I can almost see why these people would collect bills and foreclose and so on but in the end they will wind up with nothing.
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Lead is plenty cheap, but can’t let the plebs think they can get it for free/cheap! This reminds me, i gotta remind myself to up the price of diamonds again.
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Small scale testing to see how it well it will work nationwide?
Possibly.
Jesus that’s devious.
On a lark I decided to look up what i posted above. Seems that Snopes did some digging into this last year and confirmed all the different details into this, like not having running water as a cause for CPS to get involved… this bit would be true. But they also found that in the case of Flint this has not been the case at all taking their water situation into consideration. No families have been investigated by CPS due to lack of running water or access to clean water.
Felt like i needed to make the correction rather than spread incorrect information. Sorry if there was any confusion! I will strike out my previous post’s text.
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These people need to run and talk to a lawyer. I wonder if you own a home with a default on the mortgage and the city takes ownership does it negate that. Then the city has to sell this home at auction, and you could pick up your house again. Your credit would be crap for the next 7 years but if you have a 30 year mortgage it this is starting to sound like an option.
Michigan law allows for foreclosure of properties for tax liens after three years. It was part of the land banking plans to deal with vacant properties.
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A new slogan to help Make America Great Again:
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That seems very odd. If the property is paid for and then abandoned but has a lien against it, wouldn’t that simply prevent the sale of the property by the owner to someone who would actually make use of the property? You can’t foreclose on a paid for property after all.
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That was largely how it worked until land bank legislation. You had a bunch of properties that had zero market value, before taking their tax liens into account. You literally couldn’t give it away at zero cost. So you had an unbelievable amount of abandoned properties with all of the social costs that come along with that. Land bank legislation gave municipal and sometimes county governments the power to foreclose, forgive the liens, and sell the property, either as a house or demolish it and sell it to adjoining properties as a side yard for a nominal fee. This current use is an abomination.
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It’s worse than that in this case: because of Flint’s state of financial emergency, the mayor is effectively replaced by a state-appointed(I don’t know the details of how they are selected; but I believe the governor has a lot of say) “emergency manager”.
A mayor at least has to pretend to care(or genuinely care about part of the city influential enough to keep him in office) in order to keep his job. The “emergency manager” doesn’t have to please anyone in the city because none of them have any say in his appointment.
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Really? Ew!
Thanks, and good on ya for following up! Real breath of fresh air someone source-checking themselves and striving for accuracy. Cheers mate, next round’s on me.
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That bastard.
Not that I’m advocating anything, but it would be a bit of poetic justice if someone extracted the lead from their water, and returned it to any city official participating in this unethical shake down. Preferably at velocities exceeding say 1400fps.
Not that it should matter (in a better world), but the EM’s involved were not all black. I live in Michigan and recall former EM Jerry Ambrose being charged for his role in the matter…
Personally felt the inclusion of race by OP was sidelining. It certainly read to me like “it’s not racist cuz a black guy did it”
Which means about as much as saying “I’m not racist cuz I have a black friend.”
However, the criminal indifference that Snyder et al. treats the black communities in Michigan with is insane. The EM law in MI has been used to strip many communities of their public utilities/schools, Flint being just the most egregious. They dropped the pretence of caring about democracy quite some time ago.
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I mean not necessarily in the sense that it was consciously installed as such, but things like this can spread. If one city lets their government get away with this, then other mayors, governors, or would-be fuhrers will think, hey look what they did in Flint, wouldn’t that simplify things around here.
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The alternative was worse than the ability to foreclose. Everything gets weird and hard to manage when you are dealing with abandoned properties with a negative market value. What you got was an incredible amount of arson. There’s a reason that the cities surrounding the Great Lakes still lead the country in arson rates. http://www.mlive.com/news/flint/index.ssf/2013/03/burning_flint_10_cities_with_t_1.html
