What’s Wrong With Providence, Rhode Island?
*coming – history of housing crisis context of city economic, unemployment, and housing problems
Many barriers are in place preventing the citizen or government initiatives from fixing a wide swath of houses and homeowners. Simply put, even with rehab loans and down payment assistance in place, procurement and reconstruction of most all the city’s rotting homes presents a losing financial situation.
As they stand, banks, investors, and even absentee owners of abandonded, vacant, blighted, and foreclosed properties are still, in many cases, asking way too much money for houses needing expensive repairs. To that end, up to date, it appears city fines and enforcement of existing housing codes and regulations are vital to either:
- motivate owners to bring properties back up to code
- turn over properties for lower prices
- seize properties whose owners ignore fines and violations (read more in the wiki)
Without pressure on existing owners/banks/lenders/investors of abandonded homes, most, if not all, will continue to sit and wait, and do nothing to restore neighborhood vitality, or prevent street level rot and protection from squatters, blight, and stripping of vital housing systems (copper, heating, metals etc.) In order to create sound public policy that emphasizes reconstruction and respects property rights, municipalities across the nation need address the following issues of:
- paper-based record keeping
- home ownership data; it’s many times too hard to determine the actual deed holder of properties, especially in cases of multiple lenders/packagers/loan servicers of (now) “toxic” mortgage backed “securities”
- absentee owners/banks (see above)
- lax code enforcement
- lax court proceedings (liens, fines, seizures)
- irresponsible asking prices of properties needing repair
- existence of markets for stolen copper/home systems
To that end, legislators and public heads have suggested various measures to increase pressure on owners of vacant and rotting homes, yet few, on any national, state, or city level have made it into law. For instance, Providence, Rhode Island Mayor David Cicilline suggested 10% yearly tax on vacant properties (in addition to existing property taxes), but few bills or ordinances like this have actually been signed into legislation.