Long Distance Ownership Contributes To Home Explosion

Monday, February 1, 2010
Topics: Economy, Other
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The residents of West 83rd street were shaken from their daily routines last Monday when an abandoned house on their street exploded, leaving 6 families homeless and 57 other buildings badly damaged. As it turns out, the owner of the house --- a real estate company --- is based hundreds of miles away in California, barely aware of what’s happening to the Cleveland property. ideastream®’s Ida Lieszkovszky has this update.

Bill Calderwood used to live on West 83rd street, until the house next door blew up, and left his own house a pile of rubble. Now he’s left sifting through that rubble, hoping to find some things he can salvage.

Calderwood was walking his dog last Monday afternoon when he heard a loud noise behind him.  The blast almost knocked him off his feet.

Calderwood: So I got about half a block away, the neighbor down the street grabbed my dog and says check on your house, give me your dog. I come down here and I was still about 5 houses down and I looked and my porch is gone. So I thought my house blew up.

Had he been home at the time, Calderwood would not have survived the blast. He says the house next door sat unoccupied for 3 years now, and recently looters have been coming around to empty it of any remaining furniture or piping. And then there was that gas smell many of the neighbors say they complained about, including Calderwood.

Calderwood: I smell gas right now!

Fire crews and Dominion East Ohio gas are still investigating the cause of the explosion. We tried several times to talk with EZ Access, the owner of the house, but they never returned phone calls. A local lawyer who represents them said he is not ready to comment at this time.

EZ Access owns about 80 other properties in Cuyahoga County. Records from the County Recorders office show they buy some from individuals, others they purchase in bulk for about $500 dollars a piece from other similar investment companies, or often from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. Then EZ Access turns around and sells the houses to investors in California, often managing to get as much as 20-thousand dollars a piece. As part of the deal, they promise to renovate the houses so they can be resold at a good profit by the new buyer. One of those buyers was David Barnes. 

Barnes: In my opinion EZ Access- they’re crooks. They didn’t do anything that they – the promised a whole lot and they didn’t deliver very much.

Barnes is from California too, where he went to several meetings by EZ Access and was convinced to buy 2 homes in Cleveland and 2 more in Detroit for 22-thousand dollars each. He’s been spending a lot of time in Ohio lately, cleaning up those houses because EZ Access never did.

Barnes: They claimed they would put them in livable and marketable condition and they rarely if ever did anything like that. The two properties that I own here in Cleveland they got them close but there were still repairs that I had to end up getting out of pocket myself.

Barnes just finished putting a new roof on his house on West 105th street. Cleveland Housing Court Judge Ray Pianka says absentee landlords used to live in the suburbs of the cities where they rented out houses, but these days they often live out of state or even out of country. Pianka says this kind of detached ownership lends itself to disregard for the neighborhood and criminal conduct.

Pianka: The illegality comes in if they fail to disclose code violations, if they fail to file with the city the disclosure, and if they fail to repair the code violations that they’ve received notice of.

County Treasurer Jim Rokakis says he sees this sort of thing all the time.

Rokakis: There are dozens of companies like EZ Access. We estimate, and these are studies done by the folks and NEO CANDO and NPI that at least 80 % of properties that have been foreclosed, we’re talking thousands, have already been dumped by the major players to companies that buy these props in bulk.

And many of these long-distance landlords don’t pay their taxes on time.

Rokakis: The unpaid taxes on these totals millions of dollars and we’re going after these companies not just EZ Access but others to collect these back taxes.

From a review of records from the Cuyahoga County Auditors office, EZ Access owes almost $250 thousand dollars in back taxes on their various properties here.

The January 25th explosion has heightened the anxiety of others in Northeast Ohio living near abandoned, unkempt homes, especially those near the West 83rd street area, like Anthony Zarzour.

Zarzour: I live like 15-20 houses up, and I still felt it. But I have 2 abandoned houses that are across from me and I’m worried about those two – about people getting into those.

Zarzour wonders too if more of these houses area a safety hazard, and whether anyone will find out in time to prevent another tragedy. Good questions.

**ideastream®’s Jack Helbig and Mhari Saito helped out with this story.