Home Care in Detroit’s Eastside and Midtown: A Neighborhood Guide

Detroit’s Eastside — from Indian Village through Conner Creek, Morningside, and out to the Grosse Pointes border — and Midtown carry a particular energy: neighborhoods in transition, anchor institutions like Wayne State and the Detroit Medical Center, and families who’ve been here for generations. Many of those families include older adults who need daily help at home and relatives who are already providing it.

Michigan’s Home Help Program is designed for exactly this situation: it pays family members directly to provide home care, at approximately $16.00 to $17.50 per hour, with no intermediary agency in the way.

What We See on the Eastside

In our experience at CareChoice, Eastside Detroit families often include a primary caregiver who has been managing alone — a daughter who moved in with her mother after a stroke, a grandson who checks in three times a day on his grandfather. These caregivers are providing 20, 30,sometimes 40 hours of care per week without pay.

The Home Help application process converts that unpaid labor into a real paycheck.

The Eastside also has concentrations of Bangladeshi, Yemeni, and African American families with strong intergenerational care traditions. For these families, the idea of a stranger providing intimate personal care is deeply uncomfortable. Home Help’s family-directed model respects that preference entirely.

Midtown families near the DMC and Wayne State sometimes assume the medical institution proximity means medical home health is the only available service. It’s not — non-medical homecare through Home Help and MI Choice is a completely separate system available to anyone on Medicaid who meets the eligibility criteria.

Local Resources

DAAA at (313) 446-4444 serves the entire city.  Wayne County MDHHS offices handle Home Help assessments and provider enrollment.

Contact CareChoice →Detroit team

Written by Shamere Dunswell, Community Relations Manager | CareChoice