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On a Friday in May, every house on one block of Savannah’s Tallow Ward receives a notice of assessment raising its value by four hundred and twelve percent. The owners have forty five days to appeal. Each of them had a purchase offer in the mailbox the week before.

Vernon Grimball has run the county’s real property division for twenty two years on one principle, which is that his numbers hold up. This one does. He checks the model three ways and the model is clean. What is not clean is the file it was built from, and Vernon knows where to look because he was shown the Tallow Ward before anyone told him it was being revalued.

Maudelle Polite is a retired accountant who has beaten his office twice, and who is rebuilding the county’s model from public records on the dining table of a house her grandmother bought in 1946. She has no reason on earth to trust him.

Neither of them understands yet that the assessment is not about taxes. A number on a notice is evidence in a hardship affidavit, a hardship affidavit is a demolition permit, and enough demolition permits will end a federal finding that has protected the ward since 2019. The block is not being priced. It is being disqualified. They have until the appeal window closes, and what neither of them knows is that the finding they are trying to save lapsed on the record fourteen months ago, and a lapse cannot be undone.