Opinion | The county seized her condo, sold it and kept all the money. Not nice.

By George F. Will
Columnist
April 24, 2023 at 7:30 a.m. EDT

“Minnesota nice,” the stereotype of the Upper Midwest’s congeniality, needs an asterisk denoting an exception. The state’s amiability expires when grasping government wants to steal your house. Just ask Geraldine Tyler, 94, the Black grandmother whose lawyers will, in Wednesday’s oral arguments, ask the Supreme Court to remind Minnesota of Magna Carta, and of the Constitution’s takings clause and the excessive fines clause. Both provisions, it would be nice for Minnesota to acknowledge, are in the Bill of Rights.

In 2010, alarmed by neighborhood disorder, Tyler, retired and living alone, moved from her Minneapolis condominium to a senior living center. She neglected to pay taxes on her one-bedroom condominium, and by 2015 the $2,300 due in back taxes — combined with penalties, interest and fees — brought her liability to $15,000. The county seized and sold her property for $40,000. Tyler is not challenging the propriety of the seizure or sale, but of the county’s home equity theft. Instead of returning $25,000 to her, the government, in a common act of legalized self-dealing, kept $25,000, to distribute to government entities.

Minnesota governments began doing this under a Depression-era (1936) delinquent-property-tax-forfeiture statute enacted when governments were, even more than usual, ravenous for revenue. As Tyler’s lawyers note, between 2014 and 2021 at least 1,350 Minnesotans lost their homes and equity averaging $155,000 per home. This is many times the average tax liability. Nebraska took a $1 million farm after a widow missed an $8,276 tax bill when she was moved to a retirement home. Such predatory forfeiture is done by a dozen states and the District of Columbia, which took a $200,000 home from a man with dementia and a $133 tax debt. (Michigan has mostly mended its ways since a county pocketed $24,500 from the sale of an octogenarian’s home seized because of his $8.41 tax underpayment, and a court frowned on government’s unbounded power to confiscate.)

Centuries of Anglo-American legal tradition, common law and Minnesota law recognize home equity as private property. The Supreme Court has noted that Magna Carta (1215) stipulated that tax collectors could seize property to acquire only the value of the tax bill. The court has held that the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee that property shall not be taken for public use without “just compensation” makes no “distinction between different types” of property, and that this takings clause protects “every sort of interest the citizen may possess” in a “physical thing.” And prior to Minnesota’s enactment of the 1936 law, the state’s Supreme Court held that after the state’s lien is satisfied, “any surplus realized from the sale must revert to the owner.”

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Opinion by George Will
George F. Will writes a twice-weekly column on politics and domestic and foreign affairs. He began his column with The Post in 1974, and he received the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1977. His latest book, "American Happiness and Discontents," was released in September 2021. Twitter https://twitter.com/georgewill

She’s at risk of losing her Florida home over a violation she didn’t know existed

Ben Wieder, Ryan Callihan
Tue, April 25, 2023 at 8:00 AM EDT · 7 min read

Last month Marina Adair returned to Bradenton desperate to save her home. ... The 1925 house, located in the Village of the Arts neighborhood Adair helped found, had once been the location for her art space, Marina’s Village Studios and Gallery, which spotlighted local artists. But Adair, 63, had planned to move in and spend the rest of her life there. ... The artsy neighborhood is home to more than a dozen studios and shops that are also artists residences. In Bradenton, the community is known for its vibrantly painted homes and Art Walk events that attract thousands of visitors every month.

Adair’s retirement plan was put in jeopardy, however, after the city filed suit against her last August to foreclose on the house over unpaid code enforcement fines. ... The fines stemmed from a 2014 code violation for “dirt, mold and mildew” and “chalking, chipped and peeling paint” on the exterior walls of her house, which Adair said was the result of algae from banyan trees in the front of her house and paint that was stripped when she removed a vine growing on the house. ... Adair was aware of the initial violation, but believed it had been resolved back in 2014 when she had hired a handyman to clean the walls.

The lawsuit came as a shock. ... It was filed by a private attorney named Matt Weidner, who signed a contract with the city in 2020 to file foreclosure lawsuits against properties with unpaid code fines. Under the terms of the agreement, Weidner gets a portion of whatever the city recovers by foreclosing on homes and selling them at auction or reaching settlements with owners like Adair to pay some or all of what they owe.

A Miami Herald investigation found that Weidner has signed similar agreements with a total of nine cities and counties across the state and that he has supercharged foreclosures for code violations in the cities that hire him. ... That investigation, and its impact, might now help Adair keep her house.

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