For Mary Sheffield, Detroit’s future begins with keeping families housed

February 10, 2025, was bitterly cold in Detroit. An unhoused mother, Tateona Williams, parked her van inside the Greektown Casino parking structure near downtown, hoping to shield her children from the night air. 

By sunrise, two of them – 9-year-old Darnell Currie Jr. and his 2-year-old sister, A’millah – were dead. 

The Wayne County Medical Examiner ruled their deaths carbon monoxide poisoning.

City officials confirmed that the family had contacted Detroit’s homeless-response system months earlier, seeking help for permanent housing after being evicted. But Williams — like many people or families who are impoverished to that extent — felt unable to ‘fight’ within the system.

The city has since acknowledged the need for faster follow-up and emergency checks for families living in vehicles.

For many residents, the tragedy represented something larger than one family’s loss. It exposed the distance between written policy and reachable care.

Detroit City Council President Mary Sheffield has spent her career trying to close that distance. At 26, she became the youngest council member ever elected in the city. By 2022, she was the youngest council president. 

Just over a year ago, she launched her campaign to be Detroit’s next mayor, replacing Mike Duggan, who is now running for governor. After winning Detroit’s primary election in August by more than 30 points, Sheffield is heavily expected to win the general election and become Detroit’s first woman mayor, a Black woman, with housing for single-mother-led households as a major part of her legacy and platform.

Sheffield, now 38, served the city of Detroit alongside Duggan through his 12 years in office, shaping policies and navigating the challenges of a city of more than 650,000 residents — the largest majority-Black city in the nation. As City Council president, she remains one of the most visible and influential voices in Detroit’s government.

“From a young age, I was surrounded by the fight for justice — organizing, marching, learning that real change starts with people coming together to demand it,” she said. 

Born and raised in the city, Sheffield drew lessons about public service from her father, the Rev. Horace Sheffield III, a nationally respected pastor and civil rights leader who long carried forward the legacy of his father, the labor activist Horace Sheffield Jr. She learned about compassion from her mother, who came from a family of nurses and taught nursing at Wayne County Community College.

“My mother showed me care in action. She taught me what it means to show up for people—to listen, to nurture, and to lead with empathy. From her, I learned that care must be the foundation of every decision, especially when it comes to policy.”

Sheffield entered politics with the belief that government should work where people live — and that includes helping them secure a place to live.

“Growing up in Detroit, I saw what happens when the government shows up — and when it doesn’t,” she said. “So for me, the government owes people more than policies; it owes presence, compassion, and accountability. The same way my parents and grandparents served, I feel called to serve — to make sure Detroiters are seen, heard and protected by the systems meant to work for them.”

In the city of Detroit, housing tragedies are no secret. Eviction notices come a dime a dozen. 

That fact pushed Sheffield to author and advance the city’s right-to-counsel (RTC) ordinance in 2022. The law guarantees free legal representation for low-income residents facing eviction or foreclosure, administered through the Office of Eviction Defense.

Sheffield said the goal was to make sure Detroiters weren’t fighting eviction alone. 

“For me, this work has always been about more than policy, it’s about people,” Sheffield said. “It’s about keeping families together, supporting our youth, uplifting women and creating stability in our neighborhoods. That’s the true ‘why’ behind my advocacy.”

Before the ordinance, only about four percent of tenants in eviction court had lawyers, while more than 80 percent of landlords did.

Since the program took effect in early 2023, more than 12,000 households have received representation. Internal program data shows that Black women heading households account for 92.6 percent of tenant cases, and children are present in roughly 55 percent of them. Of the tenants represented, about half retained their homes. Those who did relocate received more time to move than the state’s 10-day minimum notice period.

“Affordable housing isn’t about charity, it’s about justice, about ensuring no one has to fight that same battle just to have a place to call home,” Sheffield said.

Diamond Conley, executive director of the RTC program, explained how the city’s new efforts led to a structural shift. 

“Since right-to-counsel has been in place, we have seen a decrease in eviction filings,” Conley said. She added that with more tenants having legal representation, the court now grants additional hearings.

Ted Phillips, executive director of the United Community Housing Coalition — which was appointed by the city to lead the city’s RTC contract — said his organization has worked to ensure consistent coverage at the 36th District Court. 

“Anyone who shows up to court has the opportunity to speak with an attorney,” Phillips said. “It’s made a drastic difference in access to free legal help.”

Phillips said one of the program’s biggest challenges is making sure tenants even know about their hearings and the help available to them. 

“Our focus has been on trying to get as many people as possible in court represented,” he said. “And that’s not enough. That’s not good enough.” 

Phillips explained that many tenants never receive proper notice of their court dates because eviction papers are often mailed or posted on doors and arrive too late for residents to respond. His team has begun hand-delivering letters, leaving fliers and doing limited door-to-door outreach to reach tenants who miss initial hearings, but the city’s current RTC funding only covers in-court representation. 

A fiscal analysis by Stout, commissioned by the Rocket Community Fund, estimated that an annual $16.7 million investment in RTC could save Detroit roughly $58.8 million by preventing homelessness, reducing foster-care placements, cutting health-care costs and keeping residents from leaving the city after displacement.

“When I think about the mothers sitting in eviction court without legal help, I see the faces of Detroiters who have worked hard their entire lives but are still fighting to keep a place to call home,” Sheffield said. “I’ve heard the cries for help directly from our community — women, families and seniors doing everything possible to hold on to stability.”

When Sade Jenkins opened her eviction notice, she remembers her hands shaking. Her two youngest children were one and two. They were living with her grandmother after the roof caved in at the house she once shared with her children’s father.

“We had called so many times before that and put in work orders,” she recalled, “but nobody ever came until it finally collapsed.”

Jenkins and her children’s father stopped paying rent while the home remained unsafe. “We couldn’t live like that,” she said.

When the court date arrived, Jenkins said a letter came with it, a notice telling her she had the right to a lawyer. 

“Honestly, I didn’t even know that was real,” she said. “When I called the number, they told me there would be someone there to help if I qualified. I didn’t really believe it until I walked in that courtroom.”

Suzanne, her RTC attorney, took the case beyond Jenkins’ expectations.

“She fought hard. She called me before every court date, sent me emails, explained everything, even told me to put money in escrow so nothing would catch me off guard.”

The case lasted nearly six months, from June to December. The lawyer pressed the landlord’s company for repairs, demanded inspection receipts and insisted on proof that the home had been made livable before rent resumed. 

For Jenkins, the experience reshaped her understanding of justice.

“It wasn’t about money,” she said. “It was about being heard. When you’ve got kids and nowhere else to go, that’s everything.”

Conley has noted that the data shows why housing access is inseparable from gender equity.

“The threat of losing their home seems to arise most in the city for African-American women with a lower income and with more than half of them caring for their children in their homes,” she said. “Right-to-Counsel gives residents the opportunity to be heard, to save their homes when possible, and to afford them a more orderly relocation process if they do need time to find new housing.”

Sheffield’s wider platform expands this frame of both protection and prevention. 

She has proposed creating neighborhood opportunity and empowerment hubs, community-based offices that would merge housing assistance, job placement, mental-health support and childcare referrals under one roof. 

A spokesperson for Sheffield’s campaign says that Sheffield’s team plans to create a new Office of Human, Homeless and Family Services that “will be tasked with creating and coordinating a safety net of community and City services, from ID to housing to job placement, and to integrate this wraparound service intake point within these neighborhood hubs.”

According to the spokesperson, that includes adding support for mental health services and state benefits over time, as well as coordinating with partners outside government to help Detroit residents with pressing household needs.

It’s a lesson Sheffield says her grandmother taught her:  “She taught me that compassion isn’t weakness; it’s what holds communities together.” 

Her commitment to youth runs through that same approach. 

Sheffield has “made a commitment to guarantee after-school programming within two miles of every Detroit Public School Community District  site,” her campaign spokesperson said. Her vision for that includes programs already offered by city departments as well as partnerships with programs like the YMCA.

Sheffield has also emphasized affordable housing as both an equity and economic-mobility issue. 

“Detroit is often described as a city of comebacks, but I know that for too many residents, that comeback hasn’t yet reached their block,” Sheffield said. “When I walk our neighborhoods, the number one need people share with me — time and time again — is housing.” 

Her plan envisions bringing in new jobs and improving educational opportunities, while also lowering utility costs for some households and offering repair subsidies for others.

While on council, her utility advocacy centered on making basic services affordable and accessible for low-income residents. She fought to link water rates to household income, an effort that was blocked in court, but her persistence pushed the city to expand help with the bills by offering fixed monthly water rates for eligible households facing financial hardship.

Sheffield has also secured millions of dollars for the Senior Home Repair Grant program, providing eligible seniors with up to $15,000 for roof, window, and essential system replacements to help keep their homes safe and sound. She also led the expansion of Neighborhood Enterprise Zones, which offer property-tax reductions to homeowners making repairs. 

“Stable, affordable housing is the foundation for everything else,” she said. “Without it, employment, income, education, and even participation in mental health or job programs become nearly impossible to sustain.”

Detroit’s housing policies, Sheffield argues, cannot be separated from its moral priorities. 

“I’ve seen firsthand what housing insecurity does to families — it creates instability that ripples through generations,” she said. “Even in my own family, I’ve heard stories from my grandmother about times when housing wasn’t guaranteed. Those experiences stay with you. They remind you that stability isn’t a privilege — it’s a right.”

The deaths of Darnell and A’millah Currie remain a measure of what happens when the distance between policy and people grows too wide. 

“That’s why I’ve centered housing and stability as the backbone of my policy agenda,” said Sheffield. “Because when we secure housing, we secure the foundation for opportunity, dignity and long-term growth — not just for one household, but for the entire city.”

Sheffield’s push for eviction defense, affordable housing and wrap-around services speaks to the same question those children’s deaths raised for Detroit: whether a city can build systems sturdy enough to protect its families before the crisis reaches them.