit’s neighborhoods, prompting federal authorities in the city to launch a telephone line, 800-NO-CRACK, for tipsters to turn in crack dealers for reward money. In 1987, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration seized 1,260 pounds of cocaine in Detroit, up from 55 pounds two years earlier, according to The Detroit News archives.
Before crack was introduced, freebasing cocaine had been a habit attributed to the rich and famous, with comedian Richard Pryor making headlines after burning himself while freebasing in 1980. But while freebasing is a dangerous, expensive process that usually involves using highly flammable and expensive ether, crack is usually cut with safe, inexpensive baking soda. It’s an affordable, easily made product that reportedly gives users an initial euphoric high they often spend years trying to recapture.
Drugs had caused problems in Detroit for decades, with The News devoting a full page of its Sept. 20, 1873, edition to a story about the city’s opium scourge. Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, heroin and other drugs ravaged many Detroit families and neighborhoods.
But no illegal drug has ever had such an immediate and widespread impact, said Scott Burnstein, a Detroit crime historian and founder of the website The Gangster Report.
“There’s never been a narcotic that went from zero to a thousand like crack did — it was a total game-changer,” Burnstein said. “A lot of it was the low price and the nature of the high. … There was a huge demand for it, and it opened the floodgates for the era when anyone could become a drug kingpin.”
Burnstein said gangs like the Chambers Brothers and Young Boys Incorporated recruited children to sell drugs for them.
“There’d be kids selling drugs on school playgrounds; people would walk right up and buy,” Bernstein said. “The gangs figured the police weren’t going to look on the playgrounds.”
Lighter penalties for minors also made them attractive as foot soldiers for drug dealers, said Dolunt, the former Detroit assistant police chief.
“You’d arrest some kid, and he’d be back on the street in a few hours,” he said.
Winans said he often raked in $2,000 or more per day selling crack as a kid. While he said he was allowed to keep only a small fraction of the proceeds, he felt rich.
“I’m 14 years old making $300 a day — that’s a lot of money for a 14-year-old,” Winans said.
The Rev. W.J. Rideout of All God’s People Church in Detroit, said crack had a “devastating” effect on his family.
“I had several siblings who were addicted to crack, and one sibling who sold it,” said Rideout, a community activist who grew up in Detroit. “It caused me to want to become a drug counselor and try to help people whose lives were being destroyed by crack. Thank God my family all made it out. Crack took a lot of people from us, though.”
Tough laws
With crack destroying urban communities, legislators began calling for harsher drug penalties.
In 1994, with support from the Congressional Black Caucus, Congress passed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, known as “the Crime Bill,” which is the largest federal crime legislation ever enacted. The law expanded the federal death penalty to include drug offenses and added the “Three Strikes, You’re Out” rule, which meant a third conviction for a serious or violent felony often led to life in prison.
The U.S. prison population soared from 330,000 inmates in 1980 to 773,000 in 1990 to 1.4 million in 2000, with a peak of 1.6 million in 2006. Michigan, which had about 15,0000 inmates in 1980, saw its prison population jump to about 34,000 by 1990, with a high of 51,554 prisoners in March 2007.
“During the 1980s and ’90s, all the wheels of criminal justice and politics were focused on crack,” Michigan State University criminal justice professor Steven Chermak said. “What usually drives criminal justice policy is, something bad will come along that captures the imagination of the public, whether it’s a new drug or a high-profile case, and there’s an urgency to do something about it. We saw in the 1980s and ’90s where drugs became the focal point, and it contributed to the extraordinary growth in the prison population.”
The recent trend in the criminal justice system has been toward lighter penalties for nonviolent drug offenders, with Detroit’s 36th District Court among the agencies that have overhauled their bond and sentencing policies. Michigan’s prison population has declined since March 2007 to 32,778 inmates by the end of 2024, according to the state Department of Corrections.
But Chermak said the pendulum could swing back toward harsher punishment.
“Absolutely, it could happen again,” he said. “We’ve always had social problems that get constructed into something more significant, and the system is forced to respond.”
‘The residue’
Crack is still being bought and sold in Detroit, but it’s not the problem it once was, said Detroit Police Cmdr. Anthony O’Rourke, the commanding officer of the department’s Organized Crime Bureau.
“Crack is still around, but we’ve mainly been dealing with the opioid crisis for the past few years and the deaths associated with fentanyl,” O’Rourke said.
O’Rourke said police are monitoring a recent unusual trend: Methamphetamine seizures by weight as of April 15 were up 1,000% over the same period in 2024. While individual raids have netted large quantities of the drug, there hasn’t been a noticeable uptick in user arrests, he said.
“So far 2025, we’ve seized over 98 kilos of meth, 6.5 kilos of cocaine and over 6.5 of fentanyl — that tells you where the supply is headed,” O’Rourke said. “Meth hasn’t been in Detroit in large numbers before, but I think we’re going to see a transition where meth takes over as the predominant drug.”
The problems police encounter dealing with crack and meth users are different than with opioid addicts, he said.
“The opioid users usually only harm themselves; they usually just want to lay down and take a nap,” O’Rourke said. “But crack makes people really high — and it’s even worse with meth.”
Winans said while crack is still the same addictive drug it was when it was the scourge of Detroit, rappers and tougher laws for selling the drug are partially responsible for the change in habits.
“You have big artists who make it sound cool to be popping Percocets; cool to pop (Xanax),” Winans said. “You listen to some of these rappers, and drill music (a rap subgenre), and they all talk about it, doing drugs. It’s the same thing as gangsta rap back in the day, only they’re pushing this crap on the younger generation.
“Plus, they have those federal laws that are tougher on crack dealers,” Winans said. “A lot of people don’t think it’s worth the risk selling crack. … A lot of these kids look at crack as something old people smoke.”
Wayne State’s Brown said the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s could have contributed to cocaine being replaced as the drug of choice in American inner cities.
“There were allegations made that the CIA had worked with right-wing groups that sold cocaine in the United States to fund their wars against communists,” Brown said. “The CIA investigated themselves, and their findings were that the allegations weren’t true.
“But I can only see patterns, and I see America in the 1980s fighting a Cold War in Latin America, and during this period when they were working with right-wing groups like the Contras to destabilize leftist governments, some of these groups were using cocaine sales to subsidize their wars against the communists,” he added. “And during this time, cocaine suddenly starts flooding American inner cities.
“Then, after the USSR falls (in 1991), and there’s no reason for the U.S. to subsidize these right-wing groups, cocaine starts to slow down,” Brown said. “There were congressional hearings, and a lot of questions were asked about the possible connection between the Cold War and the crack epidemic, although nothing was ever proven. Still, that is the pattern I see.”
Whatever forces drove the crack epidemic, Winans said Detroiters are still reeling from the impact the drug made when it was introduced to the city 40 years ago.
“There were so many crackhead moms, so many Black kids raised by their grandparents, no fathers in the home … and now, those kids grew up,” Winans said. “And they’re having their own kids.
“We haven’t been able to recover from the crack epidemic. We’re still dealing with the residue.”
ghunter@detroitnews.com
(313) 222-2134
@GeorgeHunter_DN

Detroit, MI
After a disastrous inning vs. the Guardians, Tarik Skubal and the Detroit Tigers are on the verge of completing an epic collapse
CLEVELAND — It has taken an extraordinary and unlikely sequence of events over multiple months for the Detroit Tigers and Cleveland Guardians to be tied for the AL Central lead with five games left to play. It’s only fitting, then, that the game that secured the deadlock atop the division — Cleveland’s dramatic, 5-2 victory over Detroit on Tuesday at Progressive Field — featured one of the more preposterous half-innings imaginable, the ultimate display of baseball randomness and absurdity.
Entering the bottom of the sixth inning, Tarik Skubal, as usual, was in control. The reigning AL Cy Young Award winner was tasked with reversing the misfortunes of a Tigers team that had seen its once-sturdy lead atop the AL Central completely evaporate over the past month. And for five innings against the rival Guardians — whose spectacularly hot stretch in September combined with Detroit’s skid to culminate in an unexpected division race — Skubal exhibited his trademark ace behavior.
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The four-seam fastball was humming, climbing as high as 101 mph. The sinker was exploding into the strike zone at unhittable angles. The slider and knuckle-curve were breaking sharply. And, of course, the changeup was giving hitters fits. When Skubal struck out David Fry with a 99.6 mph heater to end the fourth, he confidently skipped off the mound back toward the dugout, certain another masterpiece was in progress. Cleveland mustered two baserunners in the fifth, but Skubal squashed the threat, finishing the frame with his pitch count at just 74.
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The Tigers had afforded Skubal a two-run lead thanks to a Wenceel Perez RBI double in the third and a Riley Greene solo home run in the sixth. Given how Skubal was throwing, those two runs appeared to be a rather comfortable cushion on which Detroit could rely en route to a victory that would snap its six-game losing streak.
But the Guardians had other plans.
With Skubal dialed in, fighting fire with fire was a fool’s errand, especially given Cleveland’s dearth of offensive thump; the Guardians rank 28th in MLB in slugging percentage, 30th in barrel rate, 30th in hard-hit rate and 30th in average exit velocity. Instead, Steven Kwan led off the sixth with a picturesque bunt on the first pitch from Skubal, racing to first with hopes of sparking a rally.
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Before the packed Progressive Field crowd of nearly 30,000 could quiet down after Kwan’s successful gambit, No. 2 hitter Angel Martínez followed with another bunt on the first pitch of his showdown with Skubal. The ball trickled down the first-base line with delicate precision, forcing Skubal to charge and either attempt to make a difficult play or pocket the ball and yield another baserunner with no outs and José Ramírez coming up.
Skubal opted for the former, but in unthinkable fashion: Facing home plate, he reached down, grabbed the ball and flipped it through his legs toward first, as if he were hiking a football. The ball sailed over first baseman Spencer Torkelson’s head and into foul territory, allowing Kwan to reach third base and Martínez to coast into second.
“He was in a tough position as a left-handed pitcher to make that play in general and didn’t want to wheel and throw it down the line,” Tigers manager AJ Hinch explained postgame. “So instead, he chose to do the emergency flip, which is not something that is easy to do, and it obviously didn’t produce a good play.”
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Skubal echoed that sentiment, referring to the Martínez ball as an “impossible play” while reiterating his intention to prevent a second consecutive bunt hit at all costs. He also revealed that the between-the-legs toss was something he’d tried before: “Yeah, in Miami, actually,” he said. “Same result.”
Indeed, Skubal attempted a near carbon-copy of the play two years ago against the Marlins, when Jon Berti chopped a ball down the first-base line. The result was nearly identical, but the circumstances couldn’t have been more different. That was in the second inning of a July contest on a Sunday afternoon in Miami. Skubal wasn’t Skubal yet, and the Tigers were 47-59. Trying something like that then? Fine.
But on Tuesday, in the biggest game of the season thus far, with Guardians players and their fans desperate for any ounce of momentum? That was a poor choice.
“That is an example of an uncharacteristic mistake piling up on us at the worst time,” Hinch said.
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Of course, this was an exceptionally challenging play for Skubal; expecting him to have recorded an out without trouble feels unfair. That said, his decision to uncork a low-probability toss rather than hold on to the ball and keep Kwan and Martínez at first and second proved extremely costly.
And so, with the bunts having spiked the volume in the venue, up came Ramírez to try to cash in. As Cleveland’s top slugging threat, Ramírez was the one Guardian Skubal didn’t need to worry about attempting a bunt. But baseball has a funny way of surprising you. When Ramírez swung hard at a 99.9-mph fastball with two strikes, the result was roughly the same as the two bunts that preceded it: a weak roller up the third-base line, poorly struck with a harmless exit velocity of 65.5 mph, and too slow for third baseman Zach McKinstry to corral and make a play. Kwan scampered home for Cleveland’s first run. Martínez advanced to third.
The unexpected rally was far from over. But the game took a scary turn before things continued. With still no outs and runners on the corners, Fry came up to the plate. Sticking with the theme of the inning, he squared around to attempt to bunt in hopes of garnering another defensive gaffe. But Skubal’s 99.1-mph fastball ran up and in, hitting Fry squarely in the nose and sending him to the ground.
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Although it was ruled a foul ball, replay fairly clearly showed that the pitch didn’t graze Fry’s bat at all, instead making flush contact with his face — a terrifying sequence considering the velocity. The crowd went silent, and players on both teams, including Skubal, were visibly shaken. Thankfully, Fry was able to rise to his feet and get on the cart to be transported to a nearby hospital, where he is expected to remain overnight as he undergoes testing.
“I’ve already reached out to him,” Skubal said afterward. “I look forward to, hopefully at some point tonight or tomorrow morning, getting a text from him and making sure he’s all good. The health of him is more important than a baseball game.”
Guardians manager Stephen Vogt said postgame that Fry stayed conscious the whole time and the team would provide an update as soon as possible on Wednesday.
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Such a harrowing injury scare is difficult to move past, but the high-stakes timing forced the two teams to reengage immediately — and it took just one pitch for the chaos to resume. Rookie George Valera replaced Fry in the batter’s box with a 2-2 count, and Skubal’s first pitch to the new batter was a wayward changeup that got past catcher Dillon Dingler and allowed Martínez to score the tying run, with Ramírez advancing to second.
Valera eventually struck out, but then, while facing Gabriel Arias, Skubal balked for just the second time in his career, enabling Ramírez to move to third, still with one out. He then scored easily when Arias tapped one softly to first base, marking Cleveland’s third run of the inning and a lead it wouldn’t relinquish.
Before Tuesday’s sixth inning, Skubal had allowed just one run in 27 innings against the Guardians this season, with 37 strikeouts and just five walks. Then, over the span of five plate appearances — with an average exit velocity of 52.8 mph and without a single ball leaving the infield, except for the one Skubal sailed himself — the Guardians conjured three runs. Because of course they did.
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“They showed that the team that made the most contact got rewarded for it, even if it wasn’t great contact,” Hinch said. “They did a good job with that.”
To his point, Detroit’s disastrous inning wouldn’t have loomed quite as large had the Tigers been more productive offensively. But Cleveland starter Gavin Williams had a heck of a night himself, matching a career high with 12 strikeouts over six solid innings of work. Detroit struck out 19 times total Tuesday, the franchise’s most in a nine-inning game since the 2019 club — a team that would go on to lose 114 games — matched the ignominious feat on two occasions.
This Tigers team will not lose 114 games. In fact, this Tigers team might still win the AL Central, despite an unfathomably bad run of play that has them at risk of making history for all the wrong reasons. With the victory Tuesday, Cleveland clinched the season series over Detroit, giving the Guards a critical tiebreaker should the two teams finish with the same record after 162. But there’s still ample opportunity for the Tigers to avoid that fate and fight their way back into enviable playoff position.
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“We got to flush today’s game and then get ready to play again tomorrow. The team across the way doesn’t feel bad for us, so there’s no reason we should feel bad for ourselves,” Skubal said. “That opportunity to come out there and win tomorrow and win a series — I think that’s what really matters.”
“We have to get to tomorrow and get to a better result,” Hinch said. “Everybody knows. There’s no hiding behind anything other than showing up ready to play.”
Detroit, MI
Metro Detroit homebuyers face higher prices but more inventory, lower mortgage rates

Eric Vance knows a good house when he sees one.
The 54-year-old contractor from Southfield, who has spent years buying and flipping homes, recently toured a property in Redford Township that immediately caught his attention.
“It was the fireplace and that kitchen,” he said. “Because I am a family man, and it put me right where I needed to be and what I needed to see.”
Buyers like Vance who are looking for a new home are navigating the housing market at a time when inventory, prices and days on the market are on the rise, even as interest rates begin to trend down. Metro Detroit’s housing market saw prices climb modestly in August, even as sales slowed, with the market heading into a seasonal slowdown.
The median sales price across Metro Detroit rose 4.4% year-over-year to $332,500 across Wayne, Oakland, Macomb and Livingston counties, according to the latest RE/MAX of Southeastern Michigan Housing Report. The supply of inventory increased to 2.8 months in August, compared with 2.6 months in July and 2.4 a year earlier, according to the report.
“We are continuing to see a bit more inventory coming into the market that is starting to be reflected in the month supply,” said Jeanette Schneider, president of RE/MAX of Southeastern Michigan. “We’re seeing that inch up a little bit. That’s a signal that we’ve got more and more inventory coming to market.”
The median sales price rose across a broader area — 18 Michigan counties — to reach $289,000 for residential and condo sales combined, according to a Realcomp August sales report, up 5.1% from $275,000 the year before. Realcomp, the state’s largest multiple listing service, looks at Genesee, Hillsdale, Huron, Jackson, Lapeer, Lenawee, Livingston, Macomb, Monroe, Montcalm, Oakland, Saginaw, Sanilac, Shiawassee, St. Clair, Tuscola, Washington and Wayne counties.
The supply of inventory across the 18 counties increased 16%, from 2.5 months to 2.9 months year over year. Pending sales decreased 4.9% from 10,345 to 9,839 year over year, while pending sales increased from 9,778 month over month by 1%. Closed sales decreased 3.7% from 10,530 to 10,138 year over year, and decreased from 10,507 month over month, a decline of 3.5%.
“As we prepare to move from summer into fall, homebuyers have more choices than they have had all year,” Karen Kage, CEO of Realcomp II Ltd., said in the report. “While median sales prices remain fairly consistent, inventory is at its highest August levels in 5 years.”
‘Holding our own’
One notable point in the data was Detroit, which saw its median sales price jump about 16% from last year to a record $111,500, according to Realcomp.
Darralyn Bowers of Bowers Realty in Southfield said the housing market remains healthy in the city and across Metro Detroit: “So far, we’re holding our own, and we’re still seeing property values go up.
“Even in Detroit, we’re seeing growth. Michigan is unique in the Midwest here. We’ve got so many positive qualities, like the water and the amenities and the desirability of Detroit and some of the things that are happening here in Detroit. I think those all accelerate to a better market.”
Nathan Boji, an agent with RE/MAX Classic in Farmington Hills, said the market varies across Metro Detroit, with Oakland County staying strong in cities like Novi, Farmington Hills and Bloomfield Hills. Livingston County properties are selling quickly, while Macomb County offers solid value. He said Wayne County remains the most affordable for entry-level buyers, with Livonia and Dearborn competitive under $400,000. Sterling Heights is also seeing steady activity.
“If it’s priced right, it’s selling,” he said. “If it’s not priced right, it’s going to sit.”
Jessica Belanger, an agent with RE/MAX Advisors in New Baltimore, said homes in the northern subdivisions in Macomb County, such as New Haven and Shelby, Washington and Macomb townships, are selling relatively quickly: “The nice houses, nice upgrades that don’t need a lot of updates and not priced hopefully over market, are still selling.”
Mortgage rate slide helps
As housing prices rise, mortgage rates continue to trend down, according to Freddie Mac. The 30-year fixed-rate mortgage averaged 6.35% as of Thursday, down from the previous week when it averaged 6.5%. A year ago at this time, the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage averaged 6.2%.
“The 30-year fixed-rate mortgage fell 15 basis points from last week, the largest weekly drop in the past year,” Sam Khater, Freddie Mac’s chief economist, said in the report. “Mortgage rates are headed in the right direction and homebuyers have noticed, as purchase applications reached the highest year-over-year growth rate in more than four years.”
Schneider said September will be the month to watch as the Federal Reserve meets mid-month and markets look for a possible rate cut.
While mortgage rates are more closely tied to the 10-year Treasury than the Fed’s actions, she said Fed decisions can signal direction and influence buyer sentiment. Schneider added that even if rates don’t drop significantly, a Fed cut could give buyers more confidence and push some off the fence, potentially leading to more activity in the fall housing market.
“So it seems, from my perspective, the market has already kind of anticipated what the Fed is going to do, and the interest rates are already starting to kind of reflect that,” she said. “So I don’t necessarily think we’re going to see a huge drop in the mortgage interest rates, even if the Fed does a cut. But what I think a Fed cut could do is psychologically be a very positive confidence booster for buyers that have been iffy.”
While mortgage rates have eased into the mid-to-high 6% range, Boji said many consumers are still holding back: “A large percentage of the consumer still sees that as being a very high rate. They’re sort of holding their breath for a kind of a magic kind of reduction, in the sense of possibly seeing rates that we saw several years ago — 3, 4, 5%.”
Jessica Belanger, an agent with REMAX Advisors, said she’s noticing some clients becoming accustomed to the mortgage rates. “Everybody out there in general is kind of coming to that realization that those 2.5% interest rates were not a realistic expectation. It’s kind of a once-in-a-lifetime thing.”
To help prospective buyers make home ownership more affordable, Bowers said her team hosts a monthly brunch to educate them about down payment assistance and help them explore their options. She noted that some banks are offering grants up to $17,500, while others provide low- or no-interest loans, some with no income limit.
“If you had a grant of $10,000,” Bowers said, “that also is equity.”
Vance, whose budget is between $200,000 and $250,000, said he isn’t a fan of the current mortgage interest rates. But a divorce last year has prompted his move.
The father of three, including two adult children, is considering the three-bedroom home in Redford Township for its roominess. He said he could see himself building an outdoor kitchen off the back patio, a place for entertaining and spending time with loved ones.
For Vance, homeownership is about more than space: “When you are a homeowner, it means a lot. It gives you that peace of mind … a feeling of accomplishment, like you’re doing something right.”
cwilliams@detroitnews.com
Detroit, MI
Tigers magic number update: Here’s when they can clinch AL Central Division

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Detroit Tigers are down to 13 games left in the 2025 MLB regular season. They still hold a commanding lead in the American League Central Division over the Cleveland Guardians, but the Tigers (84-65) are just 6-12 in their past 18 games and have been sloppy recently.
They are no longer the top seed in the AL playoffs, losing ground to the Toronto Blue Jays.
But what’s the Tigers’ magic number in the AL Central?
The Tigers are 2-3 on this road trip, losing three in a row after Saturday’s wild 6-4 loss in 11 innings to the lowly Miami Marlins (70-79).
The Tigers still need to clinch a playoff spot, and they can do that with a good week of play coming up to seal the division, which would guarantee them homefield advantage in a playoff series.
What is the Tigers’ “magic number” to clinch the AL Central Division for the first time since 2014? Let’s break it down.
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Detroit Tigers magic number to clinch AL Central Division
Through Saturday, the Tigers’ magic number to clinch the division is 8 over the Cleveland Guardians (77-71), after the Tigers lost a heartbreaker to the Marlins, 6-4, in 11 innings. The Guardians beat the White Sox, 3-1.
The Tigers’ magic number to eliminate the third-place Kansas City Royals (74-75) from the division is 4.
The Guardians face the White Sox on Sunday before making the trip to Detroit for a three-game series.
How do you calculate a team’s magic number in baseball?
There are two different ways to determine a team’s magic number.
The first: 163 – (first-place team’s win total + second-place team’s loss total) = magic number. In the case of the Tigers, that’s 163 – (84+71). 163-155 = 8.
The second: Games remaining + 1 – (losses by second-place team – losses by first-place team) = magic number.
When could the Tigers clinch the division?
This depends on how the next series goes between the Tigers and Guardians at Comerica Park. Each win by the Tigers in that series chops two games off the Tigers’ magic number.
It’s looking more likely the Tigers might have to clinch in Cleveland in the first series of the final week. However, if the Tigers beat the Guardians in at least two games this week, they could have a chance to clinch the AL Central against the bumbling Atlanta Braves at Comerica Park over the weekend.
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Tigers schedule to end regular season
The Tigers have 13 games remaining in the regular season:
- at Marlins (Sept. 14).
- vs Guardians (Sept. 16-18).
- vs Braves (Sept. 19-21).
- at Guardians (Sept. 23-25).
- at Red Sox (Sept. 26-28).
When do the MLB playoffs 2025 begin?
- Tuesday, Sept. 30: Wild-card Game 1s.
- Saturday, Oct. 4: ALDS and NLDS Game 1s.
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