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| A plan to tear down 4,000 vacant houses makes Baltimore the latest city to invest in demolition. |
| 2016-01-14 |
| [BLOOMBERG] Maryland Governor Larry Hogan held a sidewalk presser last week in Baltimore's Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood. He promised to revitalize the city by spending $75 million to tear down 4,000 vacant houses. Baltimore's population is dropping, a result of years of Democrat machine government. The blocks of vacant houses are festering civic sores. "Fixing what is broken in Baltimore requires that we address the sea of abandoned, dilapidated buildings that are infecting entire neighborhoods," he said. It's a city that's infested by junkies, with falling property values and taxes that are twice what we pay in the counties. Then the yellow paw of a Komatsu excavator ripped the face from a nearby row house, and Baltimore joined a growing club of declining U.S. industrial hubs that have decided they have more housing than their populations can support. The logic is that removing blighted sections of the city will help the larger body thrive, eventually clearing the path for redevelopment. The hard part is conceding that some areas are beyond short-term redemption. Just look for the burned out CVS pharmacies. "When you demolish with no plans for new residential development, you're admitting that right now there's no demand for this block, this neighborhood, this city," said Erika Poethig, a fellow at the Urban Institute. "It takes a certain amount of political courage to do that." It's a city that tore down filthy abandoned housing projects along Martin Luther King Boulevard (somehow that's always where you find decayed housing projects) and built new housing at $300K a pop and sold them for a third that price. Drive by any time, wave to the bums, and read the graffiti. Efforts to eliminate derelict homes in the U.S. were turbo-charged in 2013 when the U.S. Treasury allowed six states that had received money from a pool known as the Hardest Hit Fund to use some of it for tear-downs, in addition to other foreclosure prevention initiatives for which it was originally earmarked. The reasoning behind the move, which made $370 million available for the demolition of residences, is that vacant homes lower the value of neighboring properties. |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #6 When son did mortgage re-titling on repos (1000s a month) he found Baltimore to be the most impossible city in the nation to deal with. They don't allow turning off utilities (most owned by the city). The payments for the utilities can be purchased as a lien against the home. This makes cleaning up titles hard. To make it worse Baltimore only allows that clean up once a year for a few hours payable only by cash at the courthouse. No checks, no debit cards no credit cards only cash. The son damn near went nuts on this (as he was not even in Maryland) until he made a deal with a bail bondsman across the street from the courthouse. So whenever one of the homes whose title he was trying to clean got its date at the Baltimore court he would call his bail bondsman to rush dollars across the street. Baltimore needs to be punished by the nation for this sort of outlook. |
| Posted by: 3dc 2016-01-14 12:09 |
| #5 Shades of Calais. WAIT...can I say "Shades"? |
| Posted by: Skidmark 2016-01-14 11:39 |
| #4 Nuclear demolition might be a viable option, if the northerlies and easterlies were cooperative. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2016-01-14 11:09 |
| #3 See "The Wire" |
| Posted by: Frank G 2016-01-14 08:49 |
| #2 If you listen, you can hear this loud sucking sound. It is the redistribution of wealth from Montgomery and Howard counties into the city of Baltimore. |
| Posted by: Sven the pelter 2016-01-14 00:44 |
| #1 Never let a crisis go to waste. Detroit mayor tries to explain ever-higher prices for vacant home demolition. Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan defended the rising costs of tearing down blighted homes Tuesday, just hours after the Detroit Land Bank Authority that oversees the demolitions fired its executive director for undisclosed reasons. Duggan spoke before the City Council to explain why the average cost for tearing down vacant homes in the city has increased to $16,400 each, compared with about $10,000 in 2013. The Detroit land bank oversees the auctioning and demolition of vacant, abandoned and foreclosed properties. It has experienced some trouble in selling its "Rehabbed and Ready" homes. Those homes are taken from abandoned to rehabbed — often pouring more money in the renovation than the house is worth — with the help of Home Depot and Quicken Loans. Only a few have sold since the inception of the program this summer. |
| Posted by: Anguper Hupomosing9418 2016-01-14 00:32 |