Willow and Hearth

The Lawsuit

The City of Detroit filed a civil nuisance-abatement lawsuit on July 22, 2026, in Wayne County against former HGTV “Rehab Addict” host Nicole Curtis and her company, Detroit Renovations LLC, according to the Detroit News. The case centers on a long-blighted historic property on East Grand Boulevard that Curtis has owned since 2021, following an earlier legal fight with the Detroit Land Bank Authority over who actually held title to the home.

The city alleges Curtis failed to bring the property into compliance despite a 2021 court order requiring renovation, and cites ongoing code violations including damaged and missing exterior features, an unrepaired roof and gutters, and continued structural deterioration, according to Fox News. The lawsuit seeks a court order forcing immediate repairs at Curtis’s expense, along with payment of outstanding blight fines that have accumulated on the property.

Curtis Responds

Curtis addressed the lawsuit directly in a statement posted to her own Facebook and Instagram accounts in early August, writing: “I’ve been sued, blackmailed, extorted, betrayed, you name it and not just by the usual suspects, but by ‘friends’ and loved ones that I trusted with my soul.” She framed the years spent fighting for the property as personally costly, describing what she went through as “a grief that is hard to explain if you haven’t gone through it,” and said her motivation was never financial: “I save old houses, but it’s not a job — it’s one of my passions.”

Curtis, who grew up working-class in the Detroit area, also pointed to her history with the city specifically, writing that she “used to clean houses in Detroit” before building the renovation career that made her an HGTV fixture, and said she remains focused on “saving historic homes from being demolished and/or ruined by flippers” regardless of the legal pressure.

The Bigger Picture

The lawsuit lands at a difficult moment for Curtis, who was fired by HGTV in February 2026 after a video surfaced showing her using a racial slur while filming years earlier, a controversy she has publicly apologized for. The Detroit case is separate from that fallout, but it revives a familiar pattern in Curtis’s career: a preservation-minded renovator repeatedly finding herself in adversarial legal standoffs with the same municipal systems whose blighted housing stock she has built a public identity around saving, from an earlier Minneapolis dispute over an abandoned property years ago to this current fight over a foursquare on Detroit’s east side.

The case remains active in Wayne County Circuit Court, and neither the city nor Curtis’s attorneys have indicated a settlement is imminent.

Editor’s sourcing note: Curtis’s statement above was posted on her own verified Facebook/Instagram accounts (first-party per sourcing policy), not given to a reporter directly. The headline was revised from the original draft to quote her actual on-record words for this 2026 case rather than a similar-sounding quote that traces to an unrelated 2017 Minneapolis property dispute.