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For the People
For the PeopleOur story last week about the strain foreclosed or otherwise abandoned homes are putting on surrounding neighbors ("County Offers Little Help to Troubled Neighbors") drew a pretty fair share of comments when we posted it on our Web site.
Most of them struck the same tune: If the grass is getting shaggy, neighbors should go cut it themselves.
No they shouldn't.
Not everyone even has a lawnmower, for a start; not everyone has the time to tackle another lawn if they do, and, in this litigious day and age, not everyone is inclined to put themselves at risk by trespassing on someone else's property with equipment that features sharp, spinning blades.
Don't turn to the government to solve all your problems, the Internet commentators suggested. True enough. But not in this instance.
If it's not local government's job to protect public health, if it's not local government's job to help protect the property values that it depends on for tax revenue, if it's not local government's role to provide public safety ? and all of these are elements of the abandoned house problem ? then what, actually, is local government's job?
Taking care of these annoyances is a simple enough matter for local government which, despite a tightening belt, still has the wherewithal to pay private contractors to cut grass and perform other minor upkeep and maintenance to abandoned houses.
Local government is the sole entity that can relatively easily recover the costs of protecting neighborhoods in this fashion; with little muss or fuss, it can add the bill to the tax tab which must be settled when the homes are sold.
That's not to say that stepping in in this fashion might not require some tweaks and tinkers to a county ordinance or two. It is to say that the supervisors ought to get tweaking, because this is a problem that is not going away anytime soon.
Many economists are convinced that Great Recession foreclosures are only about halfway over, that the sub-primes have mostly all shaken out by now, but a second wave of prime-loan foreclosures, generated by the five or six million jobs that have disappeared in the past 12 to 18 months, is just beginning.
An observation in another story in last week's Times-
Democrat probably came as a surprise to many readers, as it did to us: As of last October, Fauquier County had a number of bank-owned homes sufficient to rank it as the 14th most hard-hit county in the commonwealth in that regard.
Other devastated communities have taken aggressive steps to combat the problem. We might learn from them.
• Make financial institutions register foreclosed and abandoned properties, for instance, and institute heavy fines for those who don't and for those who fail to name a maintenance company or contact to look after them. Elevate the fines from heavy to harsh for failure to perform monthly maintenance.
• Impose an additional 10 percent real estate tax on foreclosed homes. There are a number of advantages to this plan, which has been put in place in some parts of the country, not the least of which is to convince those entities owning the property ? banks, mortgage firms, real estate companies ? to get these properties sold quickly.
Fauquier and other hard-hit areas ? indeed, all of Virginia ? needs to be aware that lobbyists for the mortgage industry in Florida had state legislation introduced this year that would have prevented municipalities from making financial institutions maintain their abandoned properties and from forcing them to reimburse taxpayers who had to foot maintenance bills.
And that's just wrong. Neighbors shouldn't have to cut the grass, and taxpayers shouldn't have to pay to cut the grass, either.
Who does that leave?
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