In Victorville, CA a lender decided to tear down new homes and other structures that hadn’t been completed to avoid future fines from the local government for code violations.
Officials of Guaranty Bank of Austin, Texas, which took over the development last year, were unavailable for comment. But Victorville city spokeswoman Yvonne Hester said the bank decided not to throw good money after bad.
“It just didn’t pencil out for them,” she said. “They’d have to spend a lot of money to turn around and sell the houses. They just made a financial decision to just demolish them.”
You can read the entire story in the L.A. Times at this address
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-demolish5-2009may05,0,4930126.story
Local governments frequently use fines as a way to motivate defendants to come into compliance with the code. Sometimes buildings have to be torn down if they’ve suffered too much damage from being open structures. But, this is the first time I’ve heard of tearing down brand new buildings as a way of coming into compliance with the local codes.
In the last 13 months we have had two demolished and will have a third by the end of summer. Sometimes, unfortunately this is the way to go.