All Boarded Up - dealing with abandoned neighborhoods and trolling pillagers

[groovedaddy]

TONY BRANCATELLI, A CLEVELAND CITY COUNCILMAN, yearns for signs that something like normal life still exists in his ward. Early one morning last fall, he called me from his cellphone. He sounded unusually excited. He had just visited two forlorn-looking vacant houses that had been foreclosed more than a year ago. They sat on the same lot, one in front of the other. Both had been frequented by squatters, and Brancatelli had passed by to see if they had been finally boarded up. They hadn’t. But while there he noticed with alarm what looked like a prone body in the yard next door. As he moved closer, he realized he was looking at an elderly woman who had just one leg, lying on the ground. She was leaning on one arm and, with the other, was whacking at weeds with a hatchet and stuffing the clippings into a cardboard box for garbage pickup. “Talk about fortitude,” he told me. In a place like Cleveland, hope comes in small morsels.

The next day, I went with Brancatelli to visit Ada Flores, the woman who was whacking at the weeds. She is 81, and mostly gets around in a wheelchair. Flores is a native Spanish speaker, and her English was difficult to understand, especially above the incessant barking of her caged dog, Tuffy. But the story she told Brancatelli was familiar to him. Teenagers had been in and out of the two vacant houses next door, she said, and her son, who visits her regularly, at one point boarded up the windows himself. “Are they going to tear them down?” she asked. Brancatelli crossed himself. “I hope so,” he mumbled.

Prayer and sheer persistence are pretty much all Brancatelli has to go on these days. Cleveland is reeling from the foreclosure crisis. There have been roughly 10,000 foreclosures in two years. For all of 2007, before it was overtaken by sky-high foreclosure rates in parts of California, Nevada and Florida, Cleveland’s rate was among the highest in the country. (It’s now 24th among metropolitan areas.) Vacant houses are not a new phenomenon to the city. Ravaged by the closing of American steel mills, Cleveland has long been in decline. With fewer manufacturing jobs to attract workers, it has lost half its population since 1960. Its poverty rate is one of the highest in the nation. But in all those years, nothing has approached the current scale of ruin.

And in December, just when local officials thought things couldn’t get worse, Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland, posted a record number of foreclosure filings. The number of empty houses is so staggeringly high that no one has an accurate count. The city estimates that 10,000 houses, or 1 in 13, are vacant. The county treasurer says it’s more likely 15,000. Most of the vacant houses are owned by lenders who foreclosed on the properties and by the wholesalers who are now sweeping in to pick up houses in bulk, as if they were trading in baseball cards.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/magazine/08Foreclosure-t.html?th&emc=th

[jwirr]

1. Went with my son-in-law to look at houses for sale yesterday. We

looked at 6 houses with only one still lived in. Most are foreclosures. The banks are losing even more money this way. The houses were selling for from $40,000 to $65,000. Most are nice houses. We are in Northern Minnesota.

[groovedaddy]

2. I saw a segment on the national news of one the big networks that said in Detroit

the average home sale price is around $12,000!!! They interviewed a woman who bought a house for $1,600. Can this be true?

[HooptieWagon]

4. I heard median home price in Detroit was $7500

But there are no jobs, and the low property values probably mean a low tax base for schools, law enforcement, fire, and infrastructure. However, there's got to be a large labor pool there for any corp that wants to bring jobs from overseas back to the US.

[groovedaddy]

5. "bring jobs from overseas back to the US"... Now there's a concept for you!

All this crap that has gone on just demonstrates how "under assault" working people have been for so long now and how much we lack in organization to protect our own interests.

[Marrah_G]

6. I can't even imagine a house for that little.............

In the town I am in right now you still cannot find a single family house for less then 300,000.

Condos and townhouses run about 175k.

[kwassa]

3. A good article, but very depressing.

Many of these houses were very cheap before the economic downturn.

This is what happens when cities lose their economic support through business either leaving or going bankrupt. These are the rustbelt areas of the US. Detroit never saw the run-up in prices that the rest of the country saw in the early 2000s.

For any fans of HBO series "The Wire" (best TV series ever made) you will remember all the drug activity that operated out of "the vacants" in Baltimore, areas of abandoned, boarded-up row houses.

[JOEBIALEK]

7. Cleveland Ward 12

 
This letter is in response to the article "All Boarded
Up" written by ALEX KOTLOWITZ.
 
  During my time (1993 to 1999) as President of {the now
defunct} South East Clevelanders Together I worked to promote
community organizing in Ward 12 {Slavic Village} to address
quality of life issues {such as crime watch} in an aggressive
and systematic manner.  During that time, Ward 12 was
represented by current City of Cleveland Director of Building
and Housing Edward W. Rybka and the former Broadway Area
Housing Coalition nka Slavic Village Development headed then
by current Ward 12 Councilman Anthony Brancatelli.  Needless
to say, it did not take long for our organization to clash
with the former Councilman's housing group. Their primary
objective was to build and rehabilitate housing without any
real regard for the other issues affecting the residents and
business owners.  They too took the worst houses and put
people in them who had no ability {or desire} to pay.  In
fact, once they completed their first rehabilitation on any
given street that house soon became a haven for various social
malcontents.   Once the "single apple spoiled the
barrel" the remaining law-abiding residents moved thus
adding further to the catastrophe.   Now the Cleveland City
Council wants to extend the boundaries of Ward 12 beyond the
current boundaries of Ward 15 which {as luck would have it}
would include my residence.  Councilman Brian Cummins has been
a fine representative for Ward 15 but as for Ward 12
Councilman Anthony Brancatelli; he will do for Ward 15 {Old
Brooklyn} was he has and will continue to do for Ward 12
{Slavic Village}.