Crazy things in Flint MI property market....?

[DTEJD1997]

Hey all:

 

I was playing poker the other day with a property owner/developer.  He owns several properties in Genesee County Michigan.  He owns a couple of properties in Flint, but most of them are outside of Flint, but in Genesee County.

 

In the course of our conversation, he brought up a couple of crazy points...

 

A). Insurance on some properties is not available, OR available at SILLY prices.  What did he mean by this?  Well, he has some rental house worth about $40k, that would cost $8k a year to insure.  Most insurance carriers won't even write this type of insurance...So how does one get a mortgage on such properties?  Well, he explained that you don't.  The market is simply a cash market. 

 

This reminds me of the auto insurance market in Detroit....

 

B). All sorts of goofiness is going on in the lead in the water catastrophe.  All sorts of mundane, run of the mill graft & corruption is going on of course...but he brought up a good point.  Why is the government going to spend HUGE amounts of money to redo pipes to pieces of property that aren't even worth what is being spend reworking the pipes?

 

Perhaps a better use of the money might be simply to move people out of Flint.

 

Huge amounts of money are going to be spent on property that is worth nothing, on people that have no jobs, no hope, and no future.

 

Why not spend that money and give people a shot at a better life?

 

 

[Jurgis]

Why not spend that money and give people a shot at a better life?

 

Because of the human nature.

 

Do you know what shitstorm would happen if people were offered $40K per family (or whatever their property is/isn't worth) to get up and leave? Some people might be happy, but my guess for some people this would end up as "gov't is trying to kick us out of our houses" protest/lawsuit/rebellion.

 

So bad solutions will be taken instead.

 

Note that I don't know crap about Flint and the situation there, so I may be mistaken on various points.