[MassHistPres] Hardship and ownership transfer

[Burks, Sarah]

Reconstruction of the fire damaged (or destroyed) house to a substantially similar exterior design is one of the 8 categories of alterations that may be excluded from review under Ch. 40C:8.8. What does your ordinance allow in such a situation?

-----Original Message-----
From: masshistpres-bounces at cs.umb.edu [mailto:masshistpres-bounces at cs.umb.edu] On Behalf Of Ralph Slate
Sent: Friday, March 21, 2008 11:03 AM
To: masshistpres at cs.umb.edu
Subject: Re: [MassHistPres] Hardship and ownership transfer

While that is certainly true, it won't help save this building because the reality is that the insurance settlement is no longer with the property, and the new owner doesn't have a half-million to fix the property.

It would be serious bad publicity to sue the new owner over this. The old owner is the one who should bear responsibility.

Turns out she paid $5k for the property. The new owner seems sincere about fixing it, but I think she has underestimated the amount necessary to even stabilize it.

Ralph

Jonathan Feist wrote:
> It strikes me that getting a property for $1 implies taking on the
> responsibility to improve it.
>
> There's no such thing as a free lunch.
>
> --Jonathan
>
>
>
> on 3/20/08 9:07 PM, Ralph Slate at slater at alum.rpi.edu wrote:
>
>
>> Does anyone have any specific experience with someone who transfers
>> property to another owner to avoid having to fix it?
>>
>> In Springfield, a structure had a substantial fire. The owner received
>> an insurance settlement of $760,000. She wanted to tear the structure
>> down instead of repairing it (she said it was beyond repair, we were in
>> the process of evaluating that).
>>
>> She then sold the property to someone else for $1, none of the $760,000
>> accompanied the sale. The new owner now owns a property with probably at
>> least $500,000 of damage, potentially no assets to repair it.
>>
>> With the original owner, we could have pointed to the insurance money
>> and said "there's no hardship because you have enough to fix the
>> property". With the new owner, I'm not so sure we could do that since
>> there are no assets to look at.
>>
>> Surely something like this has been tried before. Anyone know of any
>> similar cases?
>>
>> Ralph
>>
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