GREENFIELD — With about 30 dilapidated properties in the city, approximately six of which are owned by the city, Mayor Ginny Desorgher said she is hoping to sell city-owned real estate to buyers who can either repair them or take on the cost of demolishing them.
Economic Development Committee members, at a meeting last month, discussed whether to recommend that City Council declare dilapidated homes at 31 Cheapside St. and 7 River St. as surplus and allow Desorgher to sell them.
Discussing the two properties in an interview Wednesday, Desorgher explained that many of the dilapidated homes in the city pose a safety threat to residents and neighbors. She said a “significant number” of these properties have either been abandoned by their owners or are owned by deceased people.
“There are four of them that need to be demolished, one where there was a fire, one that’s been condemned for years, a couple with roofs caved in,” Desorgher explained. “The city owns them and our [Department of Public Works] doesn’t have the staff to be going by, maintaining and mowing the lawns.”
Desorgher also explained that while she has been outspoken in her viewpoint against the now illegal practice dubbed “home equity theft,” in which a municipality takes the entire equity of a home in the event of a tax lien foreclosure, she said a decent portion of city-owned properties have been abandoned for years and some of them were taken for unpaid taxes roughly a decade ago.
Responding to concerns At-Large City Councilor Wahab Minhas raised at the Economic Development Committee meeting that the city-owned properties were given to the city for tax takings, Desorgher initially reminded him that most of the former home owners were either dead, or had simply “walked away” from the property.
Precinct 2 City Councilor Rachel Gordon echoed the mayor’s remarks at the October meeting, explaining that while she is against the practice of home equity theft, takings of long-abandoned homes that have been tax negligent for decades are not comparable to that practice.
“I think we all agree that we don’t want the city taking people’s property in any case where it’s not absolutely necessary, but I do think that there are cases in which I understand the necessity,” Gordon said. “Unfortunately there are folks who just wouldn’t ever pay their property taxes if the city had no leverage to make them do it. There are cases where folks die, they leave town, there are squatters, the properties are in disrepair, which it sounds like is the case with both of these [properties].”
Precinct 5 City Councilor Marianne Bullock also suggested that the city work to draft a procedure for abandoned properties, perhaps determining a set number of years in which the city can legally take an abandoned property.
“What I would like to see, procedurally, is that when something like this comes in front of us, we can clearly see — these are the steps that were made to contact the next of kin or whoever was identified in the probate,” Bullock said. “So that we can say, ‘OK, we’ve been trying to get in touch with this person for eight years. We can now take this for title and and auction it and follow the procedure that the home equity legislation allows.”
Near the end of the meeting, Precinct 9 City Councilor Derek Helie also voiced support for the idea of getting the properties “off [the city’s] books,” noting that city government “is not a property management company.”
Desorgher added in an interview Wednesday that she has no intention of making money on the properties, but simply wants to eliminate blight from the community and maintain safe living conditions for neighbors.
“This is coincidental — we happen to have the problem properties. I could be the mayor that just leaves them all to rot … I’m not. I’m the mayor that paid back the home equity theft that we stole over the years,” she said. “I’m not trying to make money off of this. … My goal is safety and to make it so that every neighborhood [is] safer and better.”
