How can you tell when it is the first day of the month in Woodstock?
Check for household goods, furniture, trash piled on the parkway in front of a rental property. This one, in the 500 block of Clay Street, began accumulating on Saturday. Of course, Community Development was closed.
The City of Woodstock should compile a list of every landlord in town and send each a letter with specific instructions about the use of the parkway for property of renters they are evicting. Give them 24 hours to remove the mess, then send a City dumptruck for it and bill the landlord.
The problem is probably compounded by State laws pertaining to evictions and any safeguards of property of the unlucky person who got evicted. Maybe landlords should be required to move a tenant's property into secure storage for 30 days. If so, they are sitting on plenty of money (at least a deposit of one month's rent) to pay for it.
Maybe they'll need to increase the security deposit to cover the possibility of eviction-related moving and storage expense. At 8:00AM on Tuesday Woodstock's Code Enforcement Officer will know of this pile. The clock is ticking...
3 comments:
If this is trash that is one thing; if this is a family's entire belongings that's another. Some compassion would be warranted perhaps by a neighbor to use their garage for a few days until a safe place out of the weather and away from thieves might be found. We are going to be seeing more and more of this kind of thing in these economic times.
Neighbors helping neighbors?!?!?! Those days are long gone. No one likes to chat over the fence anymore or ask their neighbor to stop burning yard waste. Everyone is too quick to call the police or neighborhood services (that's what they call code enforcement in my town).
I've written previously about the need for cooperation and compassion in assisting those falling on even harder times. It's bad enough that a family, often with children, cannot afford its rental and suffers eviction. Adding the loss of possessions for lack of money to move and secure them just creates further hardship.
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