Mayor Michael Coleman has outlined plans to rid Columbus of vacant houses, but the city still faces a significant problem — determining whether a house is abandoned.
The city defines abandoned property as property that is non-productive and on which the owner is paying taxes. More often, houses are boarded up after officers find code violations.
Andy Baumann, the city’s code enforcement officer, is in charge of inspecting properties to see if they’re in violation of health codes. He reports houses are vacant or abandoned.
“Sometimes people have been living there a long time, but they may not have running water or gas. A lot of times, you’ll get rat infestation problems, or roach-infested houses,” Baumann said.
His team boards the house up. If the owner wants to stay in the house, he or she must get it back up to code before moving back in.
A relatively recent partnership between the Columbus Division of Police and the Department of Development has led to triple the number of houses reported as abandoned. If the police department goes out a call regarding drug or other criminal activity in a house and declares the property to be unsafe, the police officer contacts code enforcement officers in the development department, who immediately declare a board-up notice on the property.
If an owner is paying taxes on a property that is boarded up correctly, the city can not declare it abandoned, so inspectors look for houses that aren’t boarded according to city code.
Jennifer Cowley, assistant professor in city and regional planning, teaches a group of graduate students who are studying code enforcement.
The students documented about 900 properties in the university area, and one code violation they looked for was improperly boarded houses.
If a resident calls the city to report an improperly boarded house, code enforcement officers will come out to the property and see if it’s up to code, Cowley explained. If not, they send a letter to the property owner, giving him or her 20 days to come into compliance. The property owner can either board up the house properly or appeal and negotiate for an extended period of time. After that amount of time, if the property is still not properly boarded up, the owner can be fined and eventually put in jail.
In 2001, university-area landlord Stuart Kaplow spent some time in jail after he failed to comply with a court order to bring his 700 apartments up to code. He was also forced to live in one of the vacant properties until he brought them up to city guidelines.
