"The new treasurer has to know exactly what the fuck is going on with tax foreclosure"

One week after our deep dive into the foreclosure auction and scams targeting foreclosures and Wayne County's skimpy resources for family's going through foreclosure and the auction — seriously, do read it all — Next City published a comparably devastating and detailed look at the same topics. This one looks at the situation through Jerry Paffendorf and Loveland Technologies, which has been doing yeomen's work on the problem and possible solutions. The data that Paffendorf and his team has accumulated, as you already probably know, gives great insight into what might and should happen next. The piece brings in plenty of complementary players and is about as good of a piece connecting all of the diffusive dots that we've seen, as well as rightly pointing out how little we still know, so do give it a read. A little snippet here, centered on Paffendorf throwing his hat in the ring to be the next Wayne County Treasurer:

Now, he’s one of eight candidates to replace retiring Wayne County Treasurer Raymond Wojtowicz, who served for 39 years. Paffendorf initially threw his hat in the ring solely as a way to get Loveland’s ideas into the public conscious and inject issues into the debate. “I felt a moral responsibility and obligation knowing what we know and having seen what we seen,” he says. “That with the first new treasurer coming in for 40 years, whoever it is, has to know exactly what the fuck is going on with tax foreclosure. There are things that I feel that need to happen. Front to back we already understand the system as it exists.”

If the three-person panel selecting Wojtowicz’s replacement chooses Paffendorf, he’d take over on an interim basis until the 2016 election. Whoever is picked — the panel hasn’t set a date yet, though Wojtowicz retires December 1st — will immediately have a very real opportunity to help reshape and overhaul Detroit’s broken tax foreclosure system. Paffendorf seems more concerned about helping reform the tax auction and addressing foreclosures in Detroit than he is about being crowned the next treasurer.

“I went so far as to tell the selection board, ‘honestly if you like these proposals I’m putting forward, if you find another candidate who has the Wayne County governmental experience to do these things, then we at Loveland will happily support them to execute these programs,’” he says.