Pete Nelson, photographed with his wife Ethel by my colleague Kyndell Harkness, reported a stream of driveby gawkers on Smithtown Terrace after my Sunday story about his efforts to get the Metropolitan Council to pay for fixing damage to his property from a $7 million sewer project. A day later, Met Council staff faced some skeptical questions from the Victoria City Council, which is scheduled to vote July 13 on allowing the project’s next phase. That involves digging a tunnel 100 feet underground to accommodate a 6-foot-diameter sewer to serve the Victoria, Waconia and St. Bonifacius area.

Kim Roden is the council member who has been most publicly critical about the Met Council’s behavior toward property owners with gripes about its sewer project.

“I don’t want to stop them. I want to see the project go forward,” Roden told me earlier this week. “I need to know what’s going to change so we don’t have a mess… [At Monday’s meeting] I told these guys, you may think of me from the council woman from hell, but I got to tell you something, you guys have just totally messed this up.”

Bonnie Kollodge, a Met Council spokeswoman, told me in an email that the Met Council Environmental Services “is refining its proposed written procedure pertaining to construction related concerns and claims. Staff plan to discuss with Victoria staff prior to transmitting a proposed procedure to the City Council as part of amending our cooperative agreement.”

(more…)

Mark Miernicki, the guy in the picture above, contacted Whistleblower as part of his vigorous campaign to hang onto the house he has lived in for 17 years. I told his story in my Sunday column (I’m only getting around to telling blog readers about it now because I was out of the office Monday and Tuesday - hence the deafening silence on the blog. Whistleblowers need a break sometimes, too). This story was my introduction to that exotic financial “product” called a negative-amortizing loan, sometimes described as a “pick-a-payment” or “payment-option” adjustable rate mortgage. Unlike conventional mortgages, in which you pay a bit of the principal each month, the principal in these loans actually goes up each month. The FDIC fact sheet on these kinds of loans warns of a syndrome called “payment shock.” “Your payments may go up a lot–as much as double or triple–after the interest-only period or when the payments adjust.”

(more…)

Now officially vacant and officially owned by Fannie Mae, 823 Penn Avenue North in Minneapolis - the subject of Monday’s story and video and this photo by my colleague Kyndell Harkness - has a bright future, if Fannie Mae’s promises are fulfilled. Amy Bonitatibus, a spokeswoman in Washington for the federally-bailed-out mortgage giant, said that as of March 31, Fannie Mae owned 62,371 single-family homes nationwide - all of them obtained through foreclosure. That’s nearly 20,000 more than a year earlier.

But Bonitatibus pointed out that Fannie Mae is selling thousands of houses as well, through private brokers, auctions and its own web site. Fannie Mae’s modus operandi is to fix up the homes and then sell them, rather than just unloading them as is, she said. It won’t sit boarded for years, either, she said. She suspects the repairs and listing could happen within 30 days.

(more…)

Last month, Ted Poetsch contacted the Star Tribune about his ordeal of being boarded in his own house in the Willard-Homewood neighborhood of north Minneapolis. The boards over his front and back doors obstructed his way on two occasions: on May 12, when he tried to get out, and on June 3, when he tried to get back in.

A Whistleblower reader pointed out that despite the city’s claim that this was unprecedented, as recently as 2005 a woman’s body was discovered in a house at 3216 Garfield Avenue South that had been boarded eight months earlier. As my colleague David Chanen reported on Aug. 22, 2005, the reclusive Darlene Pirtle was 79 and had cut off contact with the outside world.

It may never be clear whether the 79-year-old was alive or dead
when the city shut up the tiny house at 3216 Garfield Av., the
Hennepin County medical examiner said.

(more…)