On August 25, AMCF hosted Mark Crain, Executive Director of DREAM of Detroit, for a webinar on the U.S. housing crisis and the American Muslim community’s role in solving it. What he delivered was not an organizational overview. It was a case for why Muslim-led housing solutions belong at the center of our philanthropy, backed by three specific mechanisms our community could put to work right now.
DREAM combines community organizing with housing and land development to revitalize a neighborhood on Detroit’s west side. The organization originally stood for Detroit Revival Engaging American Muslims, and it began as an intentional partnership between Detroit’s Black Muslim community and South Asian Muslims from the western suburbs who came together to renovate a single home for a family in need.
A Crisis That Reaches Everyone
Crain opened with the scale of the problem, and the numbers are not marginal.
There is a national shortage of 7.2 million rental homes affordable and available to renters with extremely low incomes, meaning households at or below the federal poverty guideline or 30 percent of area median income, whichever is greater. Only 35 affordable and available rental homes exist for every 100 of those households. A record 22.7 million renter households now spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing. Roughly 20 million homeowners are in the same position.
Crain localized it. In the ZIP code where DREAM works, Detroit residents carry the highest car insurance rates in the country. Before groceries are on the table, most of a household’s income has already gone to rent, a car note, and insurance.
He also traced what happens downstream. Median monthly mortgage payments jumped from about $1,700 to roughly $3,100 by late 2025. Six years ago a $66,000 income and baseline credit could get you into a home. Today it takes more than $120,000. Overall homelessness rose 27 percent between 2013 and 2025, with unsheltered homelessness up 36 percent and chronic homelessness up 81 percent.
Why Muslim-Led Housing Solutions Are a Prophetic Obligation
Crain grounded the case in three sources.
There is modern consensus: a 2023 national poll found more than 75 percent of Americans agree that housing is a basic human right. There is legal precedent: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights names housing as part of an adequate standard of living, and President Roosevelt declared a decent home a fundamental right in his 1944 State of the Union. And roughly 1,300 years before either, the Prophet, peace be upon him, taught that the child of Adam has no right except in these things: a house in which to live, a garment to cover himself, a piece of bread, and water.
Crain described DREAM’s work as faith inspired rather than faith based, a deliberate distinction. Faith based can imply service limited to one community. Faith inspired means drawing on scripture and prophetic teaching to serve everyone. He returned repeatedly to the hadith that the best of people are those most beneficial to people, and to the Prophet’s warning to Mu’adh ibn Jabal to beware the supplication of the oppressed. Finding the oppressed, he noted, requires study, observation, and honest assessment of who is being taken advantage of and where society is falling short.
Muslim Organizations Already Doing the Work
Crain highlighted three organizations DREAM looks to.
Islah LA, rooted in South Los Angeles, operates four homes dedicated to supportive housing, much of it transitional housing for formerly incarcerated people, plus seven single and double occupancy housing facilities offered at affordable rates. Al Maun in Minneapolis, a recovery community service provider approaching 20 years of work, runs sober housing with 24/7 monitoring by dedicated recovery specialists alongside food assistance, mentoring, and employment services. IMAN in Chicago runs Green Reentry, a program now nearly 15 years old and expanded to Atlanta, which trains returning citizens and at-risk youth in green construction skills paired with leadership and spiritual development.
All four organizations are currently working together under a shared campaign called Powered by Faith, which brings faith communities together around housing, community defense, and civic participation.
What DREAM Has Built in Detroit
DREAM’s work breaks into housing, economic development, and community organizing.
On housing, the organization has renovated 16 homes for sale or rent. Its Timeless Touch Ups program delivered aging-well and critical repairs to 15 families, including grab rails, bathrooms, windows, and roofing, for neighbors regardless of faith. Project Homecoming provides transitional housing for formerly incarcerated men, and DREAM has since put a second home in motion for young women in need.
On economic development, DREAM has trained more than 175 aspiring entrepreneurs, hosted a street fair drawing thousands to the neighborhood, and is now in pre-development on the DREAM Center, its first purpose-built home, with office space, a performance pavilion, and a publicly accessible courtyard on the commercial corridor.
On organizing, DREAM helped lead the Coalition for Property Tax Justice. Detroit homeowners were over-assessed to the tune of more than $600 million over a decade by Bloomberg’s conservative estimate, and north of $800 million by an independent University of Chicago study. One in four Detroit homes entered property tax foreclosure during the 2010s. The coalition has pushed multiple ordinances through city council to stop over-assessment and create compensation options for people who lost their homes.
Three Models Muslim Philanthropy Can Scale
This was the heart of the session.
Community land trusts. DREAM is among the first organizations bringing the CLT model to Detroit, a city that lacked the tax structure to accommodate it when they started roughly four years ago. A CLT holds land in trust and caps appreciation on the homes built on it, so each subsequent buyer purchases at an affordable rate. Most affordable housing carries a 15 or 30 year affordability commitment before it can move to market rate. DREAM’s CLT locks in affordability for 89 years, the longest term Michigan law allows. Crain framed it explicitly as a modern legal wrapper for the waqf, since U.S. law offers no traditional endowment statute and Muslim communities typically structure permanence through 501(c)(3)s or charitable trusts. DREAM is about to break ground on the first newly constructed homes in its neighborhood in roughly eight decades.
Interest-free housing stability. In the mid-2000s, 80 percent of Detroit homebuyers were pushed into subprime mortgages, many of whom qualified for better terms. DREAM is working toward the diminishing musharakah model, where buyer and financier jointly purchase the property, and toward making neighborhoods with Detroit’s economic profile viable for the institutions that already offer it.
Zakat. Crain was careful here, noting DREAM currently passes Zakat through directly to eligible individuals rather than deploying it at scale. But he raised two uses worth our community’s attention: emergency rental assistance to stop catastrophic housing loss, and down payment assistance to move a family toward ownership. He noted that some donors formally appoint an organization as wakil to receive and direct Zakat with the recipient’s consent.
Beyond Homes Around the Masjid
Crain closed on the phrase that gave DREAM’s published reflection piece its title. Building around our masajid has immense value. But the challenge in front of the American Muslim community is larger: leading in our most vulnerable neighborhoods, and in Black and brown neighborhoods in particular, with scalable interventions in the affordable housing crisis.
The Q&A pushed that further. Attendees asked about replicating DREAM’s model in Philadelphia, about state policy work including the Fair Chance Access to Housing Act, about supportive housing for foster youth aging out of the system, and about how donors can invest rather than only give. On that last point, Crain shared that DREAM is standing up a mission-driven investment vehicle to move more units into its community land trust, offering a modest return while funding permanently affordable homeownership.