To get a handle on how bad of a tax mess Detroit is sitting in right now, look no further than this depressing map showing every property in the city suffering "tax distress."
What looks like a big hunk of moldy cheese is in fact the property-tax status of 84,861 properties, as logged by Wayne County's online tax portal. The lighter yellow boxes represent more than 59,000 distressed buildings where the owners haven't paid their taxes. Squished among them are a honeycomb of orange boxes, indicating that these properties have such a large backlog of delinquent taxes that they're now subject to foreclosure. (Count those up and you arrive at about 74,000 doomed properties.) The plots shown in red, meanwhile, are the 18,246 properties that have already been foreclosed.
On the bright side, gray areas mean those places don't have tax issues. Lucky!
The map is the creation of LOVELAND Technologies, a Detroit-based maker of "crowdfunding and social mapping systems." On the full, interactive version, you can zoom down to the level of streets to see who's behind on their payments on your block. Then, when you've selected an individual property, the map offers several ways to balance the tax debt – paying the fees online, for instance, or seeking a poverty exemption or financial assistance from grant-giving institutions. That means this bit of urban cartography isn't just neat to look at, but might help repay a little of the $444 million in taxes and penalties owed around Detroit.
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/housing/2013/01/detroits-property-tax-black-hole/4517/
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