A Georgia homeowner who poured time and money into fixing his newly bought home arrived to find it destroyed by city officials.
Eric Arnold, a resident of Macon-Bibb County, is suing the county for "unconstitutionally" tearing down his home. According to the Institute for Justice (IJ), "all property owners are entitled to notice and a meaningful opportunity to be heard before the government tears down their home," a right county officials seem to have overlooked.
Arnold told WGXA he's worried it could happen again since the county put a lien on the property to cover demolition costs.
"To spend all that time and money and sweat and end up with nothing but a bare piece of land, it's devastating. What's worse is that if I try to rebuild or buy another property, I have no guarantee this won't happen again. It's just not right," Arnold said.
Shortly after Arnold purchased the home in February 2022, the county approved a permit for him to fix his roof. Two days later, his neighbors alerted him to a demolition crew and dumpster on his property. Arnold convinced the crew to pause and left to beg county officials to remove his home from the demolition list.
He thought he succeeded, but in reality, county officials had sped up the teardown process. Less than two months later, the county sent a demolition team and armed Code Enforcement officers in the early morning to see the teardown through.
On that day, the IJ reported Arnold was "shaking in shock and disbelief. The house he had been painstakingly fixing up for months—the house he poured hours of work and thousands of dollars into—was being clawed into a pile of rubble by a backhoe."
Arnold is now working with Attorney Christie Heber and the IJ "to sue Macon-Bibb County in state court and protect the rights of all Americans to due process and to ask for help from government officials." The Institute found that Macon-Bibb County "leveled more than 800 homes in just over three years using the same secret procedure it used to demolish Eric's house."
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