Quote Originally Posted by Fnemecek View Post
The City of Detroit.



The City of Detroit.



You're assuming that the owners can't afford to keep a place up. I did a title search for the worst properties in the Warrendale neighborhood. Approximately 60% of them are owned by banks and other institutional investors.

Given the volume of problem properties, one code enforcement officer should be able to write approximately $1.25 million - $1.5 million in fines per year.

A code enforcement officer plus a couple of paralegals and an attorney, with everything that they need to do their job, should cost us $175 - $225,000 per year. One would thus only need an 18% collection rate to make the program pay for itself.

Since some many of the offenders have assets that are well into the billions of dollars, an 18% collection rate is extremely doable.
So the city is going to write a bunch of violations and put leins on the properties owned by the banks with hope of collecting. I doubt that would phase them at all - the vast majority of those Warrendale properties aren't going to come back to life, they're too far gone. What you're going to be left with eventually, is a vacant 40 foot residential lot.