Nathan Mader

Finding off-campus housing can keep students up at night. Living in it can be a nightmare.

From unwelcome pests crawling throughout the kitchen to fire escapes that look like they’d crumble with one step, code violations have been an ever-present issue plaguing the University District, and more importantly, the students that live there.

Code enforcement, run by Columbus Building and Zoning Services, is a complaint-driven organization. Sorting through these reports taken from the City of Columbus’ code enforcement website can show how unclean, dangerous or mismanaged some of-campus housing is.

A Lantern investigation of Columbus Building and Zoning data found housing code violations in the University District are just over 14 times higher than they were three years ago. 

In fact, the 373 violations covering the first nine months of 2023 are roughly equal to a total of 379 violations reported over nine years, stretching from 2013 to 2021. 

Anthony Celebrezze, deputy director for Columbus Building and Zoning Services, said a variety of factors could have contributed to the sharp increase in violations.

Among these reasons were a more proactive philosophy taken by code enforcement after the office switched city departments, the return of students and full staffing post-COVID-19 and new University District initiatives.

Housing violations fall under Title 45 of Columbus’ Code of Ordinances, and the system generally starts from complaints called in through the 311 Customer Service Center about an address experiencing potential infractions.

From there, code enforcement officers are sent out to inspect complaints and report them in the proper categories, as well as notify tenants or landlords of the time they have to correct the issues.

Students worried about their current or future housing do have several Ohio State and city resources available to address or report concerns. However, that doesn’t mean the issues always go away.

Patrick Brady, a fifth-year in chemical engineering, and his 2023 graduate roommate Thomas Guirguis, live in a University Village apartment. On Nov. 27, 2023, they called maintenance after finding cockroaches in their kitchen.

“Most of them were in the kitchen, and I think the first night it was the worst. That was before we sprayed anything,” Guirguis said. “They were under the kitchen sink. They were coming out of this crack under the kitchen sink, and they’d just go into the vent along the other wall of the kitchen or under the stove, and they eventually made their way to the fridge and other places throughout the house.”

Guirguis said cockroaches were found in the ceilings, refrigerator, bathroom and his bedroom. He, Brady and another roommate went to a different apartment to spend the night, but the other roommate refused to sleep in the apartment for a few extra days. Despite maintenance spraying down the place, Guirguis said it could’ve still taken seven to 10 days for them to fully disappear.

“I know most of the workers here are nice and they care,” Brady said.

As of the day after University Village sprayed their apartment, Brady said they hadn’t seen any more cockroaches. Brady said despite the cockroach issue and what he feels has been poor management, they’ve had far worse experiences with other companies.

“Specifically, regarding pest management, we have both preventative and reactive steps to mitigate these issues,” Todd Jessup, general manager of University Village Apartments, said in an email. “First, we work with a local third-party pest management company that takes proactive steps [multiple] times a week to prevent pests from entering our properties. Sometimes, even with these preventative measures, we’ve seen pests find their way into our properties. In these cases, our pest management partner is dispatched to our apartments as quickly as possible to respond to the specific issue at hand.” 

Celebrezze said violations are labeled properly under each category and by separating the data by these classifications, it can be analyzed to find which infractions are the most common each year.

Not all complaints result in violations. Cockroaches and other pests were a common complaint but comprised only five of the nearly 900 total violations in the past decade. 

Another record category, “weeds and solid waste,” is more to blame for an initial jump in violations that occurred between 2020 and 2021. 

Celebrezze said code violation duties were transferred from the Department of Development to Building and Zoning Services in 2021. The change in philosophy followed.

“The mayor decided that it made more sense to have that regulatory function be with Building and Zoning, since we’re already a regulatory operation, whereas the Department [of] Development is more into trying to create jobs and businesses and that type of thing,” Celebrezze said.

Soon after the switch, Building and Zoning started Monday trash sweeps in the University District after home football games, Celebrezze said. Enforcement officers would walk down streets and alleys looking for cans, cups and other excessive amounts of garbage in yards and would return Tuesday with orders to clean up within 48 hours. 

“Unfortunately, they tended to be the same addresses, but eventually over time, those landlords worked with their tenants. Most of them, they start sending their own staff out to clean things up on Monday and charge their tenants,” Celebrezze said. “The tenants learned they’re either gonna get charged for it, or they were going to have to clean by Sunday.”

Celebrezze said when the program started, they initially were writing up 80 to 100 citations each sweep, but through working with property owners and other stakeholders at community roundtables and other educational opportunities, only about a dozen are written up per sweep, which also occur less frequently.

In 2021, weeds and solid waste made up 92 of the total 136 violations, and that number fell to 26 in 2023. Celebrezze said the initial citations may have been warnings instead of full violations, but he couldn’t say for certain. 

To further help with the trash issue off campus, the University District Organization — a community organization dedicated to improving life in the neighborhoods of the University District — has started multiple programs.

Nora Gerber, executive director of the UDO, said trash is a unique problem to tackle because there’s so much of it. She said one idea that came to life was the Trash to Treasure project, which commissions artists to turn nearby dumpsters into their canvases. 

“This does two things for us that we’ve seen. One, it reduces the vandalism on dumpsters,” Gerber said. “Usually, it subconsciously encourages people to actually put their trash inside of the dumpster instead of around it so that because they see something beautiful, and they respect it a little bit more.”

The Can Fairy project is another UDO initiative. Gerber said it was introduced because of the amount of garbage found by code enforcement’s trash sweeps and because other people, such as can collectors and those without houses, were often on porches and lawns cleaning the mess themselves, leading to safety concerns. 

“We’re going to be doing the collection and who’s doing it, so that’s safer,” Gerber said. “But then, too, instead of putting it on the lawn, you fill the box, you put it in the box, not your lawn. It reduces the litter, it changes the habit, and then when we collect those bags every Monday morning, we take them to a recycling drop-off location and they get diverted from the landfill.”

Sarah Swasey, a fourth-year in political science, complained about trash violations at her off-campus house on Indianola Avenue, along with a list of other poor housing conditions. She said a dumpster behind her house often overflows, leaving her and her roommates to take the blame.

“That dumpster is used by pretty much half the street, and we live around fraternities and all that,” Swasey said. “So, when they throw away their thousands of cans from parties, it overflows our dumpster.”

Swasey said they were fined once by the city, which was handled by her real estate company, Hometeam Properties, but they have received numerous other warnings and citations threatening further fines and even jail time.

“Over the summer someone threw away their couch, but they just left their couch in front of the dumpster, and then we got a notice for it, and it’s not our couch,” Swasey said.

The largest jump in code violations happened in 2023, as the total tripled from an already increased amount in 2022. Last year’s data saw a total of just under 400 violations in the first nine months, which is 12 times larger than the yearly average from 2013-2020. 

The jump occurred mostly in the “general” record category, going from 39 incidents in 2022 to 167. This category includes a wide variety of small structural or common infractions.

University Area Commission chair Doreen Uhas-Sauer said one of the reasons for the large jump in recent violations was the COVID-19 pandemic. She said it caused students — a large portion of the off-campus population — to leave the University District. The UAC is a volunteer, democratically-elected commission in Columbus that advises on zoning, planning and other neighborhood civic matters, according to its website. 

“We did not necessarily see students in the neighborhood because they were working remotely at home. They literally abandoned the area,” Uhas-Sauer said. “It was like living in a ghost town.

So, there’s a fluctuation there where people would not have been calling [violations] in.”

Celebrezze agreed with this, saying the post-pandemic transition caused a lot of changes for code enforcement through Building and Zoning Services. This included having code enforcement officers out on the job five days a week as opposed to half that during the pandemic. 

The jump in violations for 2023 can also be attributed to staffing, according to Celebrezze, as he said this was the first time in many years that code enforcement was up to full staffing. In addition, he said the off-campus area has the most code officers, and what can sometimes be four or five personnel has since jumped to 10 or 11.

“We ended up adding to that. We’ve got two teams called PACE — Proactive Code Enforcement — and these are folks that have been doing code enforcement for many years, and they’re kind of like our specialists. We send them into areas, so we inundated the area,” Celebrezze said. “That would account for a lot of the big jumps in the numbers in ‘23.”

Uhas-Sauer said students can also be at fault for causing violations, meaning they should protect themselves by understanding what hazards they can cause and how it impacts their safety.

“Students violate the code themselves. They bag a fire alarm or they block an exit with a bed,” Uhas-Sauer said. “Just the kinds of things you may not realize are contributing to your own lack of safety. Upholstered furniture on porches — we’ve had severe fires in the university area because of that.”

Trash is another violation often caused by students, and ensuring smoke detectors are functioning with charged batteries is another potentially life-saving responsibility of renters. 

In addition, Gerber said the quick turnaround of students in off-campus housing can discourage both parties from maintaining their properties. She said anyone indicating a lack of care and respect incentivizes others to do the same. 

“Maybe you would throw a party at your parent’s house, but you would definitely clean up after because your mom, dad, parents, grandparents — whoever  — would expect you to respect the house,” Gerber said. “I think if you have a landlord that doesn’t care about the property, it doesn’t make you want to care about the property, which is sad in a way because a lot of these homes [that] are built in the early 1900s are really cool and are really gorgeous inside.”

Gerber said she believes the landlords who don’t care about a property are likely the ones who see the most violations. Landlords who do care and show that through their work are more likely to see that attitude reflected by tenants. 

The Lantern reached out to Swasey’s landlord, Hometeam, who did not return requests for comment. The Columbus Apartment Association also did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

“There are ways in which you can intrinsically show that you care about your apartment and your neighborhood,” Gerber said. “We hope that that has a ripple effect for people that are visiting, that they want to throw their trash away properly, or when they do come and live here, that they have a sense of place and community in that they really love it.” 

Swasey said she feels having students in the University District rent for only a year or two can cause a lack or delay of care from landlords with their properties, and she feels she has been impacted by this. 

“I think there [are] a lot of times where they’re expecting that the students living in these houses are going to be immature and breaking stuff, and I do know people like that that just don’t take care of their house,” Swasey said. “It’s hard because when you’re genuinely having an issue, they might just assume that you’re just a college kid that isn’t taking care of things.”

Celebrezze said there are many outside factors causing the number of violations to present as rising, yet he believes the actual total number of infractions is far more consistent.

“It’s more of the students knowing what their rights are and what they’re supposed to be living in. I mean, I went to Ohio State, and there’s always been violations of these. Looking back on my time there and knowing the code violations, there’s always interior and exterior stuff going on,” Celebrezze said.

Violations themselves can be expensive and bring unseen costs, and Brady said their infestation forced them to throw away all their food after cockroaches found their way into the fridge. Guirguis said cooking meals was also out of the question. 

“It was just inconvenient because we didn’t want to touch anything in the fridge, and obviously we didn’t want to cook in our kitchen, so we’d have to order food every day for every single meal,” Guirguis said. “So, it’s just very expensive.” 

University Village, Guirguis’ landlord, said the safety of their residents is their top priority, and rectifying maintenance requests is of utmost importance. 

“Our maintenance team strives to give each of our residents the best living experience possible at University Village,” Jessup said in an email. “In addition to our maintenance team, we have partnerships with several third-party vendors with an array of expertise who help us maintain our facilities for our residents. We also work closely with university housing and city inspectors to make sure we adhere to all housing standards for students who are living in our University Village properties.”

Words by Nathan Mader

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