This is really a good one today. Riviera Beach, long a troubled, crime ridden area, is taking more steps to clean up the City. RB is a strange place. On the one hand, which you don’t hear about much, they have some great marina’s (I go fishing out of Sailfish Marina regularly) and reasonable priced residential property by the water and the inter-coastal. On the other, you see in the newspaper and news the shootings, arrests, etc. that seem to occur there on a daily basis. This has led to properties losing value and in many cases being abandoned. The City decided to do something about it and used foreclosure, donations and the expiration of community redevelopment program to get the properties back. Now given the fact that properties of any kind are incredibly difficult to sell, the City decided to auction them all off at once. While this method is not the way to get top dollar, it will allow the sale to happen quickly and get them off the City’s books. It is not often a City hires an auction company to do this, and this is the first I have seen in Palm Beach County since I have moved here in 2001. The City gets potentially many benefits from this in addition to getting them off the books. They plan to use the proceeds towards the general budget. But really the hope is that people will take advantage of the low prices and move there and fix up the homes. Then they become part of the tax rolls providing more income to the City. The big assumption here is that the credit and liquidity is there for housing in this area. In another article I will be blogging about today, the banks have tightened their restrictions to the point where if you don’t have pristine credit you will not be able to get a loan. So it will be interesting to see how this plays out. I wish them the best with the sale and hope the City will undergo a long awaited rebirth.
There were once grand plans to redevelop the entire City in 2003 but as a result of corruption and other infighting, the project never moved forward. I saw it and it was very impressive. I hope one day something like it can be revived and maybe this is the first step to getting there.
Riviera Beach land auction open to all Jan. 25
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