Confessions of a sidewalk vigilante

Downtown Cedar Rapids: 300 block of 1st St SE, 1/17/2022

My city's new sidewalk snow removal policy has gotten some negative attention this year, and justifiably so, but its potential as a weapon against a perennial menace should not be overlooked. Where property owners used to have 48 hours after a snowfall to clear their sidewalks of snow, they now have a mere 24 hours. I imagine my next-door neighbor rushing out with a stopwatch as soon as they see the last flake descend. One of my work colleagues has already gotten the dreaded pink notice on her front door stating a complaint has been filed and she must clear her walks or the city will do it for an inflated price. 

This property (NOT my coworker's) has the pink notice AND one for water shutoff

I will never file such a complaint against a residence, even though I walk to work, and plan to continue walking when I'm elderly and frail. It's not just because I fear her wrath; I have serious reservations about the "narc on your neighbor" approach to code violations. It's a micro-version of an ugly national trend. As Frank Bruni points out in his latest New York Times newsletter about Virginia's e-mail system for reporting schoolteachers, Texas's law encouraging lawsuits against anyone involved with abortion, and West Virginia's call for tips on election suspcions:

Is the way to address Americans’ disagreements to transform citizens into snoops and have them turn on one another? Our leaders should point us toward common ground, not add whole new weapons to our battlegrounds. In Virginia and Texas, they added weapons. (Bruni 2022)

There are all sorts of good reasons one might not get their walks clear within 24 hours: frailty, injury, travel, preoccupation with child care, and so on. If there's a problem sidewalk in the neighborhood, neighbors could check in and help out. Call in the law only as a last resort, and maybe not even then.

Our neighborhoods have bigger problems than homes where the snow doesn't get shoveled in a timely fashion. The part of town where I live, work, and go to church has a problem with land speculation. "In a market like D.C.," explain the writers on Greater Greater Washington, "it's not uncommon for the land underneath a building to be more valuable than the structure itself... [A]ll forms of property management and land use have costs, and depending on the condition of the building and the land the costs of putting it to work might be greater than the potential rental income" (Loh and Rodriguez 2018). 

Land speculation exists even in Cedar Rapids, though we're certainly not a hot market like Washington, D.C. or Seattle or Boston. The owner might be a bank waiting for housing values to increase, an out-of-town investor hoping to cash in on the next big thing, or heirs of a homeowner who's died. And someone looking for a place to build a house or start a business will be glad to find a vacancy. The problem is that, as years pass, and then more years pass, and despite obvious needs houses aren't built and businesses aren't started, land speculation becomes a drag on the surrounding area (see Holland 2018). And it's these properties, more than two weeks after the last measurable snowfall, that still have impassable sidewalks.

13th St SE, 1/31/2022: The city might clear it more effectively if I reported it sooner

Until we get a land value tax, or someone willing to meet the speculators' asking prices, I think the best I can do is to annoy the property owners and bring the city's attention to the problems by filing snow removal complaints. The first one I filed, on the block across the street from the college where I teach, got results, in that what snow could be was removed, though I don't know if they'll be able to assess the Nevada-based trust that owns it. 

Last week I flagged a vacant property on 2nd Avenue SE (pictured above, on 1/31/2022)--listing an owner in nearby Marion--though it was complicated because I couldn't get the address from the (non-existent) building and had to look it up on the assessor's website. I plan to report these properties every time it snows. Maybe the owners will get so annoyed they'll do something with the properties--or at least take care of them. I admit I haven't yet brought about a revolution in land use, but it is vaguely satisfying to my sense of moral outrage.

Let it snow!

SEE ALSO

"We Need to Talk. About Snow," 3 February 2021 [piles of plowed snow block crosswalks]

"Where Are the Metro's Destinations Heading?" 28 July 2021 [tax bills for developed and undeveloped blocks] 

 

MyCR reporting tool: https://www.cedar-rapids.org/mycr/index.php

Credit for the phrase "narc on your neighbor" goes to Dennis Evans, who was my neighbor years ago. We did not narc on each other.