Detroit has 80,000 abandoned lots and buildings, according to the city’s planning department. Old housing projects, homes, strip malls and even high-rise buildings sit empty across much of the city. Motown has more vacant office, retail and industrial space than nearly every other big city in the country.

Like many of Detroit’s abandoned buildings, though, it’s anything but deserted. Rather, it’s a hive of activity, buzzing with scavengers, vandals, late-night revelers, arsonists, photographers and urban explorers who brave the crumbling buildings’ many hazards and create a good number of their own. The complex remains unguarded.

“Mayhem. That’s what they should call the place,” says John, a 36-year-old telephone-line repairman who spends his spare time exploring Detroit’s legendary industrial ruins. “If you decide you want to push a dump truck out of a window, this is the place to do it.”

There’s more to this. The pranksters’ playground of empty and abandoned properties represents a deep and lasting betrayal of the needs of urban America.  Some cities in the Rustbelt, hit first by the abandonment of their inner cores and then utterly devastated by foreclosures, bear scars from which they are unlikely to recover and that few seem to see. Years after the financial crisis ends, I wonder if we’ll look back at this as a time when we stood by and let some of the country’s once-great communities simply fall into disrepair and die.

In Washington, Congress ceded to the lobbying efforts of powerful interests like the National Association of Homebuilders, and passed an extension of a homebuyer’s tax credit that costs more than it delivers and puts money into the pockets of people who don’t need it. There are no lobbying groups for people who live in neighborhoods with foreclosures that even banks have abandoned because they aren’t worth the expense of taking back.

However, there are some bright spots in the overall dark landscape. As TWI’s sister site, The Michigan Messenger, pointed out last week, urban gardening has taken hold in parts of Detroit, which now boasts more than 700 urban farms within its city limits. The idea behind some of those farms is to present a healthy alternative to the liquor stores, gas stations, and convenience stores where residents often turn for high-cost groceries and fast food.

Like urban gardening, the best solutions to the abandonment crisis will come from the bottom up. But those efforts need government support to take hold and expand. In order to take off, any possible solution requires a sense of urgency among policymakers about the huge problems facing cities like Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago — and even the outer exurbs in the boom markets of California and Arizona, where foreclosures have caused property values to sink and have left communities stuck in a downward spiral.

But there’s  been no big national push for possible solutions like land banks, which would allow local communities to seize and reuse vacant land and buildings. There’s been no national summit to talk about the tragedy of declining neighborhoods due to foreclosures. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner apparently picks up the phone and chats with his Wall Street friends several times a day. Hey, Secretary Geithner — How about making a call to a homeowner surrounded by foreclosed homes? Or maybe taking a stroll down one of those blocks in Detroit where every single home is owned by a real estate speculator? In America’s abandoned neighborhoods, they’ve been waiting to hear from you, or from anyone in Washington, for a long time. And they’re still waiting.

Just three years ago, Marin county residents were busy raising money for a legal fight to stop Habitat for Humanity from building four homes affordable to families making under $56,000/year, saying it would “blight” their exclusive neighborhood of million dollar plus houses. (The project is still being debated.)

But now they are being welcomed with open arms in another part of the county as they renovate one of the foreclosed homes that even Marin has acquired a passel of. Habitat bought the house, which needs extensive rehab, for $215,00. It doesn’t sound affordable exactly to those of us in more affordable parts of the country, but in a county where the median home price is $800,000, I guess it qualifies.

Nothing like a wave of foreclosures to change those “Not In My Backyard” attitudes. This, by the way, is what affordable housing looks like in Marin.

As the Marin case shows, high-priced homes are increasingly going into foreclosure. Don’t be surprised to see Habitat next in a place like Palm Beach, Fla. Or maybe the group will take on even more foreclosures in Marin. The one constant about this crisis is that no region escapes its reach, even neighborhoods that once thought they were safe. For some once-exclusive cul-de-sac communities, it may be time to drop the NIMBY attitude,  roll up your sleeves,  and help out with the Habitat renovation.

The Wayne County auction of some 9,000 repossessed properties last week resulted in more than 80 percent of them failing to draw a single bid. And that’s even with the minimum bid starting at just $500.

The fact that Rust Belt cities such as Detroit and Cleveland are plagued with foreclosed properties isn’t a new development. But what happened at that Detroit auction gives a glimpse into how acute the problem is. WalletPop explains:

The auction didn’t go smoothly, however. Out-of-town speculators cherry-picked prime properties in areas such as the Boston-Edison district, while locals who showed up too late for registration weren’t permitted to take part.

That’s the scandal. One of the reasons distressed communities have begun fighting for tools such as land banks — public enterprises that allow a community to quickly acquire abandoned and foreclosed properties, so they can be cleaned up and put to use – is to prevent speculators from playing games with foreclosed properties, while local officials watch helplessly. But as we’ve reported, getting a land bank together can be a lengthy and complicated process. Communities like Flint, Mich., are spearheading the shrinking cities movement, which tries to deal with the problem of foreclosed properties by cordoning off abandoned areas of the city and letting the land return to nature. It can be a great idea for some communities, but to achieve it, local officials first need that land bank or some other way to gain control of abandoned and foreclosed homes and land.

Otherwise, you can end up with a situation like the Detroit auction, where out-of-town speculators with money and experience can out-bid any local community groups or investors who might want to actually rebuild neighborhoods, rather than just  play real estate games.

As Virginia Tech urban planning expert Joseph Schilling told TWI last spring, ““We do a pretty good job in this country of recycling cans and plastic bottles. But we do an awful job of recycling and reusing vacant properties.”

Until our national housing policy turns more aggressively toward encouraging and allowing more local control of foreclosed properties — and to providing some financial support for that effort — expect to see more sad situations like that Detroit auction. We have some of the answers to this, in innovative policies like land banks. Why aren’t we moving with urgency to use them?

When Taylor died without a will on Nov. 27, 2007, the bulk of his $5.8 million estate went to his daughter, Jackie Taylor, now 3, who lives with her mother, Taylor’s high school sweetheart, Jackie Garcia, in Coral Gables, Fla. Taylor’s mother did not get a penny. Nor did his grandmother, great-grandmother, two of his half-siblings or any of the cousins or relatives who had grown accustomed to his largesse.

The result, for his mother, Donna Junor, has been a new hardship:

In Junor’s case, she was left with possessions that carry costs and fees that she says exceed her income as a substitute teacher. She could not pay the real-estate taxes last year on the townhouse she bought in 2005 with $222,000 her son had given her. Another tax bill is due at the end of November. She hasn’t paid her homeowners association dues in months. The lawyers have begun chasing.

Sean Taylor’s story was always a sad one, a young man who lost his life far too soon. He died a day after he was shot while confronting burglars in his home. That his $900,000 house is facing foreclosure, and that his mom could lose her home as well, only adds to the sadness. It’s also a reminder that behind the numbers of the foreclosure crisis are real and complicated stories of pain, loss, and homes that once represented someone’s achievements and dreams, taken back by the bank.

Sens. John Ensign (R-Nev.) and Ben Cardin (D-Md.) have also signed on to the proposal.

“This bipartisan plan is a proven model that incentivizes potential buyers while targeting the serious problem of excess inventory in the housing sector,” Reid said in a statement.

It’s no coincidence that both of Nevada’s senators are supporting the measure. The state had foreclosure filings on nearly 18,000 residences in August — or one in every 62 — the highest rate in the country, according to RealtyTrac, an online foreclosure database.

Cheronda Guyton, a senior vice president responsible for commercial foreclosed properties, broke company rules barring personal use of bank property, Wells Fargo said in a statement Monday.

The Times reported last week that Guyton had been spotted by neighbors spending time at the Malibu Colony home with her family this summer. At a party in August, guests were ferried to the beach house from a yacht, residents of the enclave said.

The property’s former owners were victims of convicted swindler Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, and lost the home as a result.

This story pretty much has everything you might look for if you’re trying to follow the foreclosure crisis. An expensive second home, taken back by the bank. Bernie Madoff. A top executive of a bailed-out bank capitalizing on someone else’s foreclosure mess. The yacht that brought guests to the party.

And now it has something else as well: Someone at the bank appears to have paid the price for unacceptable behavior. With top executives of companies bailed out by the taxpayers still raking in big paychecks, that’s  definitely something we haven’t seen much in this crisis. Too bad it had to take over-the-top behavior like partying in someone’s foreclosed house for that to finally happen.

A Wells Fargo executive who oversees foreclosed properties hosted parties and spent long summer weekends in a $12 million Malibu beach house, moving into the home just after it had been surrendered to Wells Fargo to satisfy debts, neighbors told The Associated Press.

It seems that Cheronda Guyton, a senior vice president responsible for foreclosed commercial properties at Wells Fargo, moved into the home in May after the previous owners lost their shirts in the Bernie Madoff scheme.

On Wednesday, another Wells executive, Mary Coffin, told House lawmakers that the banking giant, though a big corporation, “operate[s] with the conscience of a company determined to do what is right for our customers, our investors, and for all American taxpayers.”

Guyton’s actions suggest a different reality. And though it might be an isolated case, Mary this week pointed to a more systemic (and egregious) practice allegedly adopted by a Wells office in California: an alleged policy of lending discrimination in minority neighborhoods.

Wells stock might be on the rise, but its public image is quickly sinking.

Update: Thanks to reader M.A.M. for sending on a link to amazing photos of the actual house.

–

You can follow TWI on Twitter and Facebook.

Waters: When you bought the loan from this mortgage company, you had to look at it to see what you were buying, right?

Coffin: Not loan by loan.

Waters: Not loan by loan. You got packages?

Coffin: [Nods in agreement.]

It’s a curious response. You wouldn’t buy a car without taking a test drive, wouldn’t buy a house without a walk-through. Yet here were servicers snatching up mortgages with such urgency and nonchalance that they didn’t even care to investigate their soundness.

Waters says she has constituents who have been victims of mortgage fraud, their incomes falsified by mortgage originators to justify the terms and to make the loans look less risky than they were to entice the servicers vying to buy them up — situations that proved disastrous to all parties when the housing market tanked and home prices went underwater.

Complicating the issue, Coffin said, “many of the companies who originated those loans are out of business.”

Try squeezing the accountable party out of that mess.

Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) is hardly impressed.

The upper-chamber’s second-ranking Democrat issued a statement just hours later pointing out that almost precisely the same number of homeowners had foreclosure filings on their residences in July alone. Durbin said the figures are indication that Congress needs to step in to protect struggling homeowners.

Waiting for banks to ‘volunteer’ to end this foreclosure crisis is a waste of time. Treasury’s latest report show this approach has failed miserably.

It’s time for the Treasury Secretary to sit down with Congressional leadership and work to end this blight on our economic future.

Although the statement doesn’t mention mortgage bankruptcy reform, Durbin has been among the loudest cheerleaders for that proposal, which would empower homeowners to escape foreclosure through the courts.

Although House lawmakers passed mortgage bankruptcy reform legislation earlier in the year, Senate lawmakers killed the proposal after the Obama administration abandoned its support for the measure.

The numbers are sure to capture some attention on Capitol Hill, where Democratic leaders in both the House and Senate have threatened the return of bankruptcy reform legislation — which would empower homeowners to prevent foreclosure through the courts — if the enticements to industry don’t result in more loan mods.

With today’s news that foreclosures have topped 12,000 per day, the calls to do something more are sure to grow louder.