Vacant Houston Foreclosure Abandoned For 15 Years Caught In Government Red Tape

In Houston, Texas, KHOU-TV Channel 11 reports on the tale of an abandoned foreclosed home that no one's lived in for 15 years and that somehow has slipped through governmental cracks in the system:

• Usually, when you find a house that’s in this bad of shape, it’s been abandoned. But this horrible house does indeed have an owner and that owner has a name: Sam, Uncle Sam.
  According to county property records, the owner is the RTC: the Resolution Trust Corporation. The RTC was setup by the federal government in the late 1980s after the economy tanked and thousands of homes in Houston were lost to foreclosure. [...] “They generally sold them off,” [Harris County Appraisal District spokesman Jim] Robinson said.

• But here’s where the mystery of the house on Celia takes a twist. The city has been aware of the house for years, posting notices, documenting its deterioration and all the while assuming the federal government owned it. [...] The city couldn’t seize the house because by law one governmental entity can’t take another’s property. But why would the federal government be so irresponsible?

• 11 News spoke to an official with the FDIC, which took over the RTC. He checked their records and said the government sold the house 13 years ago. But the records are so old, he said they don’t know who bought it.

The surmise is that, after buying the property, an investor determined that the house wasn't worth it and never bothered recording the deed, resulting in the RTC continuing to be listed on local real property records as the apparent last owner of record. For more, see Rundown Houston homes caught in red tape.