Tax Foreclosure and Redevelopment

<p>Carolina County has been working with its largest municipality, Tar Heel Town, to  redevelop one of Tar Heel Town’s more dilapidated neighborhoods.  Many of the properties in this neighborhood are owned by absentee landlords who fail to maintain them properly.  Not surprisingly, many of these properties are also subject to liens for thousands of dollars of delinquent property taxes and minimum housing ordinance repair costs.</p> <p>A local community development corporation (CDC) hopes to acquire and redevelop some of these properties into affordable housing, but the CDC has had difficulty convincing the absentee landlords to sell. Now the CDC is pushing the city and county to foreclose on the delinquent properties in the neighborhood—and then, with the liens cleared, the CDC hopes to buy some of the properties out of foreclosure at a substantial discount. The town council is supportive of the proposal, because it sees it as a way to accomplish some of its goals for the neighborhoods. Is the CDC’s proposal realistic? How could it be implemented?</p> <p>In short, the CDC’s proposal is realistic, but the city and county would need to proceed carefully…</p> <p>Property taxes on real property may be collected using foreclosure, of course.  And as my colleague Tyler Mulligan explains here, so too may housing ordinance repair costs.  Thanks to G.S. 153A-140 and G.S. 160A-193, foreclosure is also a remedy for nuisance abatement costs such trash removal and grass cutting that is often required when landlords fail to maintain their properties.</p> <p>I provide a detailed description of property tax foreclosures in this post.  For our purposes, [...]</p>