Flip Thy House

“How Can I Get an Abandoned Home Condemned Or Demolished?”

If there’s an abandoned home in your neighborhood that’s an eyesore and/or dangerous, whether or not it can be removed is largely a matter up to your local building code inspector or code enforcement office.

Being an eyesore isn’t reason enough to condemn or demolish an abandoned home, no matter how bad it looks from the street. If the home is inspected and deemed to be structurally sound and not a danger to anyone who might wander onto the property, in most cases it cannot be condemned or demolished by the city or state you live in. Simply looking ugly and unattractive isn’t reason enough to have it torn down, no matter how much you and your neighbors might enjoy that.

That said, it is possible to make a persuausive case to your local code enforcement agency that could possibly influence their determination on how structurally sound the building is, as that’s in some cases a judgment call. If you and your neighbors sign a petition and document the dangers the home presents (i.e. squatters break into it to live, the local high school punks break into it to get high, etc.), that might be enough to sway your local inspector to deem it structurally unsound, whereas he or she might not otherwise have decided that.

If it is deemed unsound and dangerous, the city usually must give the owner of the home 30-90 days to bring it up to code and make it safe. If those repairs aren’t made by the deadline, the city will then typically take bids from contractors to demolish the building. So even if you do succeed in getting an abandoned home condemned and slated for demolition, it can take more than 3 months for that to actually be accomplished.