Last week we learned that the town of Eastham has taken possession of two duplex apartments whose owners, the Delgizzis of Weston, hadn’t paid property taxes on them for many years. Both units are on Route 6 across from Salt Pond. One has three bedrooms and two baths, the other two bedrooms and two and a half baths. The town plans to fix up the two units and manage them as affordable or workforce housing.
This week, again thanks to reporter Cam Blair, we learned a great deal more about the deadbeat Delgizzis.
They own at least 31 properties, most of them on Cape Cod, with a combined assessed value of $14.47 million. The market value is undoubtedly much higher.
One of those properties, the Truro Motor Inn, is a neglected, overcrowded complex that has kept town officials busy trying to enforce minimal health and safety regulations — such as having a septic system and proper smoke detectors. The owners have been illegally renting the units to year-round tenants since 2015, according to court documents.
Housing Court Judge Donna Salvidio first ordered the Delgizzis to close the motor inn and find new places for their tenants to live more than a year and a half ago. The landlords have done nothing since then to comply with the judge’s order. Their lawyer argued at a contempt hearing on Feb. 9 that it would be impossible to relocate the tenants because of the Outer Cape’s housing crisis, and she complained that her clients were owed $180,000 in back rent by some of the inn’s tenants.
The Delgizzis appear to be willing to go to great lengths not to pay taxes or spend money on building maintenance and repairs, but they must be shelling out a fair amount on attorneys. In the past 11 years, Blair reports, various towns have filed 15 separate tax-taking actions against them. Truro is currently involved in pursuing takings of three different Delgizzi properties.
Building up our towns’ stock of affordable housing by seizing and renovating the property of delinquent taxpayers may be a slow, labor-intensive, and frustrating undertaking. But the overwhelming need for places for ordinary people to live now calls for extraordinary measures, and no one strategy is going to alleviate the crisis. We have got to seize every opportunity for progress, no matter how limited.
That means celebrating the incremental successes of Wellfleet’s affordable housing buy down program (see Lee Kahrs’s story on page A6), using every available tool to fight frivolous obstructionist lawsuits (Christine Legere on page A5), and emulating the activist leadership that has put Eastham in position to add seven or eight new housing units to its affordable and “workforce” stock.
“Desperate times call for generous measures and kind hearts,” says Gary Sorkin of the Wellfleet Affordable Housing Trust, referring to the need for ungreedy sellers for the buy down program. They also call for the resolute pursuit of justice against privileged abusers of the law.
