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Comment by cratermoon | Hacker News Reader

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.

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

> 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.

> 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.

Very good point.

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?

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.

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.

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)

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