Somebody has got entirely too much time on their hands.
Same Thing Happening in Portland, OR
I saw the title of your post and thought you were talking about this story in PDX:
http://www.kgw.com/home/One-Man-Behind-Hundreds-of-Sidewalk-Complaints-259882571.html
Locally the sidewalks in town were in the plan for an upgrade when the downtown merchants started with their face lift campaign.
Then they were hit with the fact the city would not spend any monies on anything and expected the merchants and TxDOT to bear all the expenses with two avenues being State Highways.
The plan stymied a decade or so and TxDot did their highway assessments and the merchants designed their fronts while the city waited around for grant monies to arrive for their end that included matching funds on sidewalk upgrades.
They also allow anyone to complain about anything like grass too tall, yards unkept, sidewalks and drives, too many cars on a property, especially those that do not operate.
They will not allow one neighbor to complain about another neighbor that has already filed a complaint on them.
The city secretary decides who has to do what and how long they have to fix it. Not everything is up and up. Most complaints are because somebody wants the land and doesn't want to pay full price for it so the try to lower the property value first.
Then there is the fact that Property in Houston has a rainwater tax on all paved and concrete surfaces that rain water drains across.
😉
I was contracted to survey a subdivision lot because a section of sidewalk had failed after a utility company bored underneath and didn't compact back. The county wouldn't fix it and the homeowner wouldn't fix it. The survey showed that the sidewalk was mistakenly built entirely into the homeowner's lot. The county of course said, "no, we wouldn't do that. The sidewalk is built in the right-of-way". My client promised that the sidewalk was in his lot and if they didn't fix it, he was going to pull it up with a skidsteer in very short order, and he absolutely meant it. The sidewalk got fixed.
