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Left with Nothing

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Left with Nothing

#171

Post by nowarninglabel »

cantrevealname wrote: post #166
jamieb wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

when someone gets your $197,000 house for $134, they can sell it for $71,000 and take $6000 in legal fees, interest etc, as documented in the article. The owner loses $130,000. Don't be surprised if the person buying the house for $71,000 is in on the game too.

Your two-sentence summary is better than the entire article in understanding what's going on. I read the whole article, and I somehow missed that sentence buried in the middle of the story. So Mr. Coleman wasn't "left with nothing" but presumably received something like $65,000 (i.e., $71,000 minus $6,000 or whatever the final legal bill was). Nowhere does the article say exactly what he received in the end. The way…

No, that's not what happened at all. Try reading again.

>The Maryland company that took Coleman’s house sold it for $71,000 two months after evicting him. The company was owned by Steven Berman, who was convicted in 2008 in the Maryland bid-rigging case. He declined to comment. The law firm for Berman’s company said it was willing to reduce Coleman’s bill to $3,500 but could not reach him.

Re: Left with Nothing

#172

Post by hummingbird12 »

Can someone please tell me, why do US courts keep approving things like this?

Like they can't just foreclose a house without government approval. Why does the court approve the foreclosure in the first place over such a small debt?

Re: Left with Nothing

#173

Post by icelancer »

derleth wrote: post #137
staccatomeasure wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd rather take my chances with a judge than nearly guaranteeing failure in the current system. We already do this with small-claims court I believe and to be honest I'm not sure of the differences between that and a court that would handle a tax lien. And yes, any system you make could be gamed, but you could make one that is harder to game than the current one.

> I'd rather take my chances with a judge than nearly guaranteeing failure in the current system. Ah yes, the "Let that person solve it" school of fixing major social problems. It works really well right up until it fails really badly: George Washington was, for a while, effectively a dictator in that he could have been President-For-Life long before we came to associate that concept with bad outcomes; sadly, for eve…

A small-claims judge also can't just make shit up. The judge generally has to rely on precedent and law and uses his/her own judgement in areas where discretion does make sense.

Re: Left with Nothing

#174

Post by fnordfnordfnord »

helmut_hed wrote: post #152
fnordfnordfnord wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The local county government can put a lien on your real property for failing to pay your property taxes, in some places, even for not mowing your lawn (an exaggeration of property maint. codes). In Texas, investors can buy a "Tax Deed" at auction. The property owner has two years to buy the lien back, for a defined price, IIRC the taxes owed + 50% for each year. After the 2 yr repayment window, the purchaser of the t…

Are tax liens different from other kinds? It's my impression that if e.g. a lender repossesses, they sell the house, pocket what you owe plus fees, and have to give you the rest back. It's strange to think it would be different for unpaid property taxes. Was Coleman truly "left with nothing" or did he get a portion of the sale proceeds?

The rights of the tax lien holder trump any other claims, AFAIK. That's one reason that mortgagors want you to escrow your annual property taxes with them.

edit: IRS liens in effect before the sale go with the property, and can delay the new owner in getting a title policy.

Re: Left with Nothing

#175

Post by esamek »

mpalme wrote: post #18

Meta note: this is what journalism can look like today. Made for the web first, not for the paper. Visualizations that are actually insightful - and most importantly a well researched story.

this.

Re: Left with Nothing

#176

Post by enraged_camel »

sprash wrote: post #157
denzil_correa wrote: post #104

Sorry but WTH?!! 134/197000 is 0.068%. And if this was not enough, I read this - A 95-year-old church choir leader lost her family home to a Maryland investor over a tax debt of $44.79 while she was struggling with Alzheimer’s in a nursing home. Sometimes I wonder what's wrong with people in the world.

Not in the world. Only in the "Land of the free".

Not sure why you are downvoted, when you are pretty much correct. In the Western world, America seems to be rather unique when it comes to the economically strong preying on the weak.

Re: Left with Nothing

#177

Post by cmccabe »

sliverstorm wrote: post #87
bolder88 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just go the whole hog and tax all property. eg you buy a laptop, you have to pay the government a tax each year to keep it. Why just apply it to houses? May as well just prohibit people from owning property. Personally, I think such taxes are a massive disincentive for people to do well. As soon as you have enough money to buy a house, you are penalised for it. Luckily in the UK, we don't have property tax, a…

Property tax is primarily a disincentive to buy lots of land you can't do anything with and sit on it (metaphorically). That's a good thing- it means the incentives will push land into the hands of people who are actually going to do something with it (making it worth paying the property tax)

Absolutely. If we had reasonable property taxes in CA, we wouldn't have a housing shortage, and middle-class people would be able to live in SF again. But try explaining this to the average voter...

Re: Left with Nothing

#178

Post by 31reasons »

do-it-good wrote: post #140
staccatomeasure wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This problem is indicative of how screwed up our legal system is. Lawyers harass regular folks at-will as most people have no recourse (i.e. money to hire their own lawyer, or knowledge of the expanding and complicated laws). Two ways I can think of fixing it - one is offering simple, straightforward hearings in front of a judge with the power to use their own judgement (instead of relying on overly-specific, exploit…

The complexity of the laws is not a coincidence: 1. It gives more power to the government and less power to the people. 2. The majority of lawmakers are lawyers - complexity means them more job/business opportunities and significance in society.

Law is ripe for disruption. We need something like IBM's Watson to fight the complexity.

Re: Left with Nothing

#179

Post by dnautics »

rch wrote: post #169
rwmj wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Property is harder to hide than other forms of wealth. You can hide your money in an offshore bank account. It's pretty hard to hide land. If there's a piece of land, someone should be paying the land tax on it (if whoever owns it is hiding, the people can grab it back). So land tax is fair and progressive (the more land you own, the more tax you pay).

Maybe I'm not as impassioned as I should be, but I just see this as a question of how best to provide common services. For instance, if I had 5 acres in the middle of nowhere, I might be expected to chip in to a fund to keep a fire on my land from spreading to adjacent BLM property. However, my acreage is likely to be taxed more or less based on the quality of the view, or another similarly cosmetic factor in land va…

>why not just calculate my share of the public fire suppression expenses based on area?

remember:

> there is no "rules scheme" you can construct that will be as progressive as you want.

What you propose may be 'fair'[0], in the context of providing services*. But that is not the goal of progressivism, which is redistribution of wealth and creation of an more outcomes-equal society (a concept I'm personally not opposed to, if the state doesn't do it).

[0]but even fair in your example isn't quite correct. Because area is not proportional to fire risk. Let's say I live in the valley, where a stream runs through, the vegetation is green, and the area never gets hit by lightning. And my rich neighbors a mile away are on the mesa, which has a great view, but is brown and always dry, and up high, so lightning hits there regularly? Should area be a fair assessor of fire risk? Is it fair to have me subsidize the fire protection of the rich people who live closer to where fires happen? (this is a simplified description of the very real LA county fire system where rich people live out on the hills where there are far more brushfires)

Re: Left with Nothing

#180

Post by unclebucknasty »

sliverstorm wrote: post #87
bolder88 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just go the whole hog and tax all property. eg you buy a laptop, you have to pay the government a tax each year to keep it. Why just apply it to houses? May as well just prohibit people from owning property. Personally, I think such taxes are a massive disincentive for people to do well. As soon as you have enough money to buy a house, you are penalised for it. Luckily in the UK, we don't have property tax, a…

Property tax is primarily a disincentive to buy lots of land you can't do anything with and sit on it (metaphorically). That's a good thing- it means the incentives will push land into the hands of people who are actually going to do something with it (making it worth paying the property tax)

>Property tax is primarily a disincentive to buy lots of land you can't do anything with and sit on it...

No. Property tax is primarily a means for localities to raise revenue. If what you were saying were true, then developed land, including primary residences, would have no associated property taxes. It'd be exempt.

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