Our Blogs
Subject: Making Sense of Detroit Foreclosure Auctions -- Why Don't We Own This?
From greatamericanpixel on September 18, 2011
This is the text of an email I’m sending out to some friends, contacts, and mailing lists. If you don’t get it in your inbox, consider it sent to you, too ♥:
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Dear Hopefully Interested People,
Round 1 of the 2011 Wayne County Tax Foreclosure Auction is in progress with the first set of bids closing tomorrow morning.
LOVELAND Technologies is doing its best to clearly show what Detroit properties get bid on and sold to whom in close to realtime at http://whydontweownthis.com/live .
We’ve also mapped out the 13,000+ Detroit properties up for auction at http://whydontweownthis.com with the ability to comment on and follow properties.
If you have a desire to bid on something but haven’t registered for the auction, you can try reaching out to http://landblank.tumblr.com .
NOTE: Sometime near the end of October the properties that don’t sell will be re-auctioned in Round 2 with an opening bid of $500 (the county is not publicly clear on details yet). It will be particularly interesting and important to provide these services around this dramatically lower opening bid, where just $10,000 can buy ***20*** properties. If ever there were a time for transparency and neighborhood involvement, this would be it.
We are currently providing all of this as an unpaid public service. If you’d like to write about it or sponsor it, please get in touch. We’re getting good, interested traffic to the site with great and thankful feedback.
LOVELAND is an open door if you have ideas for how to improve this service and grow it into the future. On our drawing board at present are things like
• Making it easier to converse about properties (there’s a commenting system but not a lot of conversation yet)
• A system to crowdfund un-purchased $500 properties and find them some love (in partnership with The Land Blank)
• A mobile location-aware version on your phone at wdwot.com (so you can clearly see what’s around you and easily visit properties)
• Better realtime dashboards for all auction activity
Please check it out and get in touch if you’re interested in talking or learning more. And by all means tweet it, book it, smoke signal, paper airplane, morse code, say it and pray it.
May you live in incheresting times. High fives to you and yours,
Jerry Paffendorf & Team LOVELAND
LOVELAND Technologies: http://makeloveland.com
LOVELAND on Facebook: http://facebook.com/makeloveland
LOVELAND on Twitter: http://twitter.com/makeloveland
Ten Years Ago & 2,000 Years Ago
From greatamericanpixel on September 11, 2011
This was the view my college roommates and I had of the Manhattan skyline on September 11th 2001 (pic taken last year by someone else at a prettier, more peaceful time):
It’s a crazy world and it’s always changing, now more than ever. Please be good to each other out there.
From The Economist, “Quantifying History: Two Thousand Years In One Chart”:
TEDxDetroit 2011
From greatamericanpixel on September 8, 2011
TEDxDetroit 2011 is coming up on September 28th, which also happens to be my 30th birthday. Wooha! Tickets are only $26, make sure you register soon because they might fill up. It’s an awesome event.
It’s hard to believe it’s been a year since Mary and I spoke at the last TEDxDetroit. A little blast from the past:
This year we’re excited for LOVELAND Technologies to be involved again. We’ll be in the TEDxDetroit Labs where people will be showing both art and technology from the city. And in LOVELAND style we’ll be straddling both.
On the tech side we’ll be showing our city mapping tools like Why Don’t We Own This? and more new stuff currently in the works.
On the art side our friends Ryan Ford and Brad Henderson will be joining us from New York. Ryan painted the crowdsourced “The Spirit of Detroit Vs The Blight” (painting below) and Brad is turning it into a playable game. Both the painting and the game will be there. Awesome stuff!
Also, on October 13th, I’ll be in Philadelphia to speak at TEDxSJU (Saint Joseph’s University). I haven’t been to Philadelphia in a long while. Looking forward to that!
Introducing-ish: The Land Blank
From greatamericanpixel on September 7, 2011
Public Service Announcement: If you want to register for the 2011 Wayne County Tax Foreclosure Auction the deadline is **this Friday at 4 PM**. Registration costs a $1,000 deposit + a $35 processing fee to bid on one property at a time (the online auction comes in waves) or a $5,000 deposit + $35 processing fee for multi-core bidding. Detroit properties up for auction can be explored most easily at whydontweownthis.com.
If you miss the deadline or can’t afford it right now, all might not be lost for you. My friend Andy Didorosi (<— hey, look at that sharp dressed if stoic 20 in his 20s) and I have been kicking an idea around for a little while now called The Land Blank (follow updates on Twitter @landblank). What is a land blank, you ask? Well, I suppose it’s an innocent attempt at discovering a new school style of land banking, incorporating the open crowdfunding of vacant properties.
There are 2 things here relavent to the auction.
One is that The Land Blank can bid at the auction and will likely offer a “proxy bidding” service for people with good stories. So, for example, you didn’t register for the auction but reeeaaallllllyyy want to bid on that lot down the street. Give us a shout and if you can transfer over the funds for us to bid with, we’ll do it on your behalf and then sign the deed over to you if the bid is successful (or return your money if it’s not). Sorry speculators or out of town peeps, we gotta keep this service inbounds and make sure the buyers are also local activators.
The other is that we’d like to start a fundraising pool to bid on $500 properties. The way the auction works is that first properties are auctioned with the opening bid equating to the back taxes owed. After that, everything left drops down to an opening bid of $500. I think the rules here should be as follows: we’ll only bid on properties that are about to end with no bidders, meaning that they’d otherwise just return to the county (AKA they were unsuccessfully auctioned). The purpose of this is to try and match the properties with ideal owners or projects after the auction is done.
So, say we raise $10,000 to bid on properties with, that would equal 20 $500 properties. We’d then advertise the fact that we have these 20 properties and are looking for the ideal use. This might mean turning them over to a neighbor or community group or someone with a badass idea who proves they can execute it.
As is the style at the time, we don’t know exactly what’s going to happen, but we can collaboratively, transparently figure it out and hopefully do some good and make some interesting discoveries along the way that can lead to smarter land-use solutions down the road.
If you’re interested, get in touch! thelandblank@gmail.com and twitter.com/landblank. And check out what’s up for auction at whydontweownthis.com.
It's A Painting... It's A Game... It's The Spirit of Detroit Vs The Blight!
From greatamericanpixel on August 30, 2011
Ding-ding-ding! The Detroit Vs Painting painting is done done done (see the Kickstarter for background on this experimental crowdfunded painting-turned-video game project).
Here’s Ryan Ford’s epic painting, and go here to see a larger version:
Backers were invited to suggest characters and settings in a [Something] Vs [Something] format ala Mortal Kombat etc, and Ryan went hard to the hoop with a 6’ x 4’+ oil painting depicting ”The Spirit of Detroit Vs The Blight”. He also added a small army of characters to aid the Spirit that includes Detroit Mayor Dave Bing, the 2 women on the Detroit flag, Rosa Parks, Bruce Campbell with chainsaw arm and shotgun, the “Eat ‘em up Tigers” guy, a coney dog chef, LOVELAND’s mascot inchy, Ryan’s grandfather who worked for GM, RoboCop, and other surprises.
It’s an interesting cast, a beautiful work, and the game battle should come to life in some pretty dang imaginative ways. Not a part of this project, but I’ve recently fallen in love with these Epic Rap Battles of History, which have a lot of fun with super imaginative fantasy battles, and the game should have some crazy energy like this:
Brad Henderson is the one busy turning the painting into a playable video game using a clever system he’s building at his new Leave Luck To Heaven game studio (“Leave luck to heaven” is the English translation of Nintendo). He’s recording some of his progress and thought progress as he designs and programs it (yes, that is Sonic The Hedgehog running around the painting’s background as Brad programs the interactivity :-))
The painting will be in Detroit soon where we plan to show it around in different places before finding a settled home for it. If you’re interested in having it hung somewhere, let us know. Thanks again to all the backers! /high fives
Follow Leave Luck To Heaven on Facebook to stay in touch with developments.