Thursday, August 02, 2007

The City Hates Him Too

Ladies and Gentlemen seeking justice for our beleaguered condo association has been a driving force in my life for the past two years.

It’s why I started this blog.

Well that and I thought I’d go bat shit crazy from all of the association drama.

It’s been a long road.

I’ve discovered that if you pursue it long enough, things may start to change for the better.

I think that’s about to happen with respect to bootleg developers.

After countless months of waiting the City of Chicago is starting (or has started) a joint task force between The Mayor’s Office, The Department of Consumer Services and The Department of Construction & Permits to rout out bad developers and general contractors.

We have been delivered from the wilderness.

Hopefully the process will be smoothed out and properly publicized by the end of the calendar year so the general public will know how to put a shady developer or general contractor on “blast.”

The difference between these proceedings and a regular civil city lawsuit is that the city would be seeking remedies that bar the developer from doing business in the city---EVER AGAIN and to put the property or properties that he or she is developing into receivership.

Nice, huh? I call it the developer death penalty.

Now obviously there will be ways for someone to get around the death penalty, but that means you as the smart informed consumer that you are (after reading this blog) will actually have to perform due diligence.

Better yet, if you see your bootleg developer is doing another project, you have to blow the whistle on him or her.

Find the real estate agents that they list with and follow the paper trail from there. It’s incredibly easy and now that everything’s online all the information you ever wanted to know is at your fingertips.

Literally.

The minute I get word of how you’ll be able to report your ghetto ass developer, I’ll put it on the blog ASAP.

It’s about time the city brings the pain.

2 comments:

kbr7171 said...

"Now obviously there will be ways for someone to get around the death penalty..."

Yeah, be a friend of the mayor.

The North Coast said...

The inception of this task force comes awfully late-definately a case of locking the barn door after the entire herd has raced out of the barn and stampeded every meadow in its path.

Given that complaints about illegal conversions, extremely shoddy construction, and rampant code violations were multiplying by year two of the Bubble, why is this so late?

Gotta give Da Mare's cronies a chance to pocket their dough first, right?

It's great that the city will shut these scum down after they have had the biggest bull run in housing history to erect their stapled-together crackerboxes all over the city and pocket kazillions of dollars.

At least, for a number of these predatory scum, a "cease and desist" will be meaningless, as they are facing foreclosure on construction loans and steep losses on the huge inventory of unsold houses and condos here, as everywhere else. Inasmuch as most of them had to guarantee their loans with personal assets, they will be blasted out of the water forever by construction loan foreclosures at a time when their own homes are losing value. Some will end up out everything they own or stand to own...

...and it just couldn't happen to a nicer crowd of people,could it?