3113 Arsenal Street in the Tower Grove East neighborhood was gutted by fire on the night of November 12. It’s the usual story: the owner of an abandoned house who’s owned the building for decades deferred maintenance for so long that finally it was in such terrible shape it couldn’t even get the most desperate tenants anymore (I saw the inside one time, and it was bad). It has a water lien against the address filed by the City of St. Louis, as well as a sewer lien filed against the property by the Metropolitan Sewer District. The owner also is behind on his property taxes three years.
Wait a minute–three years?! Isn’t the City supposed to seize and auction off properties delinquent on their taxes after three years? It should have been auctioned off this summer. St. Louis doesn’t have any problem doing that to elderly African Americans in North St. Louis, after all. Well, I’ll let you in on a little secret I’ve been keeping for a while: the City of St. Louis has been failing to seize vacant properties owned by slumlords and absentee owners all over the city for years now, allowing properties with four, five and even six years of back property taxes to accumulate. Allowing, like we see in this example, for houses to sit vacant–and vulnerable to arson. There are properties like this, some big, some very big and some small. The citizens of St. Louis deserve an answer.
This house would have definitely sold at the Sheriff’s tax auction: a property like this would have been easily converted into a $300,000 single family in a “hot” neighborhood like Tower Grove East generating $3,000-$4,000 in real estate taxes a year. In other words, if this property had been seized from its slumlord owner like it should have been this year, it very well might have been on its way to being rehabbed, instead of probably becoming a pile of rubble.
The house just to the west looked like it had been damaged by fire, as well, but there was something weird about it that did not point to collateral damage from its neighbor’s conflagration. Upon further investigation, I determined the house had been abandoned for several years and had been gutted by fire only three weeks ago. It was condemned by the Building Division on October 21. What are the chances of two adjacent abandoned buildings burning three weeks apart?
And in case you’re wondering about one of those properties with extreme back property taxes, take 3117 St. Louis Avenue, with five years of unpaid arrears:
It is that church we’ve looked at many times over the years.