to think of anything, but a close runner-up is the eviction of elderly veterans who had put their lives on the line to defend their country. Here is one example. It started with an unpaid $134 property tax bill on a home owned by a retired Marine veteran in Washington, D.C. Because of dementia, he forgot to pay his bills, just as he often forgot to buy food. In a few years, this $134 debt grew into $4,999, and because of this, he lost his home valued at $197,000. U.S. Marshals actually arrived at his door, ordering him off the property. How did this happen? Here was a man with medals to prove his service, suffering from memory loss, who lost everything for an amount 40 times less than the value of his property that he had owned for 20 years, having bought it with cash. According to The Detroit News, Wayne County auctioned off almost 30,000 properties in Detroit in fall 2015 with about 10,000 being occupied homes. People protested and complained, but the county that had once refrained from acting against property owners with back taxes totaling less than $1,700 now began to mobilize. It was stated that it wasn’t fair on the neighbors to have to cover for the back taxes, nor was it fair for the property owners to continue to receive services. This conclusion raises the question, how could the neighbors be covering for the back taxes unless their rates had been adjusted to include them? An article in the Washington Post outlined an investigation done in D.C. several years ago. Approximately 200 homeowners lost their properties, and one out of three of these homeowners had liens of less than $1,000. More than half of foreclosures were in Washington, D.C.’s poorest wards. In wards 7 and 8, many homeowners had to leave their homes a few months before they were sold by purchasers. Companies with representatives who
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