This isn't an imminent domain case where they force you to sell your property and then knock the house down. This is worse. They county decides your house must go and they tear it down, leaving you with your empty lot. They have done this hundreds of times!
#^Man's House Bulldozed—No Notice, No Compensation
Eric Arnold stood in front of his property in Macon-Bibb County, Georgia, shaking in shock and disbelief. The house he had been painstakingly fixing up for months—the house he poured hours of work and thousands of dollars into—was being clawed into a pile of rubble by a backhoe.
The County had secretly labeled Eric’s house an imminent threat to the community due to its supposed state of disrepair. Under the County’s rules, that secret label gave the mayor and his Code Enforcement officers the power to demolish Eric’s house without any semblance of due process or a court proceeding. But Eric’s property was not a threat to the community. He had been lovingly repairing the fixer-upper with an eye toward giving his children and grandchildren a place to settle nearby. While he still had work to do, the yard was neat, the exterior was clean, the house was locked up, and, most importantly, it was in a vastly improved state of repair compared to when he purchased it.
Despite this progress, Eric first learned that his house might be on the chopping block a little over a month before the County demolished it, when a neighbor called him to say someone was placing a dumpster next to his house. Believing that the County made a mistake, Eric convinced the demolition crew to stand down and then rushed to County offices, begging officials to take his house off the demolition list.
Eric did everything he could to save his house, and County officials led him to believe that he had stopped the demolition. Behind the scenes, however, the County secretly sped up the demolition after Eric asked county officials for help. Less than two months after Eric learned about the potential teardown, the County sent a team of armed Code Enforcement officers to make sure that his house was torn down in the early hours of the morning. The code enforcement officers succeeded.
Unfortunately, much of Eric’s story is not unique. The County has leveled more than 800 homes in just over three years using the same secret procedure it used to demolish Eric’s house. But the Constitution doesn’t allow the County to simply destroy property —all property owners are entitled to notice and a meaningful opportunity to be heard before the government tears down their home. The County has ignored and continues to ignore these constitutional rules.
Eric knew the County was in the wrong, so he teamed up with the Institute for Justice (IJ) to sue Macon-Bibb County in state court and protect the rights of all Americans to due process and to ask for help from government officials.
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