Longtime neighbors describe traffic chaos, parking disputes, and a city government they say refuses to help
Neighbors remember the sound of church bells ringing on Sundays.
A brick building with two sharply sloped roofs and a steeple — a Lutheran church for more than 80 years — still stands, but the cross that once stood atop the steeple is gone. About six years ago, the property was sold and turned into the Al Ihsaan Islamic Center.
“They’ll turn anything into a mosque,” Justin Tye, 57, told Fox News Digital during a guided tour of his hometown, where the foreign-born Muslim population has grown significantly over the past decade.
Tye remembers the church as the centerpiece of his American suburb where local children would gather on the lawn to play pickup sports.
Lebanese, Iraqi and Syrian immigrants, mostly Chaldean Christians, began moving to the Detroit area in the early 20th century, after Henry Ford’s combustion engine drove demand for laborers in the newly-minted auto industry.
Warren, now the third-largest city in Michigan after Detroit and Grand Rapid, exploded almost overnight with the post-World War II auto manufacturing boom, as war veterans moved to the area to work for Ford and General Motors. The blue-collar, white-picket-fence community incorporated as a town in 1957.
After leaving Warren in his adulthood, Tye returned 13 years ago and purchased his childhood home. At that time, he says, it hadn’t changed dramatically.
Now, it’s much different.
Shortly after his return, foreign-born Muslims began flocking to the area.
Wars in the 1990s and 2000s led to a boom of Middle Eastern migrations, as America took in a growing Muslim refugee and immigrant population. Longstanding chain migration policies allowed family members to follow their relatives to the United States, and foreign immigrant visas have exploded in recent years.
This, Tye said, has been the story of Warren. But his town’s plight is overshadowed in the media by nearby Dearborn, a now Muslim-majority city that has garnered national and international attention.
Within a seven mile radius of his neighborhood, there are now five mosques. Fox News Digital toured the area while Tye pointed them out.
An old industrial machinery business is now a mosque, as is a former Baptist church.
Tye pointed out a residential home that local Muslims sought to turn into a mosque before a bitter zoning battle, where the Warren City Council eventually decided against the change.
Tye and several neighbors interviewed by Fox News Digital feel like they’re being pushed out of their own hometown.
“It all started when they bought the mosque, roughly six years ago,” said Tye, standing on the street corner in front of Al Ihsaan alongside his longtime neighbor, Wendy Schneider.
“After Ramadan, they would have their [Eid al-Fitr] prayer service. It was unannounced. We didn’t know anything,” he continued. “All of a sudden, we were just woken up to 100-plus people behind the mosque, with an Imam on a podium with big amplifier speakers, belting out his prayer service. So it woke up the whole neighborhood.”
Since that day, Tye says the neighborhood has turned to “chaos,” especially during Muslim holidays and weekly Friday afternoon prayers.