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Many of the vacant lots Boston is selling for affordable housing once had affordable homes on them - that the city foreclosed on and tore down

By adamg on Mon, 07/29/2024 - 10:07am

GBH reports on why Boston has so many vacant lots in neighborhoods such as Roxbury, Dorchester and Mattapan that the city can now sell at low cost to developers - because of policies under which the city would quickly move to foreclose on homeowners in arrears on property taxes rather than try to help them out.


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Comments

By Will LaTulippe on Mon, 07/29/2024 - 10:28am.

City of Boston: "You owe us $5,000."

Also city of Boston: "Let's wreck the place where you ply your trade so that you can't make the money to pay your bill."

Also city of Boston: "You owe us five grand plus interest, so we're picking someone else as a winner over you by selling the spot we took from you for $400.

These kids got boned. I feel bad for them. That's a hell of a property to not have anymore. There's a 900K house over by UVM in Burlington that's no longer in my family because my poor grandmother had ALS, and had to reverse mortgage it to pay for her care for the last two decades of her life.

I'm also not letting this guy off the hook entirely, either. Maybe don't father nine kids if you can't make the expected contribution to society for privately owning some of our community's land. That behavior is an embarrassment to all men.

I don't love taxation, but if we're going to have it, that's precisely a guy who should have been paying. May the land become housing for someone who isn't greedy.

We're getting a second Trump presidency: Why vote for the Democrats who've established that they're going to screw you, when you can vote for the wild card who might not?

(He will screw you, and I won't vote for him, but his voters don't believe or know that).

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By Frelmont on Mon, 07/29/2024 - 10:40am.

Never question our developer overlords.

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By Waquiot on Mon, 07/29/2024 - 10:46pm.

The City foreclosed on the property in 1992. That's 32 years ago.

It sucks for the family, but let's not pretend that the city wasn't going to heck in a handbasket at the time, and that there weren't a bunch of properties that people were walking away from, and that the city needed revenue at the time. At the end of the day, the owners stopped paying the taxes and got burned by that decision. These kind of property takings were and are common.*

That said, selling the property for less than the property tax due is a bad move.

*I believe that now when a jurisdiction sells a property in arrears of taxes, the jurisdiction has to hand over any proceeds in excess of the amount due to the previous property holder, which is fair.

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Voting closed 16