Originally Posted by
Hamtragedy
I've usually thought that alot of arsons are insurance jobs. Near the Lasky, across the Davison on Gallagher [[just south of Victoria), 4 houses in a row burned in one weekend last November. I figured some scum-bucket slumlord investor bought a bunch of cheap houses next-door to each other, and when the market tanked, figured he'd just burn them. The fifth house burned two weeks later. All the houses were identical, cute craftsman types with brick front porches.
The rate of arsons in my particular neighborhood the last couple years has been, no pun intended, alarming. There is a fire at least once a week where I wake up in the middle of the night because I smell smoke, and I always check around the house to make sure it's not my house that's burning. A look out the back door into the clouded Detroit streetlights puts my mind at ease, if only temporarily. Some houses, I'm sure, probably deserve to get burned, and I'll bet there's someone on the block who is so tired of seeing the eyesore, they just throw a match in the opened back door in the middle of the night, and the neighbors secretly rejoice.
But I always wondered: what happens when someone burns a house trying to collect insurance payouts? How often are they detected, then prosecuted? If someone burns a house in the ghetto and no one's around to care, do they serve time?