http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdN4-qpsFzs (Sorry, couldn't embed it)
When Andre Hall returned from the holidays to his Pittsburgh home that he had recently reclaimed after its foreclosure, it was gone. Instead, there was heavy machinery parked where his house used to stand.
The Pittsburgh building inspection department claimed it called off the destruction of his house, but “a couple of things went awry” when it hired the contractors. They were only supposed to tear down the property next to Hall’s.
This event itself shocked me (the headline definitely caught my attention), but I was even more shocked to read that it is not unusual for this kind of thing to happen. However, I thought back to our AP Government discussions about bureaucracy, and I remembered that it is precisely these kinds of “horror stories” about the government’s mistakes that render its reputation for inefficiency, so making big judgments about it may be somewhat unfair. But the excuse for the error is so vague; obviously, something went wrong in the bureaucratic ladder. It’s frustrating that these people are supposed to be helping out the people, not destroying their dwelling places.
How can the government fix this? How do you feel about the bureaucracy involved here? Other thoughts?
Thursday, January 6, 2011
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Well, wait a minute. To be fair, they said "a couple of things went wrong" when hiring the contractors. That doesn't mean it couldn't have been the contractor's fault. When my family hired contractors to work on our backyard, for example, they were supposed to tear out part of the lawn and build a patio. On the first day, they began marking stakes for where to dig on the wrong side of the yard. Luckily, we caught them and set them straight before any damage was done, but the consequences could have been awful. The point is, contractors can be stupid. It's not necessarily the government's fault.
That doesn't mean the government is off the hook, though. Yes, the bungling involved was massive. Yes, it was incompetent. This was an awful story, but it's things like this that get press. Nobody ever reports on things working. Think about it: could a private contractor have done any better? Probably not.
Regardless of who's to blame, the guy still had his house demolished. Let's hope he's doing all right and received some compensation.
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