About A lesson in vigilance.
Detroit is preparing to foreclose on as many as 62,000 properties this year. An estimate of half of them are occupied. These are all property tax cases.
Detroit desperately needs the money to support a huge unwieldly government that has plundered the wealth of that once great city.
Michigan in 1999 changed the way its local governments deal with people who fail to pay their property taxes, replacing a system of tax liens with foreclosure. Yet the number of foreclosures did not reach what advocates here view as a crisis level until years later, when the national recession hastened the city’s problems with blighted properties and population decline. By last year, at least 70,000 foreclosures had taken place here since 2009, not for unpaid mortgages but for failure to pay property taxes.
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