mheadd
commented
8 years ago First, there does not appear to be a way to link the record for a specific permit issued by L&I directly with the record for an outstanding violation.
If there is a way to do this, would love to explore. Adding help wanted tag.
City staff have suggested that permits may be issued to properties with outstanding balances where violations occur, as part of the process of correcting those violations.
This analysis found that a number of properties with delinquent taxes and that were issued permits did have past violations. However, there are several factors that suggest that this rationale for issuing permits to delinquent properties is tenuous.
First, there does not appear to be a way to link the record for a specific permit issued by L&I directly with the record for an outstanding violation. Therefore, determining if a permit was issued to a property that is delinquent on property taxes solely to address an existing violation, and not for another purpose, is beyond the scope of this analysis.
Second, the data has a number of examples of properties where violations were found where the violations do not appear to be related in any way to the permits issued.
For example consider 150 Pierce Street. This property had three violations in 2012 that appear to be related to non-compliance on another permit issued previously by the city.
In November, 2015 the property was issued a new permit to install vinyl siding on the property. There is no information that suggests that installing vinyl siding was done to address an outstanding violation (none of the previous violations relate to missing siding). So it appears this property, while previous violations do exist, was issued a permit for work unrelated to a past violation while having an outstanding property tax balance.
Finally, if we hypothesize that property owners that are less timely in paying property taxes - to the point where liens are placed on the property - are generally more neglectful toward their properties than are other owners, we might expect to see the existence of previous violations for these properties. The existence of previous violations, on its own, does not by explain why permits might be issued to these properties.
Moreover, if this hypothesis is correct, we should expect to see more often the existence of violations on properties that have an outstanding property tax balance. This is, in fact, what the data developed as part of this analysis shows.