Eric Arnold, a Black man who spent decades working as a renovator and carpenter, purchased a home in Georgia in February 2022 to renovate it in the hopes of eventually providing a home for his children and grandchildren who live in New Jersey.
But Macon-Bibb County officials demolished the home without informing him or allowing him the opportunity to challenge the decision in court.
Last week, Arnold filed a lawsuit against Macon-Bibb County, accusing the county of violating his constitutional rights by destroying his home without due process and for retaliating against him for trying to stop the demolition.
He is at least the ninth homeowner to sue the county over having their homes demolished without due process under the “blight tax” ordinance passed in 2019 to raise money for the county by demolishing blighted homes, which it describes as an “uninhabitable, unsafe, or abandoned structure.”
But photos show that Arnold made significant improvements to the house over the 21 months since buying it before it was demolished.
The lawsuit filed by the Institute for Justice on behalf of Arnold, which is a libertarian nonprofit seeking to “end widespread abuses of government power,” states the county went through with the demolition to teach Arnold a lesson to not challenge the county government:
Rather than heeding Eric’s pleas not to tear down his house, the County responded by making the destruction of Eric’s house a “high priority” and expediting its demolition. The County even tasked the demolition crew with moving its equipment on and off Eric’s property the same day as the demolition to prevent Eric from knowing when, exactly, the demolition would occur.
Although Eric’s house was a work in progress, it certainly wasn’t a public menace requiring unilateral, extrajudicial, and expedited demolition through the Mayor’s power to abate per se nuisances that threaten neighborhood safety.
Macon-Bibb County officials told The Macon Telegraph that they gave adequate notice that the house would be demolished by posting notices on the property.
But the plaintiff’s claim states that the only notice was addressed to “Monica Flagg” in October 2021, who was the previous owner of the property but gave the property to a man named Wallace Adside in December 2021, who then sold it to Arnold three months later for $15,000.
Arnold, who grew up in New Jersey, moved to Georgia with his wife in 2013 to be closer to his mother’s side of the family and to have a lower cost of living and milder winters. His goal was to renovate enough homes in Georgia to allow his family to move down from New Jersey to create generational wealth. Arnold’s claim describes this goal:
The houses Eric has purchased in Georgia are more than just investment properties. Eric’s two children and his four grandchildren still live in New Jersey. To ensure that his family members have access to quality, affordable housing, Eric aims to create a family homestead in Georgia that will last for generations and provide a place for his family to migrate south.
Eric’s Georgia properties therefore serve two purposes—they are a nest egg for himand Denise, and they are an opportunity for his entire family to return to their Georgia roots together.
“I did everything I was supposed to do,” Arnold told WMAZ-TV. “I thought I was OK. I wasn’t OK. They still knocked my house down.”
Financial Incentive
The county, which has demolished at least 800 homes over the past five years, says the demolitions are necessary for safety reasons.
However, the lawsuit suggests there is a profit motive behind the ordinance because it allows the county to assess a blighted property seven times the normal property tax rate until the owner cleans up the property. And if the house is demolished, then a lien is placed on the property.
There may also be a racial element behind their actions because Assistant County Attorney Frank Howard threatened to have Arnold arrested for working on his home without a contractor’s license.
“What are you going to do – make Macon Black again?” Howard asked, according to the lawsuit.
The city of Macon has a majority Black population, according to the United States Census. According to the lawsuit, a homeowner does not need a contractor’s license to renovate their own home.
Armed Code Enforcers
After purchasing the home in February 2022, Arnold began renovating it while living in another home with his wife. But on Sept. 25, 2023, a neighbor called to inform him that somebody had placed a dumpster on his property, which came as a surprise because he had not ordered the dumpster.
Arnold asked his neighbor to let him speak to the driver of the truck delivering the dumpster, who told him his company, Casteel Trucking, had been contracted by the county to demolish the house.
The lawsuit states that the driver of the truck agreed with Arnold that the house should not be demolished because “it’s too clean” and did not go through with the demolition.
Arnold spent the next several weeks trying to keep county officials from demolishing the house, visiting the planning and zoning office, the building and fire safety department, and the code enforcement department, which is made up of former cops, according to the lawsuit.
And he was eventually led to believe that they would not be demolishing his house but on Nov. 15, 2023, they did just that.
But unlike the previous times they demolished other homes, they had at least eight armed code enforcement officers to ensure Arnold would not try to interfere with the demolition, as laid out in his lawsuit:
Most of the officers at 1151 Sunnydale Drive on the morning of the demolition were not actually police officers. Although they had guns and wore bulletproof vests, knee pads, and elbow pads, they were Code Enforcement officers.
On information and belief, between eight and ten Code Enforcement officers were staffed on the demolition of Eric’s house. When one officer was asked why there were so many officers at the scene, no meaningful answer was provided.
The demolition of his house left Arnold distraught.
“They took my dignity away from me … like I wasn’t even a person,” Arnold told WMAZ-TV. “Like ‘You don’t even exist, we just going to do what we want. This is our town.’”
