Nuisance Central
Whether it's for your current neighborhood or for one you're interested in buying a house in, Scoop's got one more way to find out what's really going on.
Already, John Q. Public can go online to find out the tax values and sale prices for their neighbors homes. But let's say you're buying a house on the 200 block of S. Mendenhall St. and you want to make sure your future neighbors don't leave junk cars in the yard or let their houses deteriorate.
All you have to do is go to the City of Greensboro's online Code Enforcement database and type in the name of the street and the first numeral of the street address.
For Mendenhall, you'll find that in August of last year, 211 S. Mendenhall had a problem with trash piling up in the yard. City inspectors ordered it cleaned up and it was completed a week later. The next month, the same property was inspected and ordered vacated for numerous building code violations. As of Dec. 28, the property has not been repaired.
Whether you still want to buy a house on that block is your call, but at least you'll know. The service also comes in handy for apartment renters, who can look up what problems have been found by inspectors in their building. And if there's a condemned house in your neighborhood, you can check up to see whether the owner is making any progress to fix it up.
Try it out on your street and see if anything catches you by surprise.
Comments (6)
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Interesting that you used the Mendenhall address as your example. Did you know as well that it is owned by none other than Greensboro College?
Posted on January 25, 2005 11:36 AM
A great resource. Thanks.
Type in 111 in the street number and Cypress in the street name and you'll get an idea of the frustration many of my neighbors have been dealing with for several years.
An explanation of 'house' and 'nuisance' would be helpful, though.
Posted on January 25, 2005 11:40 AM
Betty: Actually I picked the 200 block of Mendenhall because I figured it might have code violations because of the converted-old-house-rental units around there. If that indeed is the college's, I'll have to look into that further.
David:If you click on the individual items, they bring you to another page that has four tabs, two of which have useful information. For instance, if you click on the second to last item for 111 Cypress, across the street from you, you'll see in the history tab that the house was condemned 5/18/04 until the owner brought it into compliance on 6/4/04.
The system has some definite weaknesses, namely there's no instructions or explanation whatsoever. It also won't show more than 100 violations, so for a frequent offender like Bill Agapion's complex on 211 N. Cedar St., you cant access any because there are so many. But it gives you a general sense for most areas.
Posted on January 25, 2005 10:46 PM
Matt ... Thanks for your response and hopefully further investigation. Unless the online tax records are not up to date, Greensboro College currently owns two residential properties in College Hill. The second one is 129 S. Mendenhall, which is also cited for numerous code violations. The college bought these properties very quietly and for hugely inflated prices several years ago. Since then, neighbors have speculated that they intend to let them go to ruin, then raze them. Even though we are an historic district, there's fear this could happen. We would love for the N&R to find out what's going on, because these properties are definitely a blight on the neighborhood.
Posted on January 26, 2005 8:24 AM
Thanks Matt - apparently the expanded information is only available using IE, I'm a Netscape user and they didn't function until I tried with IE.
Betty brings up a great investigative piece, but my guess is you didn't use the Mendenhall address simply out of pure chance.
Combine Betty's story and the Cypress St. one and you might have a great view of how ineffective our code enforcement can be in the real world.
Posted on January 26, 2005 11:39 PM
David,
Really, I didn't know about Greensboro College's involvement when I wrote the post. I picked that block of Mendenhall because I know a lot of those old rental houses had problems, and that address just seemed to have a lot of violations.
Posted on January 27, 2005 11:04 AM