**Keep Your Home ** warns Detroit homeowners before Wayne County takes their house for unpaid property taxes, while there’s still time to pay, get on a payment plan, or apply for the HOPE poverty exemption.

Under Michigan law (MCL 211.78k), taxes left unpaid for year Y mean the county takes the house on March 31 of Y+3. Anyone with unpaid 2024 taxes has until March 31, 2027. Most people find out too late.

What it does

• Address lookup: type an address and get the live Wayne County tax record, a risk level (act now / forfeited / unpaid / paid up), a countdown to the foreclosure date, the amount owed, and plain-language next steps with free-help phone numbers.
• Risk map: Detroit neighborhoods shaded by the share of sampled owner-occupied homes facing foreclosure within 6 months. Shown by neighborhood only, never by house, to protect privacy.
• Plain-language letter in English, Spanish or Arabic, written by an open-weight model (Qwen 2.5 running locally through Ollama). Guardrails: the model only gets the facts from the record, and if it writes a dollar amount or phone number that isn’t in the record (or answers in the wrong language) the app rejects the letter and shows the rule-based message instead.
• Opt-in alerts: sign up by text (Twilio) or email (Resend) to be told when anything changes and as the deadline gets close.
• “Can’t pay at all?” explains the Form 5743 surplus claim (MCL 211.78t), so owners can recover any money left over if the county sells the house.
• Outreach staff page: a password-protected list of the highest-risk homes. Staff mail warning postcards through Lob’s print-and-mail API. Each home is re-checked right before mailing, so nobody who just paid gets a card. Cards are addressed to the owner by name and never show the amount owed. Where 5%+ of the census tract speaks Spanish or Arabic with limited English, the card is printed in both languages.

Built with a Python/Flask API (Wayne County Treasurer records, City of Detroit Open Data parcels and neighborhoods, US Census data) and a mobile-first React front end built in Lovable for older homeowners on phones: large text, high contrast, and a full right-to-left Arabic layout.

Not legal advice. Open source (MIT).