City of Minneapolis Backs Down After Requiring Owners of Buildings Destroyed in Riots to Pay Property Taxes
Richard Moorhead
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The City of Minneapolis is backing down after seeking to bilk the property owners of buildings damaged in the Minneapolis riots, trying to make them pay property taxes before granting a demolition permit for them to tear down damaged structures.
The city had remarkably been applying a strict legal standard to the owners of buildings that had been destroyed in the riots, without doing so much as even preventing rampaging mobs from damaging or outright destroying 1,500 buildings in the city.
Only twenty buildings wrecked in the wake of the riots have been accordingly demolished, with Minneapolis property owners understandably reluctant to pay taxes on firebombed structures. The city perhaps relented on the policy this week, which is justified with a reaching interpretation of a state law, when it recognized that demanding taxes for riot-torched buildings would have prevented any tentative rebuilding.
Minneapolis’ downtown area would have been stuck with more than a thousand structures and buildings in various stages of blight, sentencing parts of the city to the urban decay seen in other midwestern cities such as Detroit.
Estimates of the range of the destruction inflicted upon the city have varied, but it appears as if initial reports of the destruction were underestimated. City authorities have estimated a massive $55 million of property damage was inflicted, mostly upon small businesses, with more than 700 buildings destroyed, a figure since inflated.
A sizable percentage of the city’s taxpaying homeowner base has indicated that they’re preparing to move the city, leaving Minneapolis perhaps fiscally doomed for its embrace of senseless anarcho-tyranny.
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