Re Visiting Occupy The House Movement in Detroit -as $$$gets too high for residents

[Richard]

An ex-coworker of mine started fixing up houses in Detroit. He made a career out of it. Not tearing down houses and building new ones, just buying distressed, abandoned properties and getting them cleaned up and up to code so they were livable again. Here were the issues he ran in to:

1. Dealing with *any* city licensing or inspection bureau is an absolute nightmare. They miss dates. They loose reservations. They double charge. They loose your money. Anything you can imagine going wrong does happen, multiple times, constantly.

2. Getting the Detroit water department to do anything is also nearly impossible. An abandoned house next to a property he owned broke it's main and was creating a sinkhole threatening to destroy his driveway. He called multiple times over the weekend and could never reach anyone at the emergency number. Finally he bought the pole you need and turned it off himself, then got yelled at a few days later for messing with DSWD equipment without their permission.

3. The city property tax department. You can read the series of news articles about those yourself.

4. For his troubles of fixing up his own neighborhood [[he lived in Detroit) people would come in from outside of his neighborhood [[along with quite a few suburbanites) and yell at him for being a slum lord. Keep in mind he didn't own rental properties, he brought blighted houses up to code and sold them. He bought a couple of his neighbors' houses when they were foreclosed on and let them live in them rent free as long as they paid their utilities.

He has since moved out of Detroit and turned his attention to other areas, as the situation had become untenable.

So, yeah, quite a lot is broken with Detroit real estate. It seems as though, unless you are a huge developer doing business directly with the city, the city is openly hostile to property owners.

sounds like he was trying to do things the right way,the easy way would have been to just do things without drawing attention,shut the water off and do not tell anybody,the house was abandoned so it probably would have been a long time before they would have dealt with it.

Do not worry about the permits anybody asks you are just painting inside.

One has to know going into it they will be dealing with a cluster phuck so the less the city knows the better off you are.

Most city’s look the other way when you are doing things like that and they do not know what is going on inside of the house.

You are not going to change them,so you have to figure out how to adapt and exploit their deficiencies in order to make it work.

If you look at all the housing announcements it is currently all about low income housing or below market rates,if he is working as an independent flipping houses for profit they are going to view that as somebody greedy and trying to exploit the city for profit.

If he is buying them,fixing them up in order to provide affordable housing then he will be a hero,you would not be able to appear to be actually doing it for profit.

Unless he is doing it in upper scale or a trendy neighborhood,it is pointless,he is better off hooking up with somebody in the city under the guise of making it appear as though you are investing and working at a loss for the benefit for others,they will probably cut him a check then,it’s not really an inept city,it’s the optics.That’s why people are calling him a slum lord,it’s not good optics to expect a return on investment.

I think if I was going to flip houses it would be in places like EEV or more established neighborhoods.

[K-slice]

From permitting to build new structures, do work in historic districts, resolve issues with DWSD, I've never had an issue. Granted it's all been in the last 10 years or so, but my experience working with city Gov has been quite different.

I know piling on government is the "in" thing to do in many circles now days.

[Richard]

From permitting to build new structures, do work in historic districts, resolve issues with DWSD, I've never had an issue. Granted it's all been in the last 10 years or so, but my experience working with city Gov has been quite different.

I know piling on government is the "in" thing to do in many circles now days.

That works if you are used to dealing with them,do it enough and you can figure out how and who to deal with.

We switched to a pretty much internet based government where I live.

To pull a roofing permit it took me 10 minutes online,for inspections we upload a picture of work completed and never even see the inspector.

For the process

Remove existing materials- call for inspection
Repair rotted wood - call for inspection
install underlayment- call for inspection
Install shingles - call for finial inspection

It was taking people over 30 days just to re roof their house.

Now they just do everything online unless you are building new.

The old days was easier,you just gave your personal representative an envelope and the next day had all of your permits.

For the average homeowner or somebody that does not deal with the city everyday,it can be a nightmare and a lot of the city personal have the same attitude with people as the commercial only suppliers have with non commercial customers.

They expect the homeowner to have the same knowledge as a regular and most instead of guidance become rude about it.

But that is how it works in pretty much every city,it’s like pulling teeth.

Its not considered anti government,it’s their job,but then again allowing the government to hold ultimate rule over the people seems to be the “in” thing lately also.

When I looked at doing a project up there,they told me they would assign a personal representative within,in order to ease the process,there are also X city personal that you can hire that handles it all for you with big projects.

But if they understood that everything worked as it should,you would not need those other options in the first place,the other options are there to circumvent a poorly run system.

Thats not anti government,I noticed there were a few dedicated employees within city government and that would be who I would single out for assistance,everybody else is just dead weight collecting a check.

They are not there to bust peoples balls,they are paid by the taxpayers to assist them through the process but some of them act like they are in a position of power and it goes to their head.

I am anti government,when the government forgets who they actually serve and work for.

[JBMcB]

From permitting to build new structures, do work in historic districts, resolve issues with DWSD, I've never had an issue. Granted it's all been in the last 10 years or so, but my experience working with city Gov has been quite different.

That's great to hear. You are one of the only people I've heard from recently who has had a good experience interacting with the city. Hopefully this indicates they are fixing longstanding issues in their public-facing offices. My coworker bailed out of the city roughly 8 years ago, so your experience is promising.

I know piling on government is the "in" thing to do in many circles now days.

Some people call it piling on. Some call it holding government officials accountable.

[K-slice]

Some people call it piling on. Some call it holding government officials accountable.

All for accountability, thing is, one side of isle wants us to be caught in this vicious cycle of complaining about inadequate gov service, and in response cutting gov and privatization of services. As if any entity has ever become more useful/responsive/adequate by starving it of resources.

I go out of my way to share good experiences when I have them to change perception as much as I'm able to.

[Richard]

I go out of my way to share good experiences when I have them to change perception as much as I'm able to.

Which is the reason to discuss,but in order to track progress and system improvements,it’s more informative to know if your experiences are more recent,my experiences and the other one posted was from a time years ago,if it is still the same,it might be time to revisit things in a more productive way.