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Vacant homes in Southwest Florida pose risk in storm |
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Flying debris could inflict heavy damage, injuries Article Courtesy of The News Press By Dick Hogan June 1, 2009
Lee County’s landscape is littered with thousands of homes and construction work sites in foreclosure and slowly falling into disrepair — and a major hurricane could send debris flying to devastating effect.
“How big a threat do they pose? I don’t think we can quantify that, but it’s a substantial threat,” said Gerald Campbell, chief of planning for county Emergency Management.
Residents saw firsthand after Hurricane Charley in 2004 what can happen when the Category 4 storm tore through with winds of up to 150 mph.
Charley left in its wake a landscape in which almost any vantage point provided a view of blue emergency tarps on houses whose roofs had been torn off.
But
that was close to the height of the home construction boom that ended in early
2006 when prices started falling. Abandoned buildings were few and far between.
The problem has been building over the past three years as investors and homeowners walk away from houses worth less the money owed on them because property values have fallen so steeply — the median price of an existing single-family house was $85,500 in April, down 73 percent from the record high of $322,300 in December 2005.
But building inspectors say they’ve amped up their enforcement efforts to ensure the problem doesn’t spiral out of control.
In the past two months alone, for example, the county Department of Community Development opened 1,100 new violation cases just in Lehigh Acres, the community most affected by the increased foreclosures, department spokeswoman Joan LaGuardia said.
Not all those were for homes in foreclosure, she said, but “That gives you a feeling for how much we’re doing.”
When inspectors find a house that poses a threat, they don’t waste time.
“On these vacant homes, where nobody’s living, they only have a 10-day due process,” LaGuardia said. “If we can’t get it cleaned up (by the owner) in 10 days, we go out there with our solid waste division and we clean it up.”
The county has to pay for that work, but files a lien on the property so the bill’s paid the next time the land is sold, she said.
Generally it doesn’t come to that.
“We do find financial institutions pretty willing to work with us when we contact them,” LaGuardia said.
Frank Cassidy, code compliance division manager for Cape Coral, said his inspectors are increasingly aggressive about making sure the problem doesn’t get out of hand.
Once inspectors verify a house is in foreclosure, they try to contact the owner, the lender or someone else with a connection to the property.
But after 48 hours the city takes action.
“We try to exhaust all our efforts in a short period of time — we’ve been taking a very proactive stand ever since this thing started,” Cassidy said.
The city is making some progress, he said: There were 20,000 problem structures at the beginning of the year but that’s down to 10,000 to 12,000 and “it seems to have leveled off.” A renewed interest by homebuyers and investors in the Cape’s inventory of unsold houses is his greatest ally. Real estate agents fix them up to sell.
“The real estate market is helping us handle these problems,” Cassidy said.
Because homeowners insurance policies are generally renewed annually, most homes have some coverage remaining when they are vacated, said John Pollock, president of Oswald Trippe and Co.
When banks take ownership, they are typically very diligent about maintaining coverage, Pollock said.
“Insurance is available for vacant property, but it is different that what a homeowner would have,” Pollock said.
Typically, vacant homes can’t be insured against water or mold damage, or sometimes even fire damage, because the risk is so much higher when no one is living in the home.
“It represents a higher level of risk,” he said.
Some larger banks maintain their own self-insurance divisions to protect bank-held property, he said.
Campbell at emergency management said neighbors and homeowners’ associations should also do what they can to look after the neighborhood.
That approach has limits, too.
“Can we at least take this old barbecue grill and throw it away? You can’t trespass on someone’s property,” Campbell said.
Mike Wesner, president of the Westminster Homeowners Association south of Fort Myers, said foreclosed homes aren’t much of an issue in the community because there are fewer than 10 in a community of 620 homes.
He said the association has set aside funds to clean up the development’s common areas, in case of emergency. Also helping newer communities like Westminster, he said, is that homes are built to the stronger Miami-Dade hurricane standards. That, he said, will minimize damage. |