The Great American Pixel

Introducing-ish: The Land Blank

Public Service Announcement: If you want to register for the 2011 Wayne County Tax Foreclosure Auction the deadline is **this Friday at 4 PM**. Registration costs a $1,000 deposit + a $35 processing fee to bid on one property at a time (the online auction comes in waves) or a $5,000 deposit + $35 processing fee for multi-core bidding. Detroit properties up for auction can be explored most easily at whydontweownthis.com.

If you miss the deadline or can’t afford it right now, all might not be lost for you. My friend Andy Didorosi (<— hey, look at that sharp dressed if stoic 20 in his 20s) and I have been kicking an idea around for a little while now called The Land Blank (follow updates on Twitter @landblank). What is a land blank, you ask? Well, I suppose it’s an innocent attempt at discovering a new school style of land banking, incorporating the open crowdfunding of vacant properties.

There are 2 things here relavent to the auction.

One is that The Land Blank can bid at the auction and will likely offer a “proxy bidding” service for people with good stories. So, for example, you didn’t register for the auction but reeeaaallllllyyy want to bid on that lot down the street. Give us a shout and if you can transfer over the funds for us to bid with, we’ll do it on your behalf and then sign the deed over to you if the bid is successful (or return your money if it’s not). Sorry speculators or out of town peeps, we gotta keep this service inbounds and make sure the buyers are also local activators.  

The other is that we’d like to start a fundraising pool to bid on $500 properties. The way the auction works is that first properties are auctioned with the opening bid equating to the back taxes owed. After that, everything left drops down to an opening bid of $500. I think the rules here should be as follows: we’ll only bid on properties that are about to end with no bidders, meaning that they’d otherwise just return to the county (AKA they were unsuccessfully auctioned). The purpose of this is to try and match the properties with ideal owners or projects after the auction is done. 

So, say we raise $10,000 to bid on properties with, that would equal 20 $500 properties. We’d then advertise the fact that we have these 20 properties and are looking for the ideal use. This might mean turning them over to a neighbor or community group or someone with a badass idea who proves they can execute it.

As is the style at the time, we don’t know exactly what’s going to happen, but we can collaboratively, transparently figure it out and hopefully do some good and make some interesting discoveries along the way that can lead to smarter land-use solutions down the road. 

If you’re interested, get in touch! thelandblank@gmail.com and twitter.com/landblank. And check out what’s up for auction at whydontweownthis.com.