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Friday, January 12, 2007

Keep Your Porch light On

Please click onto the title of this post for an interesting story concerning the Payne Raper.

9 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

More "feel good" type law enforcement strategy that enables the criminal culture all the more while the city keeps their focus on the property owners as a bigger problem. Seriously folks, aren't you sick of this kind of failed thinking and leadership? Or doesn't it make any difference as long as it is someone else getting repaed or killed?

12:12 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

It should be to first turn on your light bulb and think people. I'll use the proverbial "light bulb" as the "theory" that one uses to come to terms "eureka!, that the rapist is an evil person roaming about looking for victims and is not a building committing crimes.

What good is a porch light in the back alleys and dark corners of the city anyway?

2:56 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

If you attended the meeting you would've heard an outpouring of hate for absentee landlords. The crowd thought all the vacant homes should be torn down.

Councilman Bostrom didn't blame "landlords" - he blamed info-mercials that convinced people to buy homes not to live in but to rent with little or no down payment. These people took equity out only to find out that renting should be left to people who know what they are doing. He didn't blame professionals - he blamed people who were in it to make a quick buck.

Besides the Mayor and City Council, you have a whole bunch of east residents looking for the leveling of vacant homes.

3:15 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

and that has what to do with a rapist lurking around the streets looking for victims?

Your councilman is feeding you a line. If that is really what you think, then they are a lot more smooth than I thought.

I'd be really scared if I were you, if you live on the east side, you could be what they call "next". Any little trouble you fall into, and it doesn't matter how, and you could be out on the street, have your home boarded up and then torn down. Movies have been made of ironic situations such as this. Picture it, the naive people of the city bemoaning out for more restrictions, then they give their blessings to the opportunist that you call city officials and I call a joke, and before they know it, all these concerned citizens are in jail for breaking the rules that they gave blessings to.

I'll just sit back and watch you all strangle the life out of each other, knowing that you have been warned.

3:48 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

3:15 PM, what you described are not landlords but crooks who took advantage of an opportunity. There's always a good swindle to be made. Thus, those are absentee criminals, not landlords.

In the 80's it was the junk bonds, it will all go round and round and it doesn't mean that saint paul's older low-income housing stock is to blame. These infomercial people cannot borrow money without the banking industry. So you should maybe think about going down to washington mutual and yell at them for selling their so-called "junk mortgages". Quit feeding off the bottom of the fall out and get some courage and look at the top where it all started. Look within yourself and see the truth.

3:57 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I agree that some, not all, has to do with mortgage fruad. People desperately trying to sell to get the heck out of dodge and the scammers can smell it. But to put all the blame on that by Bostrom, I'll admit is rather slick thinking by the coats. They have a nice brick wall to hide the deception behind. Thing is though that all will not see this brick wall and WHAM!!!! not a pretty sight, huh?

4:20 PM  
Blogger Bob said...

Hi All,

I said this on another thread, here it is again. We have a media that has bought into the theory that buildings are responsible for crime so to speak. What can we expect from a public that has been spoon feed by our local media.

6:24 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

This is Dumb in a way.
About the meeting
-- outpouring of hate for absentee landlords.
The crowd thought all the vacant homes should be torn down.
Will tear DOWN "Alice Kengel's" home in West St.Paul.
Her city has this little old lady walking the streets, and staying at the Dorothy Day Center.
Her home on Allen St in W.St.Paul,
is boarded up and she can't even go on the property, to clean her own side walks.
She will be arrested on site, for trespassing.
So all these empty homes, blame the city code enforcement.
No housing to rent because some Twinkle-ets in code enforcement "dick's" - over the "Land-LORDS".
The Code People have been shoving that little thing that they hide in their pants up some one asses.
The Code People says it's BETTER then MY Wife?
Think it over, then get those empty homes filled again.
I am a renter.
The more you screw the owners, at the same time you are screwing the renters.
Ginger, in Wes St.Paul

8:04 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Let the ourpouring of hate flow...it goes both ways you know and the landlords in St. Paul have plenty of it. For years they have been made the scapegoat for everything from A to Z by gutless politicians who refuse to stand up to the real problem.

3:57 wants us to go to the top where it all started. Lets do that. Prior to Mayor Kelly taking office the city of St. Paul had a reasonabley well run rental housing market. Was it perfect? Hell no! There were some problems, and there were some problem owners, but not anywhere near the numbers the city would have you believe. The managers of code enforcement at this time knew how to handle the situation and they were doing so. Then comes the new adminstration with their Nazi like tactics and what seemed like a grudge against everyone they could get their hands on. What used to be a workable situation with results turned into no cooperation what so ever, and an attitude that wanted to be a bully rather than cooperate with anyone. This was rampant everywhere within every city agency, not just with landlords. The newspapers even wrote about it. The landlords saw such a hostile enviornment to do business in, they realized they would not survive and started selling off their properties fearing that they would be the next victim of a code enforcement department that routinely lied about reapirs that did not need to be made in order to get the house condemned so they use the condemnation as a springboard to a vacant building status where they then illegaly demand that owners bring their properties up to the modern day building code just like a new house that was built yesterday. Rather than make the landlords bring the house into complaince with the city's chapter 34 minimum standards regarding such properties, they chose the most expensive route to deliberatly raise the owners costs and thus rid the neighborhood of the poor people who were not liked by the neighbors because of the problem behavior. An average code compliance of this type usualy costs around $50,000.00, which I hope all of you home owners who think the city's plan was such a good idea are able to afford to do, because you will be next after they have set "precedent" with what they are doing now. It was during the Kelly administration that real estate really started heating up, and then came the infomercials and the "too good to be true" mortgages. Most of the vetran landlords who had a lot of equity in their properties and the option to lower rents or whatever they had to do in response to the market started selling their properties as fast as they could to avoid being the next victim of the city. Some were not so lucky. They were forced into bankruptcy, lost their life savings, lost their livlihoods, lost retirements, college funds for their kids, and some even lost the home they lived in and their marriages due to the city's dirty deeds. These were the professionals that 3:15 talks about. They knew how to run the business and how to make a good and lasting repair at a cost effective price. Most of the new buyers for these properties fell into 2 categories. One was a buyer with no experience in rental housing at all. They din't know the business and they din't know how to repair anything, and most have a full time job so property investment and management are mostly a weekend (if that) affair for them. They have to hire it all done and most of them are getting taken advantage of by the contractors and handymen looking for a quick buck. The 2nd group are the scammers and equity busters that buy the property for grossly inflated prices, take $50,000.00 to $60,000.00 cash home with them the day of the closing and never even go back to get the rents from the tenants that are living there. Not a bad living if you can figure out how to do this 15 or 20 times a year! Most of these homes that this group of buyers purchased are vacant and boarded up today. They are the homes that the poor people used to live in that are no longer available to them. The ones walking away from their homes are the new buyers who purchased these properties at top dollar and now cannot take care of them either because of higher repair costs, over regulation or the lack of renters. A lot of the renters got sucked into the scam also, because they found out they could buy a home and have lower payments with one of these tricky mortgages than the payment for renting a home. A lot of the ones who couldn't get a mortgage just left town for someplace where they could find housing. This crowd that 3:15 talks about that has all the hate and wants to see all these vacant buidlings torn down may get their wish and then the city can usher in the "brownfields of Detroit" as another one of their accomplishments. Granted some of the vacant homes in the city were home owners, and many of them were previous renters, but the city's own report to the city council says that most of these vacant and empty homes are rental properties. While the easy mortgages may have been a factor, it was an out of control code enforcement department that started the ball rolling in the mass sell off of all these rental properties. As for the outpouring of hate for the absentee landlords that 3:15 talks about, I have a message for you: it is your peoples hate and attitude for someone else that started the ball rolling. All you people with all your hatred got exactly what you have wanted for years....these rental homes are empty now , the tenants are gone, now you can live in peace and choke on your hatred for something you don't even understand. Get used to it, you haven't seen nothing yet, wait until next year at this time. Those vacant homes you have been so desirous of will be multipying in numbers.

11:40 PM  

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