The owner has been given 90 days to demolish and clear the 40-acre property.
As so ordered by the judge, the two sites (which are made up of more than 40 individual parcels) must have all structures demolished and the debris cleaned within 90 days. Permits must be pulled within the next two weeks and leveling to begin no later than early June.
Is this a realistic demand considering the scope and scale of work to be done safely? I know that a lot of it will depend on how many crews they can get on site, but there almost has to be a bottleneck in the disposal aspect of the job.
My legal experience is Australian rather than US but IME if a court makes this sort of order, and the person subject to the order can prove they are substantively and objectively racing to comply but aren’t going to make it, the court might well give an extension.
The court’s key goal is probably to set a deadline and see the reaction - if the person subject to the order does nothing or makes only desultory efforts, the court knows it can be harsh. If the court can see the person is genuinely trying to comply but pragmatically needs 180 days (or whatever), the court’s attitude is likely to be different.
It’s a $10M demolition project. I feel comfortable saying that it is totally unreasonable to have this begun and completed in the timeframe allowed, even if there was an already approved demolition plan on file.
Of course, the owner missed the trial date, and has racked up a million dollars in unpaid fees, taxes and fines over the 9 years since he bought the property for $400k. Seems to me this is Step One in getting the property effectively owned by Detroit, who will take the lead on renovating the site and getting it sold off to a developer who will actually do something with it.
One of my first thoughts upon reading the OP was “damn, now I’ll never get to see it in person”. Not that it was at all likely that I would see it but I’ve always wanted to.
Has Detroit’s economy recovered enough that new development is realistically on the near horizon for this massive site?
This was pretty much my thoughts on what was going on. A foreign investor grabbed the property with the intention of flipping it for a massive property without understanding the actual economic situation in Detroit and is now stuck with a dud. Now he’s just cutting his losses.
Considering the owner bought it for $500k and the the property is pretty much worthless, doing nothing may be the best financial strategy. If the foreign owner doesn’t comply, the city will do the demolition and put a lien on the property for the full cost. If they can’t recover the costs, they’ll foreclose on the property and take ownership. Considering the owner bought it for $400k, walking away is a much better deal than paying $10M to clean up a property they can’t sell. Unless the owner has a lot of other properties and business in the area, I’m not sure that Detroit would be able to collect on the debt. I’m guessing the short timeframe by the court is just so that the city can start work after the 90 days is up.
The current owner bought it at a tax sale auction and benefited from brownfield redevelopment tax incentives which the authority recently removed that incentive. I would also expect that there were specific stipulations to that tax sale that the buyer agreed to meet in order to close on the property.
Yeah It’s an open secret here in Detroit, that it is essentially a legal line in the sand to get development progressing, or much, much more likely, towards a foreclosure, and seizure.
