Picking Up Trash and Watching 4th Street

Post and second photo by the Hawthorne Hawkman.  First photo contributed anonymously.

Earlier this week, two neighbors and I took time out of our day to pick up trash along 4th Street North from 26th Street down to 24th.  We brought along 3 heavy-duty garbage bags usually reserved for Clean Sweep events.  Two of the three bags started to rip from the collective weight of liquor bottles we picked up.  This, unfortunately, is not an exaggeration.  But a funny thing happens when you walk around picking up garbage.  You have a convenient excuse to spend a fair amount of time watching a block and gathering details.  Heck, some of the people hanging out on the streets just assume that if we're picking up garbage we must be with Sentence to Serve or some such agency.  Since the only conceivable reason to pick up litter is getting caught breaking the law, then maybe, in the eyes of the thugs, we're all right.

In the top photo, we see a crowd gathered at 326 25th Ave N, which seems to bolster the claim by Michael Bell that people at that address are part of the problem too.  That contributed photo, however, was not taken during the time of the garbage pick-up.  I just like the juxtaposition of the squad car in the rearview mirror.

What we did see was a slew of problem properties, owned by some familiar faces - starting with...

Larry Maxwell - Merchant of (Housing) Death

Post by the Hawthorne Hawkman, image from wcco.com

Earlier this week, I came across a rather interesting document from several years back.  Oddly enough, my knowledge of Larry Maxwell's mortgage fraud predates my employment with Hawthorne.  Here was this guy who was representing BOTH the buyer and seller (which, although rare, is very legal) and managing to sell his properties within two weeks or less, and for top market value or even higher.  Much of this was happening while the mortgage industry as a whole was slowing down.  Either Maxwell had figured out something that nobody else had, or there was some kind of fraud happening.

Based on his "maximum" sentence, we all know what the answer to that question was.  Since I knew I'd be starting up at Hawthorne, I called up a Realtor with whom I worked, and asked him to compile a list of Maxwell deals from the MLS for me.  He put together a list of every transaction Maxwell worked on in the 55411 and 55412 zip codes from 2005 through part of 2007.  Another researcher did some additional work with the data.  When I was doing a bit of housecleaning and came across this document, I thought I'd see what these properties are like now.

There were a total of fifty-nine transactions, and out of those fifty-nine...