Crews demolish wrong house after Michigan man swaps numbers for next door | Mail Online

You might find this interesting even without a Lake Worth connection. But there is one, not talked about in the article. It turns out that part of the problem with enforcing our codes related to properties and buildings is that the city's record keeping system is in disarray and has been for years. It is my understanding that many properties have multiple addresses, especially if they happen to be corner properties. Sometimes the address goes by the east/west street and other times the north/south street. So much so that if you didn't know better, you might have two properties when you just have one. You also have many situations where the Property Control Number (PCN) is different for the various addresses - or it is listed incorrectly. Each property has a standard PCN and is uniformly applied by the Palm Beach County Property Appraiser. This has been hit or miss in the past in terms of asking for the PCN for various applications and the city's integrity of their record keeping system suffers from it. Staff is getting a handle on it, but it is an enormous task.

Anyway, the article is an example of how people can game the system and take advantage of oversights or sloppiness on the part of contractors. Click title for link.