For years, many of us accepted stigma and avoided therapy. But things are changing. These days, people are seeking therapy more than medication, and the shift is generational — younger people, Gen Z especially, have made therapy ordinary in a way their parents and grandparents never did.

But how do you pay for it?

Therapists across the country say private equity’s move into health care is making it harder for them to care for their patients.

Earlier this month, a local insurer may have made things harder still. If you see a counselor in private practice through Blue Cross, your therapist could be dropped from your plan in March.

What does that mean for our access to mental health care?

David Sniderman, a counselor and art therapist with the Willows Edge Counseling and Healing Arts Center, says the change will hit people’s access hard — especially rural and low-income Michiganders.

Sniderman joined host Robyn Vincent on The Metro to break down how insurance shapes therapy, and to make the case that what heals people most isn’t the method — it’s the trust between a therapist and client.

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Have you ever rented an apartment and noticed extra fees tacked onto the rent? A fee for the trash. A fee for pest control. How about a fee for “managing the boiler.”

Those are among the allegations against Greystar, the biggest landlord in America. It paid $24 million to settle a lawsuit claiming it hid fees like these on top of the rent it advertised. Greystar says it did nothing wrong — and the settlement lets it keep charging the fees. It just has to list them now.

This one hits close to home. Greystar runs more than 3,000 apartments in metro Detroit, and nearly 2,000 more in Ann Arbor and Lansing. The fees can add hundreds of dollars a month. And if you miss them, many leases say you can be evicted.

It comes at a brutal time to rent. Nearly half of America’s renters already pay more than they can afford. Just yesterday, Congress passed the biggest housing bill in decades — but it leaves fees like these largely untouched.

Investigative reporter and author Tracie McMillan spent months digging through leases and court records for her new investigation in The Guardian. She joined Robyn Vincent on The Metro to explain why renting can cost so much more than the advertised price.

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If it feels like everyone you know is stressed about money right now, the numbers back you up. This spring, U.S. consumer confidence fell to its lowest level ever, dragged down by gas prices and tariffs. Here in metro Detroit, unemployment is running nearly a point above the national rate, and small business owners are gloomy — just 28% think the economy is in good health.

So here’s the puzzle: At the same time, Michiganders are starting businesses at a furious pace — more than 40,000 new business applications in the first three months of this year, up 25% from a year ago. People say the economy scares them, yet they are betting on themselves anyway.

Mark Lee has spent his career advising small businesses across southeast Michigan, and he started his own company in January 2008, right as the last recession hit. He joined Robyn Vincent on The Metro to discuss if these new business owners are jumping or being pushed.

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Detroit and Windsor sit across a narrow river from each other, close enough to see the lights on the other side. For decades, they existed like one town in two countries. Auto parts crossed the water again and again before a single car was finished. Families, music, and Saturday nights moved back and forth with a constant rhythm.

Then, after 9/11, crossing got harder with longer waits and tougher searches.

Soon, the two cities will cut the ribbon on something new between them: the Gordie Howe International Bridge. That ribbon cutting, scheduled for June 12, has been postponed, and officials aren’t saying exactly why. 

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has called the bridge a symbol, but also a fact of cooperation. Yet it comes at a tense moment. President Donald Trump has threatened to block it, wrongly claiming the U.S. would get nothing from a bridge that Michigan actually co-owns.

So what does this bridge, the first publicly-owned one at this border, do for Windsor and Detroit — and for the people who have spent their lives crossing between them? 

On The Metro, host Robyn Vincent spoke with Lee Rodney, a border-culture scholar at the University of Windsor and creator of the Border Bookmobile, about what a new bridge actually does for a region the border has divided.

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For four decades, Detroit has had the same law on the books: a landlord can’t rent you a home until the city has inspected it and proven it is safe to live in. But almost nobody follows it. Today, roughly one in seven rentals actually meets that bar. The city rewrote the law in 2017 and again in 2024 to raise that number, yet it has barely moved.

Detroit is a sharp version of a problem you will find in many cities built on old, cheap housing. The law says, fix the place up, but the math says, don’t even bother. In other words, it can cost more to bring an old house up to code than the rent will ever pay back. 

Here’s what that looks like in one house, near the Bagley neighborhood: Windows nailed shut, no heat on the second floor, sewage backing up into the basement. 

Senior reporter Aaron Mondry at Outlier Media has uncovered these findings and reported on that family in the Bagley neighborhood. He joined Robyn Vincent on The Metro to discuss how the law is failing renters and landlords.

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For nearly 20 years, the U.S. has been closing its coal mines. Coal became too expensive, and gas, solar, and wind power are cheaper and more efficient options. Now, the Trump administration is spending roughly $700 million to revive the coal market, using a 1950 wartime law. 

The people behind this shift are often the ones who say the market should dictatee decisions and the government should stay out of it. They argue the shift is practical, citing rising power demand from AI data centers and the need for reliable electricity.

Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science at Harvard and author of “The Big Myth,” believes other factors are at play. “I think the important point to make here is that there is no rational economic, social, or environmental argument for sustaining coal as a primary fuel, and certainly not for reopening closed coal plants,” she said. 

Oreskes joined host Robyn Vincent on The Metro to talk about the Trump administration’s move to revive the coal industry and how politics and power factor into what we believe is practical — or possible. 

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You probably learned this as a kid: When something goes wrong, you call 911. Someone answers, and help is on the way. But across America’s biggest cities, more than 1 in 5 911 centers can’t answer calls fast enough to meet the national standard.

Often, there simply aren’t enough people on staff to pick up the phone.

Reporter Byard Duncan spent a year finding out how often emergency calls go unanswered. His reporting was the source of recent episode of the investigative podcast Reveal called “911, Please Hold.” His search took him from California to Capitol Hill, and one common theme emerged: emergency call centers dispatchers are not classified as first responders.

In the federal government’s eyes, they sit alongside receptionists and bill collectors. There’s a move in Congress to change that, and this past winter, a team from Detroit’s 911 center went to Washington to fight for it.

Why aren’t emergency call dispatchers considered first responders? Duncan joined The Metro to share his findings.

“911, Please Hold” was produced by Byard Duncan for Type Investigations in partnership with Reveal.

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It is one of the older and more uncomfortable patterns in working life: women in power sometimes pull the ladder up behind them, leaving the women coming after stranded.

Research shows it’s less about gender than about scarcity — about what happens when there are only so many seats at the table.

Danielle North has lived it. She’s a Detroit entrepreneur who’s spent the last decade building what the world didn’t give her: a childcare center, a college program for first-generation students, a women’s leadership network with 11,000 members.

North founded that network in 2014 after some of the hardest setbacks of her career came not from men, but from other women.

Fast forward to this moment, when Michigan has more women in power than ever: a woman governor, a woman secretary of state who has a good chance to be the next governor, a woman attorney general, a woman leading Detroit for the first ever. Many of them are here at the Mackinac Policy Conference this week. So today we’re asking: when women finally get power, how do they keep the door open for others?

North joined Robyn Vincent to discuss.

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Michigan picks its next governor in November, and the Democratic frontrunner is Jocelyn Benson.

Benson made her name as Secretary of State when she refused to overturn Michigan’s 2020 election — even when armed protesters showed up at her Detroit home while she decorated a Christmas tree with her four-year-old son. The John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award followed. So did the Presidential Citizens Medal.

Now she wants to replace Gretchen Whitmer in a state that voted for Donald Trump just 18 months ago.

Her path got easier last week when independent Mike Duggan dropped out, citing low poll numbers and fundraising struggles. She has also faced scrutiny along the way: her own Democratic attorney general ruled she’d broken state campaign-finance law launching her bid, and the Trump Justice Department sued her for Michigan’s voter rolls — a suit a federal judge dismissed in February.

The Metro’s Robyn Vincent had 15 minutes to find out what this all means.

This article has been updated to note that the U.S. Justice Department lawsuit against Michigan over voter rolls was dismissed in February 2026.

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Have you ever sat in your car in a grocery store parking lot, looked at the receipt, and felt something in your chest tighten?

You’re not alone. Roughly half of Americans say they struggle to afford their rent or mortgage. Food prices rose more than 3% over the past year and are forecast to keep climbing. Total household debt just hit a record $18.8 trillion.

The cost of daily life and the weight of debt are taking a toll on our mental health, especially in a moment when the term“affordability crisis” has entered the national lexicon.

Lindsay Bryan-Podvin is a financial therapist based in Ann Arbor, the founder of Mind Money Balance, and the author of “The Financial Anxiety Solution.” She joined host Robyn Vincent on The Metro to talk about how the financial pressures of this moment are affecting our mental health, and what we can do to feel better.

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Over the weekend in downtown Detroit, a 14-year-old boy was shot in the chest near Library Street and Grand River Avenue. Two groups of teenagers had converged outside a Gucci store. Police say there was an argument and one teen, in the chief’s words, “decided to settle it with a firearm.” The boy is expected to live.

For months, teenagers across the country have been mobilizing each other on social media and meeting up. In Detroit, it has been mostly just noise — kids hanging out, looking for something to do in a city that wasn’t built with them in mind.

Some nights, it has turned chaotic.

Last weekend alone, Detroit police detained 109 teenagers across two large gatherings downtown and at Palmer Park, almost all for breaking curfew.

The city’s answer is to give teenagers somewhere to go and enforce the rules more strictly. Mayor Mary Sheffield is working with organizers to move the gatherings into sanctioned spaces. Police are leaning into the existing curfew — 10 p.m. for kids under 16, 11 p.m. for 16 and 17-year-olds—and ticketing parents whose children break it.

One member of the Board of Police Commissioners says this isn’t enough. Darious Morris represents District 3 on the civilian board that oversees the Detroit Police Department. He joined Robyn Vincent on The Metro to talk about what the city owes its teenagers, and what their parents owe them, too.

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When someone finally walks out of an abusive home, we tend to think of it as the end of the story. The door closes, the survivor is safe, the danger is behind them. The truth, though, is thornier. 

Advocates say leaving is when the violence often spikes, when the threats escalate, and when survivors are left to rebuild a sense of self after years of being told they had none.

It’s Mental Health Awareness Month, and on The Metro, we spend time on the parts of a story that are often left out, like what happens after the crisis.

JoJo Dries knows a lot about the aftermath. She runs On the Wings of Angels, which meets survivors at the moment when they’re ready to leave, with shelter, security, therapy, and a community willing to catch them.

Ahead of an event this month on the mental health impacts of domestic violence, Dries stopped by The Metro. She spoke with Ahlem Mahdhi, a fellow at WDET through the U.S. State Department’s Professional Fellows Program.

Editor’s Note: This conversation includes descriptions of abuse. If you need help, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 800-799-7233, or you can text START to 88788.

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Inside a Michigan prison less than an hour from Detroit, 25 incarcerated men are doing something many people behind bars haven’t been able to do in decades. They’re working toward a bachelor’s degree from Wayne State University, paid for in part by federal Pell Grants.

Congress blocked those grants for incarcerated students in 1994. It restored access in 2023. But as the Trump administration restructures the Department of Education, the future of that funding is uncertain.

The question at the center of this story: Can a college degree behind bars change who walks out — and is the country willing to keep paying for it?

Jonathan Roden has lived both sides of that question. He spent 23 years in Michigan prisons. While he was inside, the college path available to him was an associate degree through Jackson College. He wanted more.

He came home in August of 2023. Nine days later, he started at Wayne State. In December, he graduated from the Mike Ilitch School of Business.

Now he walks back and forth through those same prison gates, this time as a coordinator for Wayne State’s prison education program. Roden, a Michigan Justice Fund fellow for WDET, is opening doors for men who are right where he used to be.

He joined Robyn Vincent on The Metro alongside audio from Carlton Banks, a student in the inaugural cohort at Macomb Correctional Facility. Banks was sentenced to life in prison for his role in the 1994 murder of a teenage Subway employee named Angela Garcia. He was 18. He’s now 48. Under a 2022 Michigan Supreme Court ruling, he expects to come home in 2028. He calls that prospect “a blessing, but not a celebration.”

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Last month, hundreds of Oakland County residents packed a Pontiac meeting room. They came to speak against a proposal that would put surveillance drones, built by a company called Flock Safety, into the hands of the county sheriff.

Police nationwide have used Flock cameras to run thousands of immigration-related searches on behalf of ICE.

Many residents did not get a chance to speak. Just before the discussion began, Commission Chair Dave Woodward held a vote to move public comment to the end of the meeting, after the contract had already passed.

When Commissioner Charlie Cavell asked for a roll call vote — to make every commissioner go on the record — Woodward denied it and moved on.

The drones were approved, 14-4.

After that meeting, residents launched a campaign to recall Woodward, and by late April, petition language was approved. 

Yesterday, Woodward appealed that approval in Oakland County Circuit Court. If a circuit judge upholds the petition language, organizers will have 60 days to gather roughly 9,000 signatures across Royal Oak, Birmingham, and parts of Troy.

Woodward has called the recall “a distraction.” 

He joined Robyn Vincent on The Metro to discuss the recall effort, his business connections that have prompted ethical concerns, and whether he should have handled that April meeting differently.

Editor’s note: During this conversation, Woodward said some people involved in the recall campaign are advocating for political violence. The Metro reviewed the social media posts Woodward referred to. In one, a person supporting the recall effort praised Luigi Mangione — the man charged with killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December of 2024 — calling him “the closest thing to a superhero we have.” A leader of the recall campaign says that supporter is no way affiliated with the campaign. 

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One of the largest data center projects in the country is happening in Michigan, in the small farming community of Saline Township. Southwest of Ann Arbor, Saline Township is home to roughly 2,300 people.

Many of those residents did not want a data center. Their board voted against it, and their neighbors packed the meeting hall. Then the lawsuit came.

The companies are Oracle and OpenAI. Together, they are worth more than a trillion dollars. The township said it could not justify the fight, so it settled, and construction began.

Governor Gretchen Whitmer calls it the largest single investment in Michigan history.

It will use more electricity than an average nuclear reactor produces.

State lawmaker Morgan Foreman represents the district where it is being built. She says her constituents were not partners in this project; they were bystanders to it. She joined Robyn Vincent on The Metro to discuss how a small community of farmers and small-business owners ended up hosting one of the most consequential pieces of AI infrastructure in the country.

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A month ago, gas in Michigan was just under $4 a gallon, and small business owners were already making changes to brace for what was coming.

In the month since, the average price has climbed to nearly five dollars, with some Michigan stations already past it. The squeeze that was just beginning a month ago has settled in. The U.S. and Israel’s war with Iran is in its third month, the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, and Midwest refineries are down.

For the small businesses that anchor metro Detroit, this is one more strain on top of an already heavy stack. Corner stores and landscapers are absorbing higher fuel costs to stay competitive. Restaurants are closing, and analysts say rising gas prices and declining consumer confidence are likely to accelerate the trend.

All of this comes after months of tariffs, rising healthcare premiums, and an unsettled workforce.

Mark Lee runs The Lee Group, where he consults with small businesses across Southeast Michigan. He spoke with Robyn Vincent on The Metro about what another month of pain at the pump is doing to the businesses he advises. Lee is also hosting his 12th annual Small Business Workshop on May 13 at the Corner Ballpark in Detroit — a free, half-day event for local entrepreneurs and business owners navigating exactly this kind of pressure.

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When you call 911 in Detroit, who’s paying for the ambulance? It’s a question that’s tripped up the Detroit City Council twice in two years… and the answer goes to a vote this afternoon.

Detroit pays three private ambulance companies between $500,000 and $600,000 each per year. That’s to keep a guaranteed number of rigs staged in the city.

Those same companies can also bill you — or your insurance — when they pick you up. Councilmember Angela Whitfield Calloway has called that “double dipping.” But The Detroit Documenters pulled the original 2023 contract documents and confirmed: that is how the deal is written.

So what is Detroit paying for? And what does it say about American healthcare that a city has to cut million-dollar checks just to guarantee an ambulance shows up?

Noah Kincade, coordinator for Detroit Documenters, joined Robyn Vincent on The Metro to walk through what’s in the contracts and what’s at stake in a city council vote on the matter.

Editor’s Note: After this segment aired, the Detroit City Council voted 4-3 to send the ambulance contracts back to committee rather than vote on them directly. Council President James Tate was absent, and President Pro Tem Coleman Young II presided. Young, Scott Benson, Latisha Johnson and Denzel McCampbell voted to send the contracts back. Mary Waters, Angela Whitfield-Calloway and Renata Miller voted no. The Public Health and Service Committee will take the contracts up May 4 at 10 a.m.

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Four years in, the war in Sudan has produced the largest displacement crisis in the world. Nearly 14 million people have been forced from their homes. Both the United States government and a United Nations fact-finding mission have called the violence a genocide, citing a coordinated campaign by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces against the Zaghawa and Fur communities of Darfur.

In the United States, the response has been quiet.

Khadega Mohammed has spent much of her life trying to say something about that silence — through poetry, community organizing, and her work at the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, where she is the only Sudanese person and the only Black person on staff.

Born in Sudan, raised in Saudi Arabia, and resettled in the United States with her family in 2007, Mohammed is a spoken word artist whose signature poem, “Between,” opens the PBS AfroPoP documentary “Revolution from Afar.”

She joined Robyn Vincent on The Metro to talk about the Sudan she remembers, the America she lives in, and the in-between where her poetry was born.

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In town halls and public squares across Michigan, people are debating whether data centers should be part of their neighborhoods.

Some communities have hit pause on data center development — the massive server farms that power artificial intelligence and cloud computing.

The concerns are straightforward: these facilities can consume as much electricity as a large city. They often use millions of gallons of water a day, and critics say they deliver few permanent jobs for the enormous tax breaks they receive.

Now Detroit has entered the fray.

Last month, Detroit City Could voted 6-2 to ask Mayor Mary Sheffield to impose a two-year freeze on all new data center permits.

Detroit City Council Member Scott Benson is leading that effort. He has convened a working group of city planners, utility officials and environmental advocates with a December 31 deadline to develop zoning rules for data centers.

Benson joined Robyn Vincent on The Metro to discuss why he is pushing for a two-year pause and what Detroit needs to get right before data centers arrive.

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