After an incident involving a can of spray paint and a propane heater caused Kenneth Sandrell’s Bevo Mill home to burn down in 2025, he considered turning the vacant lot into tiny homes or a park for the local children.
Instead, the property has become, depending on whom you ask, either an unlicensed mini car lot or an illegal parking lot. It’s racked up building code violations and Citizen Service Bureau complaints. Sandrell owes the city a little more than $10,000 in back taxes, penalties, interest, fines, and fees. The property was one of 173 properties the city filed foreclosure lawsuits against last week.
As SLM previously reported, those lawsuits were made possible by a pair of relatively new laws that allow the city to foreclose on property over unpaid fines and fees (for instance, money the city spends cutting a derelict property’s grass or boarding up its broken windows, which are then assessed to the homeowner). The majority of the suits filed last week were against Paul McKee’s Northside Regeneration, part of what seems to be a city strategy of wresting parcels away from the developer’s failed bid to revitalize North City…