I'm suprised foreclosures are rising so rapidly in Erie... the whole "foreclosure crisis" that's sweeping places like Ohio and Michigan has mostly been a "non-issue" in the Commonwealth... and considering the rock-bottom housing prices in the Erie area... exotic financing schemes have probably not proliferating... the Erie area did buck the national trend of value depreciation with a 4% growth rate last year
http://www.goerie.com/apps/pbcs.dll/...WS02/803180334
Bracing for blight
As foreclosures rise, city worries about more dilapidated properties
BY STEVEN M. SWEENEY
steven.sweeney@timesnews.com
The peach-colored house and the green house in this photo in the 1200 block of Buffalo Road in Erie are abandoned. The city is in the process of acquiring the properties so they can be demolished. (Christopher Millette / Erie Times-News)
Every house has a story.
The story is about to change, permanently, for the ramshackle place at 1205 Buffalo Road.
The city of Erie officials want it demolished.
The house was fine when Raymond and Betty Slater lived there. But since she died in 2002 and he died in 2004, nature has taken over.
The green house is buckling under its own weight, with pieces of siding and roof coming off. The windows are poorly boarded, and thick ivy branchesladder their way up the north wall.
"The city's been dealing with code violations there for years. It's been declared blighted," said John Vahey, the city's demolition coordinator. "It doesn't take too long in this climate for things to go downhill."
Blighted. Under state definitions, the house has utilities shut off inside, more than two years of unpaid property tax liens, uncorrected housing-code violations and more problems.
The house at 1205 Buffalo Road has plenty of company.
As the economy tightens throughout the nation -- and Erie County -- foreclosure proceedings are on the rise, and local officials fear more homeowners might be inclined to skip town and let the city to take care of their properties.
In the past six years, the city has listed 220 properties and vacant lots as blighted, with properties going off the list and more coming on from time to time. Officials fear the list could soon grow.
"We're looking at a wave of these coming into the area soon," said Kim Green, the city's economic and community development director, at a recent committee meeting on blighted properties.
The number of foreclosed properties put up for sheriff's sale in Erie County reached a record 716 in 2007, up from 636 in 2006 and 520 in 2003, according to the Sheriff's Office.
The number of foreclosure actions filed in Erie County Court increased to 753 in 2007 from 360 in 2000. And another 179 properties are the subject of foreclosure filings so far this year.
But those numbers pale in comparison to the more than 4,000 potential properties that Erie County may sell for back taxes in any given year.
At a sheriff's sale is when a property is sold because the owner can't afford the mortgage. A tax sale is when a property is sold because the owner can't afford the taxes.
The problem with most of the blight in the city isn't the grade of the decay or the amount of it, officials said. More problematic, they said, are the hurdles the city must overcome to get control of properties and correct the blight.
"Tax-sale laws need updating desperately," said Steve Letzelter, Erie County's revenue and tax claim director. "Somehow, if the state could find a way to make it more current, more applicable -- a lot cleaner, a lot simpler."
As it stands, properties can be put up for Erie County-sponsored tax sale only after two years of uncollected back property taxes. But property owners can set back the auction clock by paying up.
And property owners who stand to receive hefty fines for city housing-code violations can get favorable rulings from judges by feigning to make improvements, some officials said.
"The classic category of people are the absentee landlords who have milked the last bit of value out of these properties yet there's no way you can come after their house in Scranton, or wherever," said John Elliott, executive director of the Erie Redevelopment Authority.
Elliott said the authority attempts to take the worst of the blighted properties by eminent domain.
But even then, he said, state laws favor landowners -- even absentee landowners.
"It costs several thousand dollars for each filing, and the Redevelopment Authority had done about 40 filings a year for two years," he said. "The process is very involved."
Elliott said he's looking forward to upcoming state House legislation that would give local governments powers similar to private banks, which can start foreclosure proceedings within months.
Changes in laws would also give governments and nonprofit community development organizations the power to fix code violations and make improvements with the possibility of selling the parcel to a new neighbor.
But even with the power, few groups have the money to spend.
The city's funding for blighted house redevelopment comes through the Community Development Block Grant program.
"That budget has been cut every year by the Bush administration," Elliott said.
The amount of CDBG funds for the 2008-2009 year for the city of Erie dropped from $4.4 million to $3.6 million, with accompanying cuts to demolition and rehabilitation projects alike, the city said.
City code enforcement officers talk in terms of worth and value as they try to figure out which houses could be saved -- if the owner spent enough money.
Vahey, the demolition coordinator, said he heard about estimates to replace the plumbing and electrical wiring for a two-story, multifamily brick house on East 12th Street.
"It was $57,000," he said of only the plumbing and electrical repairs. "You're looking at $200,000 alone to get that in shape."
Vahey wants the building torn down.
But long before the property got to that point, it progressed through multiple steps of decay and blight recorded in a thick file at City Hall. The other approximately 220 blighted properties and lots followed the same path as well.
Missing gutters, unmowed grass and broken windows are all things that, left untreated, can start the process of certifying a property as blighted by triggering violation notices from city code-enforcement officers.
The city likes to work with homeowners to get minor violations fixed before they become major issues. Andy Zimmerman, the city's manager of code enforcement, said many people comply.
The few who don't are the problem.
"How can I explain it. ... People. There's slum landlords that will just bleed a property. They won't invest anything into it," Zimmerman said.
"We run across people that buy them and own them and they don't do any maintenance and don't do anything to a point where they just walk away from it."
A house's decline
In 1995, Betty Slater, the owner of the house at 1205 Buffalo Road, near Brandes Avenue, welcomed changes to her neighborhood.
She told the Erie Times-News that she bid good riddance to a nuisance bar across the street, the Twenty Grand Cafe, which was forced to close the same year.
Bar patrons would break beer bottles on her lawn, Slater said at the time.
Three years later, in 1998, Betty Slater and her husband, Raymond, picked up after a fire that started in their house's basement and charred the inside.
They had little time left in the house. City officials said they spent their last days in a nursing home.
Betty Slater, 77, died in 2002.
Raymond Slater died in 2004. He was 91.
No one has lived in their 88-year-old house since.
A half-dozen blighted houses and three city blocks separate Jim Black's place from the Slaters' old home. He looks at the Slaters' house and one just to the east in disgust.
"It's a lot of time and money you spend trying to make your house look presentable," Black said. "You can do all the work in the world you want to on your own house, but if the guy next to you doesn't mow his lawn, it's for naught."
Black said he tried to sell his house 12 years ago and couldn't.
He said he doubts anyone would want to buy it now, with the economy in bad shape. And he doesn't dare rent it out.
"You're going to get those kind of tenants."
What kind?
"Tenants you don't want there to begin with," he said.
Black looked at the Slaters' house, then glanced around the neighborhood, before answering another question.
"My neighborhood? Working class. There is a couple of hard-working people there doing the best they can," he said.
Black paused and looked at the Slaters' house again.
"With the abandoned house in there, it looks like a ghetto."
STEVEN SWEENEY can be reached at 870-1675 or by e-mail.
The problem with tax sales
Each year, Erie County can sell up to 4,000 at tax sales to collect back taxes.
Steve Letzelter, Erie County's revenue and tax claim director, said most offices don't keep track of how many properties are eventually sold. He said many of the property owners who owe back real estate taxes end up paying by the time that the tax auction starts every September, so only about 350 properties make it to auction and about 40 sell.
After the auction, the remaining properties go to a judicial sale, where a local court wipes all liens and taxes clear from the properties. Letzelter said then the county sells 50 to 75 more properties.
If not sold by the county or retained by the owners, the properties end up in the repository -- what another development official called the "purgatory" of unwanted properties. Properties could stay there for years.
"It takes so long. Start to finish you could have several years involved in the process," said Letzelter, who said banks can foreclose on houses more quickly. "Third parties can enforce a collection a lot sooner than I can."
...
on a sad note unrelated to development... Meadville's Vicki Van Meter has died at the young age of 26... she gained international fame in 1993 as an 11 year old when she piloted planes across the country and across the Atlantic... I'm the same age as her and remember her exploits vividly... how tragic
http://www.goerie.com/apps/pbcs.dll/...=2008803180333
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