Evone Brown, a 55-year-old former machine operator, survives on $850 a month from retirement and disability checks, which wasn't enough to cover the roughly $8,000 she owed in property taxes on her home on the east side of Detroit. This year, because she was at least three years behind on her tax payments (most of which she inherited when she bought the house in 2011), Wayne County's treasurer foreclosed on her. As a result, her house is up for sale this week in Wayne County’s online foreclosure auction, at a starting bid of just $500. She will most likely be evicted this January.

She’s not alone: As Detroit seeks to leave bankruptcy behind and get back on its feet—ramping up development with construction of a light rail and a new hockey arena that will cost the city hundreds of millions of dollars—it is simultaneously bearing witness to a process that could evict up to 142,000 of its residents, many of whom are too poor to pay their property taxes.

Detroit is 83 percent African-American, and 38 percent of its population lives below the poverty line. But the older, blacker Detroit starkly contrasts with a whiter, wealthier new Detroit that's been wooed in by tax breaks and living incentives—which gives these evictions a heavily racial subtext.

“Do you think they are going to take my home away from me?” Brown asks, breaking down in tears. A few feet from her lies her brother, sleeping. He has just come back from the hospital after being diagnosed with prostate cancer. Brown herself suffers from arthritis and has mobility issues. A knee-replacement surgery gone wrong last year left her with one leg shorter than the other.

“If they kick us out, we won’t have anywhere to go. We will have to go to a shelter. I don’t want to go to a shelter. I want to stay in my home,” she says.

This year in Detroit, there have been 22,000 foreclosures on properties whose owners failed to pay property taxes three years in a row. Of those, 10,000 are estimated to be occupied, meaning this year's foreclosures are set to oust about 27,000 Detroiters from their homes.

That’s a large number in a dwindling city with fewer than 700,000 residents, but the figures are set to get even worse. In the next couple of months, Wayne County's treasurer will be serving foreclosure notices on 110,000 more properties, 85,000 of which are in Detroit, according to its chief deputy treasurer David Szymanski. With half of those Detroit properties estimated to be occupied, this means a further 115,000 Detroiters might lose their homes next year.

In a city supposedly trying to attract residents rather than lose them, this means a potential 142,000 Detroiters—one-fifth of the city’s population—will be shown the door within the next year and a half. The city has yet to announce plans for accommodating those who get evicted.

Detroit’s tax-delinquent residents, who together occupy more than half of the city’s properties according to local data firm Loveland Technologies, are frequently blamed for the city’s underfunded, poorly functioning public infrastructure and are considered part of the reason the city went bankrupt in the first place.

The city’s still relatively new mayor, Mike Duggan, likes to say at press conferences and town-hall meetings that he wants to work with Detroit’s “good” residents—those who seek to pay their bills and mow their lawns. But with little active effort put into retaining residents who are behind on their bills and facing foreclosure, some are beginning to feel like the evictions are a part of a bigger ploy to rid the city of large chunks of its poorer residents—a modern-day form of forced relocation.

“It’s a tragic and extreme version of a familiar pattern,” says Cheryl Harris, a professor of civil rights and civil liberties at the UCLA School of Law. Harris calls the Detroit auction a massive form of “racial dispossession.”

Forced relocation is a sensitive subject in Detroit, where, in the 1950s, large chunks of poorer, black neighborhoods were razed to make way for highway development. Black residents were violently kept out of whiter areas of the city until the '60s.

Harris says that these evictions should be viewed alongside the “legacy of specifically racialized housing policies that put these [black-owned] properties and these [black] property owners at a distinct disadvantage within the relative marketplace, and located them as devalued to begin with.”

In a seminal book on Detroit's inequality, Thomas Sugrue, a professor of history and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, highlighted the long-lasting effects of postwar housing-discrimination policies, including redlining, which categorized neighborhoods with even a small handful of black people living in it as unfit for investment or mortgage loans. (In the July issue of The Atlantic earlier this year, Ta-Nehisi Coates extensively mapped how these practices played out in Chicago.)

The establishment of two segregated housing markets strongly favored white people, blocking black people from federally sponsored low-interest housing loans and making them vulnerable to extortion from opportunistic lenders. These dual markets set the scene for Detroit’s 1967 race riots and accelerated the pace of white flight. Ongoing, growing wealth disparities between white and black families—a recent estimate is that white families are an average of six times wealthier than their black counterparts—can in part be explained by a continuing history of housing discrimination.