Police, fire and rescue vehicles and personnel filled East Sixth Street off Park Avenue late Friday to respond to a fire in a building known to be used by squatters.
I did not see any reports in the newspapers Saturday.
Firefighters tossed numerous items out of the windows Friday night. The building was unsecured Saturday. A young woman came down the front steps just as I arrived and hurried over to Park Avenue.
Toys and household furnishings littered the front lawn Saturday.
The house next door is also unsecured, but was not affected by the fire.
The house that caught fire was boarded at some point, but squatters around Park & Seventh appear to play a cat-and-mouse game with authorities.
The next house east of these two ramshackle buildings is well-kept, as are most other homes on the block and the chiropractor's office just west of the fire scene. What can be done to help the homeless squatters so that these dangerous eyesores can be cleaned up and reclaimed as legitimate housing?
Why do anything? The council seems to think it is OK to have a drug owner run a store, so why not have squatters in a house and continue the trashing of Plainfield?
ReplyDeleteIf the cats are not active, then the mice know they can do what they want. There is NO enforcement of ANY laws here. Yard waste in the streets, multiple unlicensed cars on property, lawns not cut with 1' high grass. And forget traffic laws, it's a free for all after one crosses the SPF border when driving. Ridiculous.
ReplyDeleteInteresting ... I checked out the Google image of that house. It was boarded up back then. I know most, if not all, Plainfield Google street view images date back to when the Monarch was an empty lot, so we're talking more than a few years. The adjacent house was apparently occupied at the time of the street view. We definitely need stricter regulation of abandoned properties in town. We don't want to become a mini-Detroit with what's been happening to abandoned homes there. It's not just a problem of the existence of homeless squatters.
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