Cities Being Forced To Bear Costs Of Foreclosed Houses

Posted in Foreclosure Homes, September 11th, 2008 |

Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky are under siege being overwhelmed with hundreds of foreclosed units. The cities are being forced to bear costs of maintaining or demolishing these foreclosed properties. Banks from outside the state, who are the legal owners, have abandoned the houses.
Cincinnati has boarded up some houses and ordered the demolishing of others. Hundreds of other houses have been notified about violation of building codes. The owners of these foreclosed units are banks. They owe the city about $201,237 pertaining to fees for inspection, barricading and demolishing. Courts summon them for these violations related to the foreclosure actions taken but the banks hardly ever respond. As a result the municipalities are hard pressed to oversee the work of trimming overgrown grasses, winterizing and boarding up deserted houses from vagrants, drug peddlers and prostitutes. Abandoned houses bring down the market prices of property in the entire neighbourhood.
For the police, fire fighters and building inspectors the ordeal of these vacant foreclosed houses has become tiresome and expensive – to say the least.
In Spring Grove Village the police caught 40-year-old Christopher Hunley just has he was breaking into an empty house. Hunley was after the copper pipes and had to be charged for trespassing with a motive to vandalize and steal. The problem arose when the accusers could not find the owner to testify that Hunley did not have a permission to enter the premises. From the Hamilton County records Fannie Mae was the owner. But the latter objected to it saying that this was an error. The prosecutors finally tracked down Washington Mutual as the bonafide owners but the bank could not arrange for any representative to go down to Cincinnati to testify. Finally with time running out and Hunley in jail the prosecutors had no alternative but to accuse of misdemeanor and set him free!
Fannie Mae is among the worst offending lenders who have foreclosed on borrowers, evicted occupants and then let the property stand abandoned and derelict. The others are Deutsche Bank of Frankfurt and the ABN and Amro group of banks from the Netherlands. The banks state that they are doing their best to look after their foreclosed houses. Gabrielle Harrison of Fannie Mae said, “We are not perfect” and it may well happen that it causes them to overlook one property here and another there. Meanwhile indirectly the city pays the price in an indirect way for the blight of foreclosures.