The picture above is a screenshot from the Dakota County Sheriff’s Office Foreclosure Mapper. Feel free to click through to get to the county’s map application and scroll around to see which houses in your area have been recently foreclosed upon. I have to admit I was quite surprised to find 50% of the foreclosures in my neighborhood have occurred in the last six months. This whole thing was supposed to be getting better, not worse, right? This is a topic which literally hits close to home for so many people. I know I have witnessed numerous houses go up for sale for a short time before the owner gives up and pulls the house off the market. Sometime shortly thereafter a moving van pulls up, a group loads all the worldly possessions of the family occupying the space inside and drives off never to be seen again. This scenario has been happening all over the South Metro time and time again since the beginning of the housing market failure.

In our neighborhood, including the house directly adjacent to mine, something very similar to what I mention above happened here. One of our townhouse association board members noted that many of those who foreclosed in our neighborhood simply walked away from their homes to leave it to become the bank and the association’s problem. Our association is then on the hook for the back association dues (which they try to get tacked onto the sale price if they can) which sometimes total more than $10,000! In the case of our previous next door neighbor they were just hoping to sell the unit for $120,000 which would cover what they needed to recoup. A neighbor relayed that this deadbeat family ended up moving to a new townhouse just a few miles away in Farmington where they currently reside. Seriously?

I used to mention frequently how the Apple Valley townhouses were going to become the ghetto of the South Metro. The Met Council made sure that the cities south of the river built plenty of high density neighborhoods to keep in line with what is considered forward-looking planning. The Met Council believed that high density housing would help to eliminate sprawl and bring more population under single municipalities driving up their tax revenues. An unintended consequence was that it also created large numbers of inexpensive and poorly constructed units which became ripe for an environment where a single devastating event, such as the housing market failure, quickly and drastically changed the dynamics of these neighborhoods. The numerous foreclosures have begun attracting renters of dubious quality in homes owned by people who don’t keep up their property. One house on the corner of my street, which used to house juvenile delinquents selling drugs who later graduated to crimes which appeared in the Dakota County Criminal Complaints, stills hows signs of damage from that group’s stay. Why? Because those who moved in don’t care as long as the rent stays cheap. The rest of us, who have been here for years and take care of our homes, get the shaft. At least one long-time neighbor (an original owner) is going to sell at her first opportunity, possibly at a loss, just so she can get out before it gets any worse. Such a shame.

So how about you? How many foreclosures are occurring in your neighborhoods? Are the numbers going up, down or staying about the same? Have you noticed the dynamics of your neighborhood change (upkeep of properties, renters, crime)? Are you fearful that because of the foreclosures and the resultant vacant properties/bad renters/destructive foreclosed owners that the South Metro may degrade its previously healthy image? Are you considering a move, even if it were at a loss, to leave your neighborhood? Whatever you have to say about foreclosures go ahead and comment on as I’d love to hear what you have to say.

Here is a graphical representation of the State of Minnesota’s Level 3 Sex Offender database which you can view in a much less interesting format here.

BUYER BEWARE: the data used to generate this report is fluid in nature and I make no guarantees as to the accuracy of the reporting that lies below. That said, this data is updated regularly (probably weekly to begin with but it may go longer as I can’t imagine the L3 offender list grows quickly) and the charts are updated along with it. Please feel free to check back as often as you like:

Following a recent post about a fight/robbery taking place following a minor motor vehicle accident along Highway 13 in Burnsville, I posted a link to my text based archive of Dakota County Criminal Complaints that I have been compiling automatically since sometime last year. bb stacker commented saying he was surprised of the ages of those accused in the crime. I was intrigued to find out exactly how old the general Dakota County offender is and wrote a couple of quick scripts which I thought would be able to pull the information down that I needed.

Well, while I was able to get some of the birthdates with my quick and dirty attempts, I wasn’t able to effectively pull them all. In fact, I only got about a 1/3 of them and I really don’t care to spend much more time on it. With the data I did retrieve the median age is about 28 which isn’t all that young I suppose but again, that data is from a small and error prone sample and is more or less useless.

Looking over the data that I had available to me, I did notice that I would be able to easily obtain the address information provided. So, I first pulled out the hometown city, state, and zipcode of each of the criminal complaints going back as far as I could (12/17/2007). Numerous complaints exist which do not include any valid address information at all and as such, any of those incomplete complaints were dropped. In the end I had over 1450 addresses to work from and have mapped them out for your viewing pleasure. Make sure you check out the regional view as well as the national. Please be aware that these aren’t 100% and shouldn’t be used for homework assignments, letters to your mother, or anything else of even moderate importance as this was only a fun exercise for me to do after I finished up my work this afternoon. Cool? Good.

In addition to the maps I have provided, I took the top 20 zip codes’ raw data and have pasted them here just to give you a more exact idea of where people live who are being arrested most often in the South Metro.

You can continue to read the Dakota County Criminal Complaint text archive which I maintain and update daily at 1PM CST. There are some really interesting reads there (as some of you have undoubtedly noticed) and I encourage you to keep up with the happenings in the South Metro either there or through the official Dakota County interface available here which provides you with the information for the last year in PDF format only.

If you have any thoughts on the topic of crime in the South Metro or what I did above, feel free to comment on, I’d love to hear what you think!