04/06/2026
Have you ever driven past a vacant house and wondered, “Why doesn’t somebody just DO something about that?!”
Early in my time at City Hall, I handled permits and code enforcement for the City of Frostburg. I learned pretty quickly that local jurisdictions are a lot more limited than people realize when it comes to vacant and problem properties. What we had were essentially blunt instruments: certified letters, citations, liens, court dates. And the situations behind those properties were almost never simple.
Here’s the thing you don’t always hear: there is nearly always a human being behind a property issue.
In my experience in Frostburg (and I expect this is true across rural Appalachia), the overwhelming majority of the problem properties aren’t owned by bad people. They’re owned by people who are grieving and can’t bring themselves to sell the house their mother raised them in. Sometimes it’s someone in crisis whose situation falls just outside the reach of every system designed to help - I once dealt with a situation where a resident was living in genuinely unsafe conditions, and the agency designed to intervene couldn’t act without her consent. Sometimes it’s people who just… don’t know what to do, so they do nothing.
And then there’s a smaller slice. People who know exactly how to play the long game, who let citations accumulate, stay unreachable, and let someone else eventually clean up the mess. This stuff does happen in our community, but in my experience, they’re the exception, not the rule.
My job was to toe that line between the neighbor who was rightfully frustrated and the person behind the property who was struggling in ways that weren’t always visible from the street. The city’s tools were the same regardless of which situation I was walking into.
I didn’t always get it right, but I always tried my best with what I had available to me.
