When the paint started peeling off the walls and every window had been broken, the neighbors had had enough. Bad enough that the homeowner never – literally never – cut the grass and had not bothered to repair a broken door that beckoned invitingly to would-be vandals, but it was dragging down the property values in a neighborhood with an average assessed value of $113,000. The neighborhood didn’t feel like it could quietly tolerate the mess next door any longer, so they posted a sign to try and shame the homeowner into caring for the home. It reads: “Bank Owned Blight brought to you by Bank of America.”
In Pennsylvania and all over the country, neighborhood blight is a real and omnipresent problem. However, when big lenders are the homeowners, it’s hard to see how to justify the neglect. In South Buffalo, city employees are currently mowing lawns of bank-owned homes, something one council member thinks is pretty ridiculous, given that “we’re mowing the lawns of properties owned by multi-billion-dollar banks that took TARP money.” Thus far, the only response to attempts to embarrass or shame the bank has been that BofA informed the city that it actually had transferred the property to HUD, something the HUD holds no record of[1].
Of course, it should be noted that not every BofA-owned home is going to seed. In fact, in Chicago, BofA is planning to donate 150 bank-owned homes to a non-profit community investment organization in an effort to fight neighborhood blight and get those properties into the hands of an organization that can maintain and ultimately make use of them[2]. It also is involved in funding local demolitions of properties that are beyond repair. Do you think this is a good way to deal with all of these vacant foreclosures, or should lenders wait to initiate the foreclosure process until they have a plan for the property?
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[1] http://www.buffalonews.com/city/article492262.ece
[2] http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/178026/20110711/chicago-foreclosure-bank-of-america-donate-properties.htm
