Tax foreclosures have grown so steeply that county officials have lately had to forgo pursuing tens of thousands of additional properties that have fallen far enough behind to risk foreclosure.
“It’s more than this office can handle at this point,” said David Szymanski, the chief deputy for the Wayne County treasurer’s office, which had so many properties to foreclose on this year that it held 10 sets of hearings about them in a convention center auditorium. “We are popping at the seams.”
Other cities wrestle with unpaid taxes, too, but the size of Detroit’s problem is staggering. Several factors have brought the city to the point that crucial revenues are not being collected and thousands of houses are being taken away each year — not by banks, for failure to make mortgage payments, but by the government, for failure to pay taxes. Contributing are soaring rates of poverty, high taxes despite painfully diminished city services and a long pattern of lackadaisical tax collection by the city.
In some cases, homeowners have abandoned properties and simply quit paying taxes, and foreclosure may be the only way to get a house back into the hands of people who actually want to live there and pay their share.
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