When 'Right-Sizing' Vacant Properties Goes Wrong | Hacker News Reader

When 'Right-Sizing' Vacant Properties Goes Wrong

citylab.com

71 pointsMz46 comments

The power of government can be terrifying, when it's turned against you.

It would be nice to have a third-party opinion from someone who lives in Clarksburg to fill in the details that this article is missing.

It's not possible to tell if this guy is really a victim of overbearing local government or a shady businessman who finally had his underhanded practices catch up with him.

To put it into context, from what I've seen before -

1. The mentioned owner probably paid less then $500 per house.

2. There was no real improvement nor investment made in/to those houses.

3. This was all about squeezing rent out of dilapidated properties, that were at the same time keeping everyone else house prices down.

He still paid the $500. If he was keeping current on his taxes, and the house was not an attractive nuisiance, there is no reason they should be demolished. If they were condemned, he should have been compensated for them.

There is no reason he should have to make the house "nice", it should simply be habitable. It shouldn't leak, the walls should not be structurally unsound (in my town that is among other things defined as more than 30* out of plumb), there should be adequate egress, and in the winter months working heat.

The only thing he seemed to have a problem with was working heat; but was going to have a professional come and fix it. The town then prevented him from fixing it before the hearing; pretty much ensuring that the tenant couldn't live there and he would lose.

There should be a much higher burden of proof on the governments part, before someone is relieved of their property or its productive use.

You say the heat was the only problem, yet the article says inspectors revealed additional problems during further inspections. Could be leaky pipes, could be issues with the structural integrity. The article is hardly fair and balanced, and it does sound like something fishy is going on, but I have a hard time believing he had some 12 or so houses demolished without having something fishy going on himself.

They were demolished for building code violations according to the article. A process that took many months and many meetings with a tribunal.

The question is whether you believe this guy was a victim of political corruption, where city officials targeted a competitor. Or believe the government side that he was a slumlord. Both seem equally likely given the evidence in the article.

I guess I find that demolishing the house should take more than a few months or planning committee meetings. I think that an independent judge should have to be involved in anything that deprives someone of their property.

I actually think a major component of the problem is property taxes that are too low. If there were minimum assessments on a lot, or alternatively a minimum assessment on a structure; then the landowners would be properly incentivized to put them to good use; or they would naturally revert to the town after several years of non-payment.

What about the tenants? Why are people so focused on increasing house prices? No one wants food prices to be high or internet prices to be high.

In a small town that's shrinking rapidly, the people who live on the margins in maybe-condemned houses probably can't afford anything better. If you demolish houses that people are living in and raise housing costs, where are those people going to live?

I can see the justification for demolishing abandoned houses, but demolishing houses that people are living in seems evil.

The goal is to push those people into government/subsidized housing.

I an understand the desire, in theory.

In theory, it's better to live in a government housing project that is kept up to minimal health and safety standards.

In practice, it varies on a case by case basis. Sometimes, that's exactly what is needed. It is certainly better to live in a maintained government housing project than to live in a private crap hole with black mold, roaches and rodents but it's not better if the government housing project also has roaches, rodents, mold and crack dealers.

It's difficult to convince people to spend money on such things unless you can first convince them that there is an emergency need to do so. Destroying the low cost housing while producing a glut of people who need low cost housing will create that emergency.

True, the owner should paid less than 500$ per house because, the investment no real improvement about the house.

> The power of government can be terrifying, when it's turned against you.

If condemning and bulldozing your property terrifies you, you'll be in for a real treat when you look up cases about civil forfeiture abuse.

My town is on an aggressive knock-down strategy as well. One problem they ran into was people trying to "save" houses on the chopping block after the tax sale. Since then they are clearly tagging the houses where the PROPERTY is for sale but the HOUSE is condemned.

In certain neighborhoods, the city wants the excess houses GONE. They don't want them fixed up and barely hanging on.. The city wants to collect enough empty lots that NEW BUILDING is worth while... And just sit on empty lots until then.

The problem for somebody like this owner.. When is he city happy to take your tax sale money but leave the block on their "knock-down" list.. And why isn't the list more public.. Who's getting benefits of knocking Dow YOUR HOUSE but not others?

Absentee slumlord gets his comeuppance, claims corruption and sues. What's news here?

But wait. If the article is correct and the city's population dropped by half, I would expect there to be hundreds if not thousands of legitimately vacated and abandoned properties. Why would the city go after a slumlord's properties instead, even if he is an absentee landlord known for ill-maintained rental houses?

(And it also seems that a city which has dropped so significantly in population would be a poor location for a true slumlord to prey, since I would expect it to be a buyer's market.)

I am not sure it's as open-and-shut as you portray it.

> But wait. If the article is correct and the city's population dropped by half, I would expect there to be hundreds if not thousands of legitimately vacated and abandoned properties.

In that part of the world, unlikely. An uninhabited house very quickly degrades to total uselessness through winters and summers in the Northeastern US (especially winters--pipes freeze, roofs collapse, etc.) So, the only houses that remain standing have people in them.

So, somebody is living in these houses almost by definition--quite often for a very cheap amount of money since there isn't exactly high demand and its very important to keep people in the house. And, since the money coming in is very small, repairs are kept to a minimum and a major repair requirement generally results in the house being abandoned.

This creates a pretty near perfect storm for the controversy in the article--the houses are near condemnable; the city wants them gone; the owner is making a profit but is absolutely not going to spend large amounts of money on it under any circumstance; the renters certainly don't have anywhere else to go and are happy to be there even with the house being so crappy.

Degrade to total uselessness yes, but not demolish itself. Even in the worst climate an abandoned house does not turn into an empty lot in a few years, or even decades.

Just a guess (and a rather cynical one): so they could get some money out of the owner. He's the one with the cash, so he's the one to target.

Fair point. Maybe I'm just not good at reading, though...I can't see how the city is benefiting financially from going after Jacquez. The article does suggest the possibility of cronyism -- the city is going after certain property owners to increase the value of properties owned by others who are either bribing city officials or friends of city officials -- but I don't see any legitimate revenue coming into the city because of actions against Jacquez versus going after legitimately vacated properties. In fact, it seems the city would be losing money (having to go to court and potentially pay settlements) by targeting people like him.

I don't know anything about anything in either politics and real estate, though.

no, sadly it reads like a political power play. Someone is the system decided they would use their power in government to fix things and this guy was an easy target. He had some homes, some with problems, but obviously no real means to fight back.

See this way to often, people get in office or a position where the public really has little to no real ability to push back. They can do exactly what they did to this guy, take your property or prevent you from using it until you just cannot afford to keep up the fight. If they lose, they will just try later or keep going on someone else. There is no penalty for the majority of abuses by government functionaries, none. People think cops get away with murder, they haven't see jack

This pretty much describes how you end up with a Killdozer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZbG9i1oGPA

> slumlord

You say that like there is something wrong with renting property to poor people.

A slum is not defined by the income of its residents, but by the quality of the homes.

The quality of the homes is determined by what the tenants can (or choose to) afford.

That is an important possibility not represented in the story. Do you have personal experience or a source to complement the theory?

One thing that raised a red flag to me is telling his tenant to stay at a relative's if the house was unlivable during repairs. Every state's law is different, but I'd be very surprised if it's not his obligation to provide short-term accommodations if the property cannot be lived in.

Agreed. For an article that provided so little view of the other side, and seemed to be on the landlord's side entirely, the fact that a huge red flag like that would slip through is, well, a red flag. If a landlord ever said something like that to me, I'd tell them to go live at a relative's house while I stayed at their place!

I agree that the article is hardly fair and unbiased. Aside from the women's boiler needing extensive repairs, the article claims that there were "other repairs needed" which could be really anything. Of course that is the only property of his they talked about. Who knows what the other issues where.

In the end... it's just click grabbing. Painting the situation as an overbearing, corrupt city government demolishing folks homes is sure to grab more eyeballs.

Yes, that was a bit of a throwaway line wasn't it?

However, the State legal authorities have seen fit to halt all demolitions while they investigate, and the qualifications of the building inspectors are being checked, and a close relative of a post holder is building housing for rent.

A barrel of knaves?

Yeah, I was pretty much accepting a government run amok story until this comment. If you can't get the heater or AC up and running again in 24 hours, your residence qualifies as uninhabitable, sorry.

However, as someone who grew up in a similar town, I understand that housing in these kinds of areas is a delicate balance.

While you can talk about "slumlord", the issue is that most of the people in these houses are stuck in the area, probably have fairly low fixed incomes, likely have bad credit (or possibly lost their house in the crash) and very few other choices. Most "slumlords" in such an area are not exactly raking in the dough, and, if rent goes up too much, the renters are out a home and now have to go live with someone else.

In reality, wiping out a few houses doesn't really help that much in these kinds of sparsely populated areas. In reality, the whole town needs to be wiped out or consolidated with another town to make much difference.

Unfortunately, that has its own set of issues.

I'll agree that often times the law says that. But if he's not making much money on the house (slumlords don't have premium properties and so they can't charge premium prices) then asking a tenant to stay with someone else could (emphasis COULD!) be a small kindness.

Before people go bananas on me let me explain. If the woman is out of the normal lease term and is now living month to month then the landlord could raise the rent. And if he's not making much money on the house then he might have to raise the rent to offset whatever money he spends putting this woman up in a hotel. So that would end up costing her quite a bit.

Of course I'm speculating wildly here that she was out of her lease and that he had the ability to raise her rent; maybe it was rent-controlled. Or perhaps he was making money hand-over-fist renting a poorly maintained property for a lot of money while treating his tenants poorly.

I do know that rarely is there a slam-dunk one way or the other, no matter what the subject is.

Exactly. When I ran into a problem with my furnace, my landlord came over with an armful of electric space heaters. Still left me on the hook for the jump in the electrical bill, but better than nothing.

Very good point.

Do you have some evidence this landlord deserved 'comeuppance'?

Or that in another case highlighted by the article, the investment firm founded by the City Manager and his brother better deserved the income from new units built where old ones were torn down?

>Or that in another case highlighted by the article, the investment firm founded by the City Manager and his brother better deserved the income from new units built where old ones were torn down?

it is called "eminent domain" (expropriation of private property for public use :)

Anyway, people don't have the right to be poor and live in the only slums they can afford. (and even less the society would care about pets which, most frequently than not, would be ok in the "slums" and not welcome in the new rental units)

With the complete lack of details about the state of the plaintiff's properties there's no way to take an informed side...

At one time I was studying to become an urban planner. The article caught my eye because of the opening:

At the end of May, a task force convened by the Obama administration suggested that Detroit needs to "right-size" its housing stock. That’s a phrase often used in reference to cities that have spent decades in the midst of population decline; in Detroit’s well-documented case, it was a city built for more than 1.8 million people that’s now home to about half that number. The task force suggested the city should tear down 40,000 properties left vacant in the exodus.

It seems to me the detailed story about what happened in Clarksburg is a case study. It is unfortunate that the article never returned to its opening thought to make a real point related to Detroit (using the case study to support the point). But as someone who founded and ran a sub-forum on Cyburbia for a time and who, thus, used to talk a lot with people who enforced city codes, etc, this looked to me like a cautionary tale and a suggestion that "If things can go that wrong on such a small scale, surely we need to be concerned when something similar is being suggested by the federal government for a city the size of Detroit."

People just need to rewatch robocop.

What's the property law in the US? If you own a house, don't you also own the parcel where it's built? How can a city destroy a house that has an owner, or is built on a private land?

Same reason a city can crush your car if you use it improperly. Your property is a responsibility because it does not exist in isolation. If you fail to live up to that responsibility, the city must take over the responsibilities. That may include destroying a fundamentally unsafe and unusable structure that exists on your property.

If you can build a house in an impermeable bubble located in low Earth orbit, I'll agree you can do whatever you want within that bubble. As long as your property shares the same landscape and air and ecosystem as my property, I care what you do with yours.

Ever lived next to a dilapidated home?

Well, this is so nice - instead of asking you to fix the building or demolish it on your own the city will bulldoze it for you and hire the lawyers in case you have some objections that need to be handled. But what's exactly that law - what's an 'improperly' used house? Can they demolish it if your heating isn't working? Leaking roof? Broken window?

Housing codes determine what is acceptably "habitable" and what is not. The laws are also more strict when the residence is a rental property, as American society would like to discourage absentee or delinquent land-lords and help protect tenants from bad situations where your land-lord is supposed to be maintaining a property but instead tells you to "go live with a relative" when the heat is out.

For demolition it shouldn't matter if it is a rental or not. If it would be habitable by an owner; then it shouldn't be demolished. The tenant may be evicted or he could be fined or something; which is fine, but he should still be allowed to attempt to market the house as a single family residence.

Normally, this is done only in really extreme cases in the U.S. Part of the point of the article is that one city experimented with doing this much more aggressively than is the norm. "Takings" law is generally very conservative. In other words, the government can take your property, or a portion of it, for very compelling reasons. This usually happens in cases where, for example, a new highway is going through and they need to consolidate land to put the highway on. It is usually a very, very conservative process that errs as much as possible on the side of the homeowner. The article is about an anomalous situation where a city decided "hell, we have so many vacancies and so much blight, let's pursue takings much more aggressively" and, well, all hell is apparently breaking loose.

Because, yeah, most folks react to that in much the same way you are reacting: What the bloody hell???!!! in essence.

I supposed private property is the foundation of american society, culture and laws. This is why i'm surprised it's so easy for state officials to violate it and so hard to defend your rights.

Yeah, well, you know, Americans are still human and, thus, when push comes to shove, the system only works right when good people are running it. To some extent, it doesn't matter what the actual rules are, if assholes are in charge, people get screwed even if the rules are awesome, and if good people are in charge, then, you know, the system tends to work okay even if it isn't the sharpest tool for the job. (shrug)

Within highly constrained circumstances, they can come and demolish the property. IANAL, but I believe the legal rationale is under the nuisance law -- that an abandoned building constitutes a nuisance to the community, like a pickle works or a paper mill, and either the owner must mitigate the nuisance, or suffer consequences.

The point of the story is that the city appears to be abusing the law. A building with a legitimate Certificate of Occupancy is not dilapidated, and a building which is occupied is not abandoned.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuisance

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