Follow up to "The Crap In My Back Yard"

Last April I posted about the "Crap in Our Back Yard." In this post I complained about how our county sells tax liens on piece of sh*t properties that the lien holders don't have a hope in hell of collecting on. Well, in the last 9 months since writing the post the city and county were supposedly working together to identify properties like these so that they could prevent liens from being sold so that people could acquire the property through another program offered by our city. In the same 9 months one of the houses has had SUR 13 sprayed on it (which I'm guessing isn't good) and both properties have had significant reductions in property value while ours went up 43%. In the same 9 months two adjoining properties to ours have become vacated bringing the total number of vacant structures in the immediate vicinity to ours to 7 out of 18. In the same 9 months I mentioned these properties to city directors, a commissioner and if you recall from my April post, the mayor, who acknowledged my concern about such properties several times during the same nine months. I was told at least twice from different sources, that these properties were on the nuisance list and scheduled to be demolished. I reviewed that list on line last week and these properties were not listed at all. In fact, one is listed as having 3 code violations while the other has 6 code violations. I checked the online tax records this evening and noticed that the 2007 liens were sold. This means that these will sit ANOTHER 2 YEARS before I can attempt to acquire them in any way that is affordable because the total owed in liens for both properties is about $15,000 now. I have no way of knowing because the taxes are no longer delinquent. Way to go!

One other thing, 9 Months ago in my post I threatened to run for mayor and now I'm going through the process of making that a reality. So at least one person is willing to do something to improve the situation. Just like the old saying, "If you want a job done properly, do it yourself." I wish I could just go down to the courts and file a civil suit against the property owner for contributing to the demise in property values but the county auditor isn't co-operating with us!