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.