Does Des Moines need a dose of Big Brother to deal with derelict housing?

By Carolyn Szczepanski

Four decomposing cats lay in the middle of a kitchen floor covered in rodent feces and shattered glass. Nothing left but skin and bones.

Wearing white haz-mat suits taped into their rubber boots and breathing gear to ease the stench of animal waste that extends all the way to the sidewalk, the work crew arrives at 7:30 a.m. to a four-bedroom home that has turned into a wasteland of abandoned possessions drenched in animal urine. As the hours go by, a pool of trash floods the driveway at 1423 22nd St. - popcorn canisters, fuzzy slippers and plastic bags of crumpled clothes stream out the decaying door and piles up so high it nearly obscures the boarded windows.

Out front, overturned couches and stained mattresses topple off the littered porch and balanced precariously in the knee-high weeds that have devoured the small yard. Inside, clouds of flies swarm among the dressers and tables that, turned on their sides, expose the few spots of red carpet that have escaped the entrails of unidentified vermin. And throughout the empty but stench-haunted house, the plaster on the walls blisters open, rust bleeds from every piece of metal pipe and exposed bricks create scabs on the crumbling ceilings as if the structure itself were diseased.

"We're never going to get this finished today," Mike Lehman says, sweat escaping from under his red Nascar cap as he gulps a bottle of water during a lunch break for the work crew.

"Doesn't get dark until 8 o'clock," city inspector Ed Leedom replies, with a half-serious smile.

But Lehman's right. Half the day is gone and they haven't even gotten to the basement yet; there's so much trash down there the last several steps are buried. Like an episode of "The X Files," the two men wade in with a flashlight, cautiously crunching across the wall-to-wall debris, holding onto the ceiling for balance. They went in looking for signs of deteriorating electrical and plumbing systems, but they reemerge, shaking their heads. They'll have to bust through the exterior wall with a backhoe to make a final assessment.

But, even with the knee-deep trash clogging the basement, Leedom and Lehman agree this dump is high living compared to some of the places they've abated around the metro. Like that house on East 14th Street that Lehman worked a while back. There, the trash was so thick - cat feces covered in food scraps covered in old clothes for untold years - that it created a new putrefied floor so tall that Lehman had to bend 90 degrees at his waist to get through a doorway that was at least nine feet high. Because of the fossilized garbage, the toilet was nothing but a hole in the fake floor and when Lehman opened the shower it was crammed top to bottom with used toilet paper.

And the cockroaches? Once the crew started digging out the debris the insects paraded up from their subterranean refuge, creating a two-foot band all along the walls. Lehman can still picture the first thing he threw out of the house - "a white AM radio, like your grandma would have" - because it cracked open the instant it hit the pavement, sending more than a pound of cockroaches scurrying into the street.

Leedom's seen his share of such shocking residences, as well. City workers call them "path houses," he says, because the trash fills the interior so completely residents maneuver through small openings in the gigantic garbage maze. With decaying exteriors, these houses risk pelting kids with bricks or plaster as they bike through adjacent alleys. With rotting interiors, these houses get so foul postmen have been known to turn them in because they couldn't bear to visit the mailbox another stomach-turning day. And, although they represent just a fraction of the true number of uninhabitable houses, there are more than 200 of these public nuisances contaminating neighborhoods across the metro.

However, while no one disputes the need to eliminate such aesthetic blights, the remedy is far more difficult than the diagnosis. Consummately strapped for cash, the city has been running out of funding for demolitions virtually every year, as the number of nuisances rise. Frustrated with abandoned buildings that stand for decades, neighbors argue the city doesn't move fast enough and lacks the authority to halt the decline until it has hit rock bottom. And with property owners simply washing their hands of their filthy structures and taking no notice of the city's demands, the process can get as messy as that trash-strewn driveway at the metro's newest nuisance on 22nd Street.

When it comes to defining the seedy structures that make neighborhoods look indecent, Ben Bishop has an apt metaphor: "It's like pornography," the administrator for Des Moines' Neighborhood Inspections Division says. "It's hard to define, but you know it when you see it."

According to the municipal code, a building becomes a public nuisance when "it's so damaged, decayed, dilapidated, unsanitary, unsafe or vermin-infested that it creates a hazard to the health, safety or welfare of the occupants or to the public." Sound vague? City inspectors don't disagree.

Generally, what makes a public nuisance is structural defects, explains neighborhood inspections supervisor Mary Newman. Say you have a foundation wall that's bowing; that may not constitute a public nuisance. But if it's collapsed, it would be. A foundation wall that's bowing, a bad roof, and a bad electrical system?
"It's always a judgment call," she says.

And right now, approximately 200 decaying homes have been found guilty of offending neighborhood standards. Although scattered throughout the city, the violations are generally the same: roofs falling in, foundations in disrepair, windows without windowpanes, and, of course, ungodly amounts of garbage. Since the start of the year, the city has leveled 24 such buildings and, currently, six are waiting on demolition row (see sidebar, page 19) for their crimes against surrounding property values and threats to community health.

But, just as it generally takes years of low maintenance to make a family home a dangerous eyesore, a public nuisance is not abated overnight. Owners are notified. Court orders are obtained. City council gives approval. And through the whole process the title holders have every opportunity to renegotiate the string of 30-day deadlines, as long as they prove they're putting in the effort.

"We give them a certain amount of time, and, if they're not compliant but they're trying to be, we don't rush to take them down," Bishop says. "We don't want to take them down."

Luckily for the city, the majority of owners step up to the plate when their property is labeled a public nuisance, Bishops says. About 50 percent of public nuisances are rehabilitated by the owner or sold to somebody that has the means to make improvements, he says. Another 25 percent, he adds, are simply torn down by the owners.

But then there's that final 25 percent of owners who throw a wrench in the system by turning their backs and sticking taxpayers with the consequences of years of inadequate maintenance. Leedom says the city can spend months just trying to find the party responsible for some of these abandoned homes. (Indeed, owners of buildings leveled earlier this year or slated for upcoming demolition contacted by Cityview did not return phone calls.) And after court orders and hand-delivered letters don't get their attention, the city has to take matters into its own hands. Of course, that's when another problem crops up: money.

For the past five years, Bishop explains, the city has had trouble stretching federal dollars far enough to get buildings down. Over that period, funding from the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program has stayed steady at about $250,000, he says. But that's proving inadequate.

"Close to end of the calendar year, come November or December, we're getting low on money in that fund," Bishop explains. "We don't stop the process, but we stop doing the demolitions until January when the money comes in. Two years ago we had two waiting, last year we had eight sitting on the list waiting to come down. So running out of money isn't uncommon, but because costs are up and we're doing more [demolitions], we're finding we're running out of funding mid-year."

That's what happened this year. Having demolished 24 homes - nearly as many in the first six months of 2005 as the entire preceding year - the fund had run dry. After a month on hold, officials told Cityview last week that recent discussion had made them "very confident" that they will soon get the $160,000 they need to make nuisances tumble through 2005. But that's just temporary relief. Bishop says that next year his department is looking for a 40 percent bump in their budget, hoping they can increase their CDBG funding to $300,000 and obtain $50,000 from the city's general fund.

The need for more money, officials say, is two-fold: more homes and higher prices. Leedom says that, because the city's 16 inspectors largely split their time between hundreds of rental inspections and the 10,000 junk and debris abatements they handle each year, declaring public nuisances is "more like a side job." Even so, they've gotten more vigilant about public nuisances, and even though he's working 17 in the Drake neighborhood right now, Lehman already has his eye on four more potential suspects. Not to mention, neighbors are becoming more vocal in feeding tips to the inspectors on their beat - like the woman who saunters over to rap with Leedom about housing gossip, as he stood on the sidewalk in front of new nuisance on 22nd Street last week.

But while the assistance is appreciated, the city is straining to make good on neighbors' concerns, partly because it's become increasingly expensive to turn a dilapidated residence into a pile of rubble. The price tag varies widely whether you're talking about a bungalow or a four-story building, Bishop points out, but any way you slice it the cost is going up. John McKee, deputy city engineer, says a small house used to set the city back $6,000-$7,000, but now that same structure will cost as much as $10,000 to tear down.

Why?

"Dump fees, fuel, labor, everything's gone up," Newman says. And don't forget the fees to deal with the sewer and water lines, McKee adds; plumbing costs have been going up, as well.

What makes it even harder to swallow, Bishop and Newman both acknowledge, is that after all the paperwork and bureaucracy it costs the city as much as three times more than what it would for the homeowner to handle it. And once they've passed the buck to taxpayers, they're not likely to cough up good money for past bad deeds, Bishops says.

In fact, Su Donovan, with the city's legal department, says that less than 5 percent of the property owners who disregard the city's demands end up paying for their public-funded demolition. Right now, she says, we're looking at approximately $2,969,540 in outstanding personal judgments dating back as many as 10 years.

The city may soon start a collection practice to get some of those out-dated debts back in public coffers, Donovan adds, but don't expect Bishop or Newman to hold their breath. Even neighborhood advocates point out that, if you trace a public nuisance back to its owner, they're generally not living South of Grand. They're living just down the road from the eyesore in question, often in a house that looks like it might be next on the nuisance list itself.

Sharon Zanders-Ackiss speaks with a forcefulness that implies fighting terms are her mother tongue. With a level gaze and sarcastic half-smile, the director of Des Moines Citizens for Community Improvement doesn't pull any punches. And to be perfectly honest, when the Waterloo native relocated to Des Moines 11 years ago, she wasn't impressed. Not by a long shot.

"When I was moving here, I thought this was the most raggedy, ugly place to be the capital of Iowa," she says. "I remember coming into these neighborhoods and thinking, 'What's going on here?' because the decline was so prevalent."

She wasn't expecting the low-income neighborhoods to be gilded in capitol-dome gold, but when she first started working with the communities just north of Forest Avenue, she was sadly surprised by the amount of decrepit housing. In the past decade, the aging housing stock in King Irving has gotten a shot in the arm, thanks to rehabilitation, demolition or new development, she says. But that improvement hasn't caught on in surrounding areas.

Based on sidewalk research, Des Moines CCI recently determined that no less than 30 percent of the houses in the adjacent Ingleside Hills neighborhood are either abandoned, designated a public nuisance or already scheduled for demolition. For years the drug trade was dragging the area down, Zanders-Ackiss says, and the neighbors worked doggedly to make their streets less appealing to illegal activity. But now unseemly and unsafe housing, she adds, is at the top of Ingleside's most-wanted list.

"What they do is encourage vagrants, they encourage illegal activity, they're an eyesore that bring down property values," Zanders-Ackiss says of drastically substandard housing. "It's a no-win situation to keep a building standing for years."

Like a non-traditional realtor, Zanders-Ackiss knows the tour of egregious examples that continue to stand throughout the Ingleside neighborhood. First stop: "a monstrosity" on 23rd Street that's been boarded up so many times it looks like a jigsaw puzzle pieced together with irregular squares of chip board weathered into varying shades of rust. Second stop: the short stretch of 21st Street, where, out of 15 houses, maybe four are in decent shape, she says. But wending through the neighborhood, it's apparent that the 23rd Street monstrosity and the string of decline on 21st Street aren't unique. On virtually every block there's a crumbling building that, at best, has become an unsightly home to a certain army of vermin.

Like Zanders-Ackiss, Dawn Jorgensen, director of the Fairgrounds Neighborhood Association, knows the financial liability of such eyesores.

"When we started the neighborhood association nine years ago a realtor told us, if your house is a mess it doesn't matter, but if your neighbors' house is a mess your property value is decreased by $20,000," she says, "because someone can buy your place and fix it up, but they can't fix up the neighbor's."

Just this year, she adds, her neighbors took pictures to city officials when they protested their property assessments, arguing "I can't sell my property for this amount when the family across the street has plastic tents full of junk in their front yard."

But, Zanders-Ackiss has learned that it takes a measure of organized outrage to get officials to pay attention to certain parts of the metro that, had the city done their due diligence in the first place, wouldn't have fallen into such disrepair.

"I think there needs to be wake-up call here," she continues. "Unfortunately, people in neighborhoods like Ingleside feel like, if these houses were in West Des Moines, how long would they stand? If these houses were in Beaverdale, how long would they stand? Why do we have deal with housing standing more than a decade, what's the problem? There's no reason why they should be standing that long. You can't tell me it takes 10 years for that process."

But don't think Zanders-Ackiss wants to see old houses turned to landfill fodder either. In fact, she thinks the city should seek a second opinion from local non-profits before an automatic prescription for demolition. The property on 22nd is a perfect example; even Leedom says the place is structurally sound.

"There's got to be some good communication between the city and developers," Zanders-Ackiss says. "They need to tell people that, from the view of the city, it's in good, sound condition and then put it out there to see if a non-profit could come in and make another affordable housing unit instead of tearing it down. If it takes $10,000-$15,000 to tear down, it might take $10,000-$15,000 to get it up to standards. Don't think demolition is the only option."

Jorgensen agrees that Fairground area residents have similar hopes for rehabilitation. Many of the homes out there are on 25-foot lots, she says, which isn't ideal for redeveloping from the ground up. Plus, keeping the original housing stock, saves the character of the neighborhood, she adds. But, while Jim Cain, executive director of the Iowa Coalition for Housing and the Homeless, readily agrees the worst thing for a neighborhood is a patch of unused grass, rehab isn't as easy as it might sound.

"There's problems inherent in doing renovation work that aren't necessarily the case in building new housing," he says. "With a new house you know what you're getting into. But doing rehab, on the face of it everything looks just fine, but then you start tearing out plaster or floorboards and discover there are problems you hadn't noticed before."

Leedom agrees that it's not uncommon to see a public nuisance rehab stall just short of the habitable mark. You'll watch someone sink a good $10-20,000 into rehabilitating a structure and then they just don't have that last $10,000 to get it done, he says. But if the expense doesn't get it all the way to standards, Leedom says, the city has to tear it down, improvement or not. But, while Leedom says demolition is the city's only option, Cain says the real issue is priorities.

"The city has a certain responsibility in terms of what they see as a priority," he says. "If they want something done to houses that they consider to be a nuisance, then they need to make it a priority when they do funding for housing programs; say, 'we believe in preserving existing stock and we're going to back it up with funds.'"

But, while recent meetings with neighborhood inspectors and council members have gone well and neighbors are hopeful their housing plight has become more of a priority, Zanders-Ackiss isn't staking community improvement on a city that has proven inefficient so many times in the past.

"There's work with the city; that was Plan A," she says. "But we're also working on Plan B."

So what's Plan B? Zanders-Ackiss, despite her outspoken demeanor, is keeping that one to herself.


It's impossible to ignore the specter of Big Brother lurking around the margins of recent city council discussions.

While residents want action on housing maintenance and city leaders want to address declining aesthetics, both admit there's a fine line between empowering inspectors and enacting Orwellian regulations. But, as neighborhood advocates point out, the current system has some glaring holes that might justify stepping on owners' toes.
"We have concentrated code enforcement; that's taken care of," Jorgensen says of the rental inspection and junk complaints officials are currently authorized to address. "But if somebody owns their house and it's in poor condition what can the city or the neighborhood do? Right now, the answer is nothing."

Zanders-Ackiss says she hears that legal impotence from inspectors all the time: "If the lawn is mowed and the foundation's in good shape, there's nothing we can do."
But in a half-dozen cities across the state, officials are armed with the authority to hold owners accountable for their houses' upkeep through a property maintenance code. Currently, Des Moines has aspects of the International Property Maintenance Code in its rental unit regulations, but, despite past discussion, has not widened the provisions to owner-occupied structures, Bishop says. The problem is that, while requiring a property owner to address issues like peeling paint and deteriorating siding may placate frustrated neighbors, such codes are not always accepted without significant opposition. For instance, in June, Waterloo enacted a property maintenance code, and not one month later hundreds of residents had signed a petition demanding the mayor and city council members resign for infringing on homeowners' rights.

Last week the Des Moines city council tackled the issue in a work session, evaluating letters from both sides - some in favor of a stronger hold on homeowners, some concerned about tightly tailoring the regulations and finding a safety net for low-income homeowners. In light of the conflicting opinions, the matter was referred to Des Moines Neighbors to convene a task force, study the options and come back to the council with recommendations. But, it's not just the decision makers who have yet to take a firm stance on the possibly contentious regulations. Officials and residents alike remain on the fence.

"The problem with a property maintenance code is you have mom and pop living in a $40,000 house over by the Fairgrounds and they don't have money to paint their house," Bishop hypothesizes.

"So do they eat or do they paint?" Newman asks.

"Because if you have a property maintenance code neighbors will expect you to make them paint the house," Bishop continues. "So you paint the house and then you have to put a lien against the property for the paint. So is property maintenance code good? Yep. Is it bad? Yep. Is it a political decision the council has to make? Yep."

Looking up at the crumbling exterior and splintering roof at the public nuisance on 22nd Street, Ed Leedom clearly sees the efficacy of a maintenance code. Here's a property he's been watching with a worried eye for more than a year, even going so far as to knock on the door - which would only crack open a couple of inches - in an effort to at least speak to residents. But, because it's not a rental, he had no authority to do anything about the clearly deteriorating building. Standing in an upstairs bedroom with a gaping hole in the ceiling and shredded plastic covering the window, there's a hint of frustration in his voice when he says he's pretty sure it wasn't in much better shape when people were living here.

"A maintenance code would be helpful," he says, "If there were a way to monitor all the properties, if there were a way to legally do anything about them, it would make a big difference. But there's the legal problem of, can you walk onto someone's property and tell them what to do with it? And the other thing is manpower. We'd need more to keep up."

Jorgensen says that, like council members, she's taking a wait-and-see approach.
"Part of me says it sounds good, but part of me wonders if my garage is peeling - which it is right now, I'm painting - or if I have a cracked window, are they going to give me a week to fix it?" she says, paintbrush in hand. "And what do you do with people who can't afford to do those repairs? They own the house, but they can't afford to live in it?"
Of course, some advocates point out that the city doesn't have to be a financial bully to keep low-income owners in line. Like rehabilitation instead of demolition, leaders might ponder assistance instead of assessments to keep the housing stock up to standards.

"There's been a lot of emphasis here for several years focusing on home ownership for folks of lower and lower income," Cain says. "That's a good thing, but once someone is into the unit and it comes time to make repairs, there's often a pretty thin margin between income and cost of living and then making repairs on top of it. If we're talking about low income people who are residing in single family homes, the city might put forth some funds for owner-occupied rehab."

But whatever the outcome, Bishop says the issue is definitely back on the radar, and Council member Archie Brooks agrees the debate is just beginning.

"I think it is worth pursuing, and that we have to further investigate what agencies are out there that can help those in need, and also be protective of owner-occupied status or the old saying 'a man's home is his castle,'" he says. "We don't want to become Big Brother, but one house can drag a whole neighborhood down."

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