TULSA, Okla. — No one wants to live next to a trashy, dilapidated house or apartment complex.
The kind with overgrown yards, junk vehicles abandoned here and there, overflowing dumpsters and garbage cans, broken windows or caved-in roofs, and weeds reaching for the sky.
Oklahoma's legislature passed a new law authored by Tulsa House District 68 Representative Mike Lay to combat the blight.
"If my house sits next to a vacant piece of property that's blighted," Lay said, "That then devalues my personal property."
"The new law will go into effect November 1st," said Tulsa Government Affairs Director, Shane Stone. "So between now and then, the mayor's gonna be working with the city council to get an ordinance in place so we can take advantage of the opportunities that that new law affords."
"It allows them basically to apply a municipal lien that is only subordinate to a tax lien," said Lay.
It's a carrot-and-stick approach to bring properties into compliance.
First, property owners will be encouraged to clean up and fix up. If they fail to do so, there will be financial consequences. And, it only applies to non-owner occupied properties that have accumulated $1,500 in code enforcement violations.
"It certainly empowers our code enforcement efforts to be a little bit more aggressive," Stone said. "Specifically on abandoned properties or the sort of properties where we have absentee owners from out-of-state where they aren't taking care of their properties. We want to make sure we're keeping neighborhoods clean and safe, and this gives us another tool to do that."
According to Lay, it is modeled on a similar law in Alabama that helped the city of Mobile greatly reduce its number of blighted properties. "They had like 1,800 properties identified, and they brought it down to just a little under 800, so it had a significantly positive effect."
Mobile Mayor Sandy Stimpson told 2 News, "There was a direct correlation between crime in the area and the amount of blighted houses that you have because so many of them could be used for uh illegal purposes. So we recognize that from a public safety standpoint we needed to do something about it. But also for property values sake and for those people that happened to be living on the street and could not afford to move, they just sat there and watched the value of their home, which was probably the greatest asset they have just diminished and we knew that was not where we wanted to be."
Mobile quickly discovered its law came with an additional benefit. The fixed up properties provide additional affordable housing.
Stone told 2 News it is a side effect Tulsa hopes to enjoy in addition to others.
"It's going to make our neighborhood safer by not having blighted properties, which hits on the mayor's goal of making Tulsa the safest big city in America," said Stone. "It's also going to help us get those properties back on the market and cleaned up so they're better for the neighbors around them. It also helps us with our affordable housing challenges."
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