An update to DB urbanism

By CHRISTINA HOAG The Associated Press updated 5/23/2011 10:10:58  – LOS ANGELES — A dead dog lies among the knee-high weeds, a sign to Guillermo Elenes that the burned out, boarded up house is being used as a dump. Inside, soiled diapers, fast-food trash and the strewn beer and vodka bottles indicate squatters have been living there. The dumping ground-crash pad serves as a squalid symbol of how the foreclosure crisis is riddling communities with blight because no one wants to shoulder the responsibility of maintaining foreclosed homes. “There’s one on every block,” said Elenes, a community organizer with the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment in Watts, a low-income South Los Angeles neighborhood pockmarked with foreclosed homes. “All we want is for the banks to step up and be good citizens.”
Communities across the nation have made little progress in getting banks to maintain foreclosed properties, and as the ongoing crisis matures and bank-owned homes fall into advanced stages of disrepair, cities and residents are getting desperate. In a keenly watched move this month, Los Angeles forged a new strategy — it sued one of the world’s major financial institutions, Deutsche Bank, to force it to take care of 166 properties, both vacant and renter-occupied, charging the blue-chip German giant has turned into the city’s largest slumlord. “The buck stops with the owner of record. We’re saying, ‘You are an owner like any other owner,'” said Julia Figueira-McDonough, deputy city attorney.
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