Knoxville Tennessee Blog

This post will be coming tomorrow. I had a good one lined up and then I got distracted by a minor security flaw in the KGIS website. More details to come tomorrow.

Update: I contacted KGIS@KGIS.org and have not heard back from them. So I’ll assume that this isn’t a big deal and explain the security flaw I mentioned last night in passing. The exploit is a simple and very common SQL Injection technique. Since this blog is about Knoxville and not about SQL I’ll skim over most of the details save for a few.

Before I do that let me first make my original post. KGIS.org is the coolest county/city owned and maintained website in Knoxville for quite a few reasons. The first reason is because it is one of the most heavily skinned and customized DotNetNuke sites that I have seen on the net.

In addition, it has some really cool information available online that is easy to navigate. For instance, if you are looking to buy a house in Knoxville or you want to find out how much your neighbor or friend paid for their house, you can do that with the Owner Card application.

If you want to look at an interactive map of the new school zones, you can do that and view an assortment of other maps using KnoxNetWhere. Finally, you can use the Property Map and Details Report which will plot your property lines and give you all kinds of other interesting data about your land.

I’m going to let you explore the bunches of other maps and information they have at KGIS.org so I can get on with explaining the security exploit I mentioned last night.

**EDITED - KGIS informed me that they are patching the exploit and requested that I not publish the security flaw to which I kindly agreed **

I haven’t had time to determine how serious of a security flaw this particular exploit is causing. It appears that the variable is being passed into a stored procedure which will significantly decrease the vulnerability as it acts like a filter, but I would probably advise them to get it patched up none the less since it is a 15 minute or less fix.

In the April 16th meeting of the Knox County Commission a speaker in the Public Forum created a bit of a stir. In fact before it was all done voices were raised, apologies were given, and it became very clear that Knox County government doesn’t really care much about local people’s property rights.

The speaker that triggered this passionate discussion was Laura Cole. Betty Bean covered what happened in this Knox County Commission here in the Halls News Shopper News. What you couldn’t see in Betty’s story is the damage that has occurred to Ms. Cole’s property because of inadequate stormwater ordinances, pitiful development practices, and incompetent code enforcement from Knox County engineering. If this sounds bad then you should hear the excuses from Chris Granju of the Knox County engineering department. The only thing he did not say was that the sun was in his eyes. He did say he felt he was being “compelled to investigate myself”.

To make a long story short Mr. Granju had his hat handed to him by Knox County Commissioner Phil Ballard. Commissioner Ballard told Mr. Granju he had written the county engineering department three weeks ago about Ms. Cole’s problems and had heard nothing. Mr. Ballard asked Mr. Granju, “Is it a normal practice of your department not to report back to a commissioner?”

Commissioner Tony Norman apologised to Ms. Cole. The frustration he felt was clear in his voice.

So you might ask yourself what happened to Ms. Cole’s property that was so severe that she says, “My farm will be destroyed within a year, and I have few options. I can sell or I can sue … this is not a balance (between development and environmental concerns). This is destruction of one person’s property for another person’s profit.”

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a movie must be worth much more.

The Laura Cole story via “Farmer” James McMillan and YouTube:

Part 1 and Part 2

The Knox County Commission meeting Public Forum featuring Laura Cole via Publius9 and Channel9 of YouTube:

Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV

Š

So you are thinking about or already in the process of moving to Knoxville Tennessee and you’re not sure where to even begin looking for homes. In my last post on Knoxville Real Estate I listed a few websites that you could visit to help you track down the house of your dreams, but I didn’t give you any guidence as to what part of Knoxville would be a good place to buy or build that home.

The Knoxville News Sentinel does a wonderful job in creating highly effective web diagrams, charts and multimedia. A prime example is this flash driven demographic of Knoxville’s 20 wealthiest zip codes.

The diagram names the following zip codes as the wealthiest:

37922, 37932, 37938, 37772, 37931
37923, 37803, 37849, 37737, 37830
37919, 37774, 37742, 37865, 37721
37705, 37924, 37754, 37918, 37764

The chart also lists the housing costs of the Knox County, Anderson County, Sevier County, Loudon County, and Blount County zip codes and additional home data as well as the ethnic makeup of the zip codes and the education levels per zip code. This is great information for folks looking to buy homes in Knoxville. It is also interesting data for those folks who are already home owners in one of these zip codes.

Knoxville Real Estate is quickly becoming a hot commodity for many developers and home owners. Every year more people are moving to Knoxville Tennessee, some come for the great University of Tennessee, others are here for the nearby Oak Ridge National Laboratory and many of them are attracted by the beautiful Smokey Mountains.

Whatever the reason, Knoxville Real Estate is emerging as one of the premier real estate markets. If you are moving to the area and are in search of Knoxville Real Estate, the first two sites you will want to visit are kaarmls.com and trulia.com. Both sites will provide you with an abundance of Knoxville Tennessee Real Estate listings. Of these two links I favor kaarmls for house searching but you will probably find the heat map of Knox county from trulia quite interesting.