Foreclosed homes a mess for county

TAMPA –It’s a cool morning in suburban Valrico when a small team of Hillsborough County code officers descends on a house with a broken fence and weeds as high as a man’s head.

Bill Langford, head of the county’s special code enforcement team, breaks out a portable drill, starts replacing wood and fixing the lock on a privacy fence that surrounds an algae-covered swimming pool. Another team member rides a bush hog over the dense vegetation that once was a lawn.

Hours later, the pool is still a pond of green slime, but at least it’s secured so that kids from a nearby school bus stop won’t drown in it. The shorn lawn is less of an eyesore, and the team can move to another of the thousands of foreclosed homes that have been abandoned since the housing market crashed in 2007.

“Our plan is not to continue to maintain that property,” Langford said. “We will monitor it, but we hope the banks will get it through discharge of bankruptcy and take responsibility for it. But we want to get it to a degree where it’s not a major detriment to the community.”

Rest here…

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