Quote Originally Posted by JBMcB View Post
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.
That was an eye opening post! It sounds like trying to get the government plumber out to fix something in a Moscow apartment circa 1980. Government can to things right but when agencies are not functional, what's the alternative? The first thing that comes to mind are management firms that manage various functions of landlords' needs. They can screen and find renters, send in crews to repair and improve apartments between renters, provide tradesmen, etc.. I wonder if it would be possible for management companies to squeeze permits out of languid and dysfunctional licensing departments with legal bribes, lawsuits or other incentives. It would free redevelopers to upgrade Detroit instead of standing in lines and writing letters.