Thread: Editorial: Ending government-sponsored blight

Editorial: Ending government-sponsored blight
Jul 7, 2008 3:00 AM (7 hrs ago) by The Washington DC Examiner Newspaper

WASHINGTON -
Loudoun County, VA officials have for years looked the other way when confronted with glaring violations of their own zoning ordinances. Angry homeowners have now joined a growing list of Americans demanding strict enforcement of such laws. As Examiner staff writer David Sherfinski reported last week, overcrowding complaints in Loudoun have more than doubled this year as citizens grapple with what Sterling Park resident Joe Budzinski calls “government-sponsored blight.â€

Northern Virginia Invites Organized Crime
By Greg L | 6 July 2008 | Virginia Politics, Crime | 16 Comments

Joe over at NOVATownHall continues to lay out the evidence of a massive zoning enforcement problem in the Sterling area of Loudoun County while advancing an interesting theory that explains some of the observed behavior. Based on what we’ve seen in this area, I’d suspect the behavior and this possible situation that would explain it is hardly limited to Sterling.

There is another specific case going on right now which may be far more revealing than either of these, because evidence is piling up about a home purchasing mortgage-and-refinancing scam which might explain much of what has been happening in our area. It appears some of these boarding houses have been the result of a loophole in lending practices, in which someone can buy multiple residences, sell and refinance them several times over, then leave with a wad of cash and sticking the lending institutions with the bill. In the lag time between purchase and physical foreclosure, the residence is rented out to illegal boarders, and the rent money kept as additional profit. Banks, and eventually taxpayers, are left to pick up the final bills.

I’d add that there must be some sort of black market for used applicances and building materials, since far more often than not a previously overcrowded foreclosed single family residence will be stripped of everything of value by the most recent tenants. Applicances, fixtures, and as Joe notes even garage doors seem to disappear from these properties. Someone has to be buying this stuff, which is stolen property after all.

This is a pretty low-risk crime for these folks to pull off, since the banks that end up owning these properties don’t know who the previous tenants were and don’t have an inventory of the applicances or other property that was stolen. Solving these crimes would require the assistance of the previous property owners which aren’t likely to feel much inspiration to help out the bank that just foreclosed on their property. Going after the folks fencing this stolen property is difficult, since just proving that the property they sold was stolen would be very hard to do. When the chain of custody for property gets this opaque, figuring out what property was stolen and who stole it is a real challenge.

It’s just another disturbing facet of the residential overcrowding problem that is very difficult to effectively address short of ensuring that residential overcrowding and real estate fraud doesn’t happen in the first place. If local governments simply did a better job of stopping overcrowding, not only would it rescue communities from tremendous spot-blight, but it would shut down a wide-ranging criminal enterprise that must certainly be responsible for the trafficking of millions, if not billions of dollars worth of stolen property every year. In the meantime, we have a massive stolen property market in Northern Virginia and law enforcement hasn’t been able to address it in any way.

Such a juicy invitation for organized crime in Nothern Virginia hasn’t been offered in decades. The easier it is for organized crime to safely operate a wide-ranging criminal operation with enormous profit potential, the more likely it is they’ll come and displace the small-time crooks, extending their geographic reach and insinuating themselves into an ever-wider proportion of the criminal activity that goes on.
http://www.bvbl.net/index.php/2008/07/0 ... ment-69966