On Saturday I watched a car pull up to a vacant lot in North Corktown. Someone hopped out with a hammer and a foreclosure notice on a stake. The person went over to a particular lot, gave the stake a few whacks with the hammer, and walked back to the car. By the time they returned [[from across the street) with a camera, the staked notice had slumped over to about 3 o'clock. A few pictures were taken, and they made a three-point turn to head back the other direction. As they finished the three-point turn, the staked notice fell over the rest of the way.

Just now I took the dog for a longer-than-usual walk. I noticed easily half a dozen foreclosure notices at vacant lots or burned-down buildings. In the few cases where the stakes were still upright in the ground, the notice had blown off the stake. The others were just lying around.

To be fair, the notices are much more important to get right when dealing with structures than vacant land, and in those cases they seem to be more apt to staple or tie the notice to a fence/door/porch, and the occupants tend to remove the notice. But if you've already gone to the lengths of paying someone to make pointed stakes, and drive around with a hammer, the least they could do is get it more than an inch into the ground.