[Alberta's Child]

I just read some details of the Eighth Circuit Court’s opinion in favor of the municipal government. Their decision is based on a more nuanced but very concrete legal analysis than a simple foreclosure.

It seems that a government foreclosure process under Minnesota law is unique. There are many points during the foreclosure process when the property owner can intervene on his or her behalf to remedy their default — and they are even given an opportunity to pay off the debt under a 5 or 10 year period.

At one specific point in the process — after the debtor has refused to avail herself of any of these remedies — it ceases to be a “foreclosure” and effectively becomes a property abandonment process. The Minnesota statutes governing the abandonment process date back to the 1880s when it was apparently common for farmers to abandon their Minnesota farms and move west to the Dakota territories and settle on new land given to them under the Homestead Act. The property was considered abandoned because the Minnesota courts and government authorities had no recourse and no mechanism for even contacting these people.

In this case, the Federal courts simply ruled that the foreclosure/abandonment process was governed by Minnesota law. Importantly, the courts ruled that the sale of the condo was not a violation of the “Takings Clause” for a clear legal/technical reason — in that the debtor no longer had any ownership claim on the property after they passed the specific point in the Minnesota process where it went from a “foreclosure” to an “abandonment.”

[marktwain]

Abandoned property becomes a serious problem when there is no mechanism to transfer the title to another person.

But Minnesota had a clear means to transfer title. They also had clear knowledge of who had the title and was not paying the taxes.

You are correct. This is all about what the limits of the Minnesota law is.

Many state's law is the excess value goes to the former property owner.

[Gaffer]

My answer to that ‘wizened’ decree by the eighth is “just where in the hell are there any land-rush homesteads available and which one did this woman hitch up her buckboard and horse and make the rush to grab, ‘abandoning’ her titled property?

Democrats love to talk about our Constitution as a ‘living, evolving’ document and then turn around and use lame excuses like this to allow leftist government to use its power to seize private property without benefit of having a complete claim against the entire value of the property.

I’m not buying it.