Public Nuisance Abatement Litigation in the Mortgage Crisis

This paper was initially drafted in October, 2010 and has been edited slightly since then. It describes the author's first-hand experience in the use of civil nuisance abatement litigation as a code enforcement tool in the first decade of the 21st Century. It notes the inadequacies of criminal prosecution which, in the face of new marketing and financing practices, allowed remote corporate financial institutions to take ownership of housing with no intention of complying with local housing and building maintenance codes. Those and other circumstances where no actual human appeared in answer to a summons require a different approach to protecting neighborhoods from abusive land use. Civil litigation is an important new tool to use in cases against individual dwellings; but it is not alone a sufficient tool. Where courts and the case law permit the nuisance of outlaw behavior in the guise of business models and practices, municipalities are not able to keep up with the level of illegal conduct perpetrated by the noncompliant financial institutions . The paper discusses specific cases litigated in Cleveland, Ohio to make that point.