Councillor corner: The challenge of abandoned properties

Abandoned properties become havens for squatters and other vagrants. A relatively secure home in the heart of a job-rich environment is very attractive to people who often find themselves living along rivers or in parks in our suburbs due to adverse conditions. Protection from the elements and security for limited possessions as well as a viable location to allow family to live with informal workers in the area are just a few reasons why people flock to these locations.

The challenge comes in that these same people, coming for work purposes, provide a safe community for criminals to hide within. It is difficult from the outside to separate the criminal living in an illegally occupied property and those that are just staying close to work. This results in abandoned properties becoming base camps of criminal activity and hot spots of crime in our suburbs, from drug dealers to professional home break in specialists.

In order to tackle this growing problem we are making use of the Department of Environmental Health in order to get the owners of properties to begin to maintain their properties in a way that doesn’t risk community safety. We are also involving the Metro police to assist with the removal of squatters and vagrants from these properties.

Residents can assist by both contacting their local councillors to highlight the location of abandoned properties in their area, as well as by going to their local Community Policing Forum meetings to highlight the property as a potential crime hot spot for police and Metro police vigilance.

In the long term, we are pushing to get the laws and processes changed to better facilitate the process of securing and maintaining these properties to keep them from becoming a problem. But that doesn’t help communities right now. So we need to work together to use the available resources to identify and control these problem properties to make our community safer.