Detroit blight to be tracked by law
Robert Klein, Founder and Chairman of Safeguard Properties, was featured in a Free Press article that discusses Detroit’s recently passed vacant property registration ordinance.
Detroit blight to be tracked by law
Owners of vacant homes must now register
Detroit is battling its ongoing problem of vacant homes and blight with a new law that holds property owners more accountable.
The Detroit City Council approved the Vacant Property Registration ordinance this month, joining hundreds of municipalities nationwide, including Grand Rapids, West Bloomfield and Dearborn, with similar policies.
The ordinance — sponsored by Councilman Kwame Kenyatta with support from Karla Henderson, the city’s Building Safety Engineering director — requires the owners of vacant properties, from individual owners to lenders, to register them with the city for a $25 per structure annual fee.
The registry is expected to allow city officials to better track property owners, to consistently levy fines and to hold owners accountable for their properties before and after they become blighted. The city already required rental homes to be registered.
“We do know that there are some good property owners,” Henderson said. “We’ll leave them alone and start going after the ones that aren’t.”
In March, the Southeast Michigan Council of Governments reported that there were 6,448 new foreclosures in Detroit from August 2009 to February 2010, bringing the number of foreclosed properties in the city to 18,993 by February. That’s in addition to thousands of vacant homes that already dot the city.
The fines for failing to register a vacant property are expected to range from $250 to $500 per citation, per property. The fines for failing to maintain a vacant property according to city codes will range, depending on the size of the structure, from $500 to $3,000 per citation, per property.
Lenders and real estate agents who initially bristled at the extra work these ordinances could create are reluctantly accepting the trend.
Carol Trowell, president of the Detroit Association of Realtors, said banks and realtors are more proactive in maintaining properties, which helps the market.
Robert Klein, founder and board chair of the Cleveland-based Safeguard Properties, which maintains properties for lenders nationwide, including in Detroit, said there’s a legitimate need for cities to have ordinances such as this but said the lack of uniformity presents a hardship for the industry because requirements vary from city to city.
Safeguard maintains thousands of homes in Detroit, according to its Web site, but also has about a dozen listed on the city’s Web site targeting blight.
“There’s hundreds and thousands of properties that are vacant,” said Klein, speaking generally about vacant homes. “The vast majority are being properly maintained.”
To view the online article, please click here
About Safeguard
Safeguard Properties is the largest privately held field services company in the country. Located in Cleveland, Ohio and founded in 1990 by Robert Klein, Safeguard has grown from a regional preservation company with a few employees and a handful of contractors performing services in the Midwest, to a national company with approximately 800 employees. Safeguard is supported by a nationwide network of subcontractors able to perform any requested superintendence, preservation, and maintenance functions, as well as numerous ancillary services in the U.S., the Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico.
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