casiepierce

The thing that keeps bothering me is that when the City uses SAFE, like say, for things like car washes on MLK or for high-crime apartments in Vickery Meadow, as examples, it's not the residents or closing the properties that are targets. The idea is to get properties into compliance. Or sue the property owner. Most of the SAFE cases- and I'm not saying that this site was a SAFE case- usually get held up in court for years and years and then the owners end up paying fines as their costs of doing business.

Mobile home parks are different from apartments because it's both the tenant and the owner who are responsible for repairs. I played this game once with my next-door neighbor, who rents from his slovenly uncle. The uncle told Juan that if he painted the trim and the eaves on the house, that he would reduce his rent. So Juan started painting. The next month his uncle charged him full rent, so Juan stopped painting. He complained to me that his uncle was a slumlord. So I offered to help Juan and I started pounding on code enforcement and they started giving Juan notices of violation, which he passed on to his uncle, since Juan doesn't own the house. His uncle told him to paint the house and Juan told him, "not without rent reduction", there was some back-and-forth and Juan ended up buying his own home and moving out.

So, are these things usually worked out in advance between a renter and landlord? Is there anything illegal about requiring that your tenant maintain your property? With a moblie home park, its the tenant who owns the structure. So, I would think that code enforcememnt should have been giving notices to the trailer home owners, and not to the owner of the land. And if they come into compliance, good and if not, then they pay their fine and they keep getting hammered with notices of violation.

So, here come the politics of it all. Why did code just start enforcing violations? Do we really know how many calls were made before last year? Who was calling in violations, if anyone at all? It may well be that nobody gave two hoots about code violations at the park until very recently. I suspect that's the case. But I'm also skeptical of the good folks at the Enclave. They have a serious case of NIMBY (ask me about that later...) And why was the push to bankrupt the owner of the land? (again, not sure who is responsible for what on mobile home parks, but I would think that a structure must be maintained by the owner of the structure, and not the owner of the property.) There is something stinky about this whole mess and I think that if Crosset were doing something fraudulent then he needs to be culpable for his part, but to think that this place hes been sitting quietly for something like 40 years, it's not lax code or bad landlording that's cooking the pot here. It's something else and it's most certainly political. And I don't believe that Chaney engineered it- he's not smart enough to plot an elaborate land-grab; I think someone approached him with an idea of how to get rid of it and he played his part very well. One day, we might know who has been pulling the strings. But there is definately more here than meets the eye and Crosset is as much a "victim" in this whole mess (because that's what it is) as the folks who have to relocate, and I say that because of the hokey stuff going on with code enforcement.