Crime & Safety

Four New Abandoned Houses Found in Danbury, More Expected

Danbury is seeing more and more abandoned houses, and that has city employees worried.

Danbury's isn't as bad as Cleveland or Detroit, obviously, but more and more houses are being abandoned, said Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton.

"I expect this isn't the end of it. We'll see a lot more," Boughton said. He worries about this problem for many reasons, including lost tax revenues. The city Finance Department files reports using land records that point to more foreclosures in 2012 than were in 2011 and 2010. Foreclosures are bad for the city's neighborhoods.

Shawn Stillman, coordinator of the Unified Neighborhood Inspection Team, said the city received word of four more abandoned houses last week. That brings the reported total to more than 40, and Stillman said he and other people find more while they drive around the city.

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"That's one I never been in before," Stillman said Monday, seeing one on Balmforth near Osborne. He said it is possible other members of the unit or the building office were aware of it.

Stillman, City Fire Marshal Jimmy Johnson, Fire Chief Geoff Herald and Mayor Boughton said abandoned houses cause all sorts of problems.

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Johnson said he worries about abandoned houses because of the dangers they pose to firefighters.

In one house on Hager Street, Stillman said a German bank owns the house, and it tries to maintain the property, but people keep breaking in. On Monday, Stillman found more than a dozen small plastic bags used to carry drugs, plus he found more than a dozen used condoms. People were breaking into the house and using it as a place to get high and have sex. (See attached video.)

"This is a big problem," Stillman said. He said if people are inside getting high, they walk outside and that puts people living nearby at risk. It is attracting drug users and prostitutes to the house. That's bad for the neighborhood, and that's what Stillman and the UNIT work to stop.

"The bank is supposed to come by from time to time and stop people from breaking in," Stillman said. "The problem is if people want to break in, they will."

On Coal Pit Hill Road, Stillman visited a house Monday that is gutted with no functioning windows or doors on the ground floor. Inside, floor joists in one section of the ceiling were burned away, and nearby are missing floor boards. The staircase looks too weak to support a person walking upstairs.

"The longer they're vacant, the more likely it is they're dangerous," said Chief Herald on Friday, without knowledge of the Coal Pit Hill house. Speaking in general, Herald described all the dangers Stillman found on Monday in the Coal Pit Hill house. Burned flooring, a hole in the floor and a suspect staircase, all dangers for firefighters who might try to check the house for squatters during a fire.

Herald said he is reluctant to send firefighters into abandoned houses during a fire. He said an abandoned house might be missing floor boards, it might have been damaged by a fire, and without tenants inside, who knows how many minutes the fire has been burning before it was reported.

"The floor might give way. Those are firefighter killers," Herald said.


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