Posted on 02/15/2017 2:39:42 PM PST by nickcarraway
Charlestown can’t seize the properties, so it’s citing them to force them to sell.
Members of a small, low-income community in Indiana are discovering that state-level protections that make it hard for cities to seize their property may not be enough. When city leaders decide to get into bed with private developers, there are all sorts of ways for cronyism to threaten the property rights of owners.
When we imagine how a city or town seizes private property from citizens in order to hand it over to developers for special projects, we often think about eminent domain. Governments can force citizens to sell them their property (often for much less than it's worth on the market). While eminent domain was supposed to be used solely for public works projects (roads, schools, et cetera), the infamous Kelo v. City of New London Supreme Court decision set a legal precedent allowing governments to use it to hand over property to private developers for big projects.
Some states that objected to that decision passed new laws to restrict how eminent domain may be used within their borders. Indiana was one of them.
So property rights-minded citizens might be surprised to hear that the mayor and city officials of Charlestown, Indiana, a rural community with a population of less than 8,000, are trying to arrange to hand over hundreds of homes to a private developer. He's not using eminent domain to do so. Instead, the city stands accused of deliberately finding excuses to burden the community's residents with thousands of dollars of fines that will be waived if they sell their properties to the private developer.
The property-rights-defending lawyers of the Institute for Justice (you may recall their efforts to stop abuse of civil asset forfeiture) are stepping in to represent several property owners in this community and are seeking an injunction to stop the city from trying to use code violation citations to essentially force property transfers.
Within Charlestown is a low-income neighborhood named Pleasant Ridge, full of working-class folks and retirees. According to the Institute for Justice, Mayor Bob Hall decided in 2014 that he wanted to get rid of the houses there and replace it with a more upscale planned community with fancier homes and retail options. But he needed to get rid of the houses (and the people within them) first. Starting in 2016, residents and property owners of Pleasant Ridge discovered Charlestown had a nasty tool to try to get rid of them. City officials started looking for any excuse to cite property owners for code violations. When you're looking at low-income neighborhoods full of working people and retirees, there are likely to be plenty. The Institute for Justice described how it played out:
Beginning in the summer of 2016, the city unleashed a torrent of code enforcement targeted specifically at the Pleasant Ridge neighborhood. City officials began performing exterior inspections of properties in Pleasant Ridge and mailing citations to the owners. So far, this campaign has primarily targeted landlords who own multiple rental properties, rather than smaller landlords and owner-occupied houses.
The citations state that the owner accrues penalties of $50 per violation, per day. Multiple citations are issued per property, which means that a single property will begin accumulating hundreds of dollars in fines each day. The fines can be for things as minor as a torn screen, weeds taller than eight inches or chipped paint. In many cases, the fines begin the day the citation was issued, not the day the owner received it. So owners can easily be on the hook for thousands of dollars in fines before they even receive notice, and the fines continue to accrue until the owner is able to repair the property.
The city knows that many of the residents cannot afford to pay these exorbitant fines, leaving them only two options: Sell their home to Neace Ventures or raze it to the ground to have the fines waived. The scheme would be bad enough if Neace were offering fair market value for the homes, but it is not. The inspections regime has been a windfall for Neace. Not only has it compelled more than 140 homeowners to sell—it has also forced them to sell at a considerable loss. Most of the homes have a tax assessed value of between $25,000 and $35,000, and they would be worth much more if the city had not caused the market to collapse by announcing in 2014 that it was going to destroy every home.
One grotesque little detail from the Institute for Justice is that that the city probably would have to pay the citizens more for the property if it did use eminent domain. But this nasty little system lets the private developer get the property on the cheap.
One of the plaintiffs the Institute for Justice is representing, a neighborhood association that owned a duplex in the neighborhood, had racked up almost $9,000 in fines due to citations for a bunch of minor violations. The fines bankrupted the association and resulted in them selling the property. (CORRECTION: The fines have not bankrupted the association yet, but they will if they are not thrown out by the courts.)
The city attorney for Charlestown told The Courier-Journal that the city is acting completely within the law with their fines. But the Institute for Justice claims that Charlestown is violating state law for the exorbitant amount of the fines and violating its own code by immediately fining property owners rather than waiting for after providing a written order for repairs and determining that they've refused to cooperate. That's because the city doesn't actually want them to cooperate. They want the residents to sell their homes and get out. The mayor said as much in a Facebook post last fall trying to discourage property owners from repairing their homes.
Read the lawsuit here and watch the Institute for Justice's video about Pleasant Ridge below:
Been there, done that with the Jersey Shore - Christie’s only excellent achievement as a lawyer.
So sad.
This is why we elected Trump.
How does that have to do Trump? He was doing this sort of stuff in Atlantic City and was extremely pro-Kelo. Just last week he said he was in favor of asset forfeiture.
This type of thing could easily boomerang on the mayor and owner of Neace. Perhaps very violently.
This is completely legal, the Supreme Court said so. /s
It would seem this violates equal treatment under the eyes of the law.
You shouldn’t be able to focus on strictly one community in a city to levy fines you aren’t anywhere else.
Code violations are generally something that must be fixed before the sales of a property. These are much easier to facilitate because a lot of money changes hands and often equity will help bring the building back up to code.
Just out of the blue home inspections, especially internally on a whim aren’t seen all that often.
Apartment complexes are something different, but if an owner has been keeping pace with upkeep and hasn’t been guilty of abusing tenants, they aren’t generally inspected all that often.
Sounds like they have a mayor that desperately needs retirement. He and a good portion of the city council need to find other employment.
Developers and city council members all have addresses.
Just saying.
L
it will Boomerang the only time stuff like this works is when it is kept quiet. the city is probably in for a lot of litigation and if there is any proof of individuals on the city being connected to the developer things will even messier.
This all related to redevelopment of lands from the now-closed Charlestown Army Ammunition plant, tens of thousands of acres, and the New Ohio River Interstate 264 bridge, which opens this whole area up to access from Louisville.
Very High Dollars homes, river bluff homesites, etc, all less than a 15 minute drive from Downtown Louisville, Univ of Louisville, the Med Centers, UPS, etc.
Let me play debbil’s advocate here. Pleasant Ridge doesn’t sound so pleasant. In fact it reads like Pottersville.
“Many houses don’t have grounded wall outlets. Some have rotting wood foundations, siding hanging off like peeling paint. Front yards are sometimes treated like junkyards, or else overgrown with grasses three feet high. On one inspection, Jackson said he could see a child’s face through a window from outside and his legs through a hole in the wall.
The Gunnison homes were manufactured on an assembly line in New Albany in the 1940s and popped up in Pleasant Ridge within three days. Jackson said most don’t have foundations, though the Keiths dispute this claim.
“It was meant to be temporary housing. It’s outlived its 60 years beyond what it’s supposed to be,” Mayor Hall said. “It’s substandard housing.”
Kelly Druin moved to her rental unit on Marshall Drive about a year ago out of necessity when her Sellersburg home was repossessed. It serves its purpose now, she said, but she’s not comfortable. Druin pointed to structural and electrical issues, such as unsafe outlets and mold.
“It’s almost like decorating a crumbled up cake,” she said. “It’s nice on the outside but really awful on the inside.”
Some rental properties are maintained better than others.
Tammy Burden, who’s rented her house for the last eight years, said her landlord responds well to her maintenance complaints. She treats the property like its her own, too.
“I like fixing it up,” she said. “[My landlord] always compliments what I do to it and says, ‘It’s your house.’”
The city also ascribes high crime to an increasingly transient population. If people aren’t connected and invested to their communities, it creates problems, Hall said.
According to numbers from the city, Pleasant Ridge was responsible for 42.8 percent of all the city’s disturbance cases, 26.1 percent of all theft cases and 35 percent of domestic cases between 2005 and 2014.
The neighborhood has been home to three meth labs, 50 to 60 controlled substance buyouts and one murder-for-hire case.”
Awfully close to home
Oh, go away you never trumper. He offered the woman a million dollars. In Asbury Park they were offered close to nothing for their properties. Educate yourself.
Abuse of power under the color of authority = prison.
So you do believe the government can take anyone’s property away on a whim?
No, of course not and I didn’t say that - I said the opposite. And if you’ll remember, Trump lost the case.
I don’t want to have some long back and forth with you. You have your opinion, I have mine.
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