(Repost from 9/4/13. New content coming soon!)

Everyday I ride or walk or run or drive through Brush Park.

Coming up soon is the Detroit Property Tax Auction and today I got sucked on to Why Don’t We Own This, a website that compiles property information in Detroit. While you can view non-auctioned property information (i.e. my apartment building, about 40 units, sold in 1989 for less than a quarter million dollars!), the properties on the auction block are marked as well.

I started skimming through properties in Brush Park, many of which look like they were bought in the early 2000’s by speculators— many empty properties had been last purchased for upwards of $400k in 2006 by now-defunct (it seems) LLC’s.

Most interesting though, is a bunch of small parcels (condos), making up a really lovely brick building by the Butcher Shoppe. They were last assessed*** for about $2k each and the bidding starts at $8k. These are really lovely, I’ve passed them a bunch. Nice cars out front, decent people walking their dogs on the vacant lot across the street, etc.

Why Don’t We Own This (and the city of Detroit), lists the “Carola Development Company” as owners, and then google filled in the rest. The man’s name listed as the owner of that company and it’s address. The address is around the corner at a property now owned by Freddie Mac. That building sold in 2006— height of the market— for $230k. The city doesn’t share the last sold price, but Carola Development itself was formed in 2002, although hasn’t been in good standing since 2009, COINCIDENTALLY the same time the owner of Carola received an order of suspension from the State Attorney Discipline board. Where’d this guy go?

Google revealed a little more evidence of a fall— an article from an attorney publication about a Detroit District Attorney being suspended. The State Attorney Discipline board notice notes that the man had already been suspended from the bar because of a failure to pay dues in early 2008.

ANYWAY Fascinating stuff, someone should buy a condo because it looks like a bunch of them are owned by this guy. I haven’t seen inside, but outside they are really lovely.

***A key problem of affordability of home ownership inside Detroit City is property taxes. While property tax millage rates vary, in Portland (already considered annoyingly high because we don’t have sales tax) they range from about $15-$20, per millage. In Detroit, the 2012 rate for principal residence is $67. For NO services inside Detroit? That’s insane. However, these condos have a very low assessed tax value, meaning you’d probably pay about 250$ in taxes. Also, I’m pretty sure Orr is going to restructure the property tax code as the city enters bankruptcy.

******More digging— the same guy, in the same John R st address, owned “Detroit Urban Living” company, categorized under “food and cafe” WHO IS THIS GUY??

Personal stories of losses and gains become revealed in Detroit’s landscape. The ruins and empty prairies of Brush Park (and other Detroit neighborhoods), didn’t just happen overnight, or burn up in a riot in the 60’s. They reflect the inflated rises and dramatic falls of economic bubbles blowing up and bursting, over and over again. Here, the abstracted economic history of our country becomes physical and concrete, it’s written in the faces of  weathered neighbors and in their weathered homes, standing still after years and decades of bloated hopes and crushed reality. Detroit is not a city where problems are gilded and hidden– they face you every day, riding your bike to work among ruined mansions, breathing in the smell of wild sweet grass.