HARRIS COUNTY, Texas – David Mercado walks KPRC 2 Rilwan Balogun and Gil Gredinger around his northeast Harris County home and points out areas in his neighbor’s yard he paid to clear.
“I try to clean it up a little on the fence line. But still, the overgrowth continues to come over,” Mercado explained. “It’s a constant battle. I can’t constantly clean somebody else’s property when they should be doing it.”
He’s reported seeing snakes, possums, and rats make their way from the neighboring abandoned home into his property.
“I’ve caught about 10 or 15 possums already,” Mercado shared, reflecting on the toll the situation has taken on his quality of life and his rental business.
Mercado’s former tenant, moving out, stopped by the home and shared with Balogun he lost count of the amount of rat poisoning and exterminators he’s paid for trying to attend to the rodents.
Mercado said he sent two complaints to the Harris County Tax Assessor’s Office but didn’t hear back from them.
The office spokesperson said there’s nothing they can do because the property owner paid the taxes.
“The Harris County Tax Office website provides nuisance reporting contact information to help customers find the local government departments that could possibly help,” the statement said. “Since the role of the Tax Office is collecting property taxes, we do offer potential tax sale buyers the ability to report delinquent abandoned property. In the case of [the property] the taxes are paid in full.”
“I understand that he already had paid his taxes,” Mercado said. “They’re up to date because I wanted to buy it from under him, but he already had paid the taxes, so I couldn’t do nothing about it.”
KPRC 2 reached out to the Harris County Public Health and Environmental Services and Commissioner Adrian Garcia for comment but didn’t hear back.
One potential solution proposed by Mercado is for the county to act against negligent property owners, such as cleaning up abandoned properties and placing a lien on them to recover costs.
“I would like [the county] to contact the owner and ask him to clean up the property ASAP. Don’t procrastinate,” he urged.
