East Point Using Fire Code to Knock Down Abandoned Properties

East Point maintenance supervisor Otis Burton attacked an apartment building with a backhoe Saturday as the city knocked down the first abandoned property on its hit list.

Owners of the boarded-up Los Erken Apartments had failed to keep the building habitable and safe. East Point Fire Chief Rosemary Cloud got a court order to flatten it as a safety hazard.

It won't be the last, she said.

"We got court orders to demolish five or six more properties, and we'll be moving forward in the next two to three weeks," she said. "This is the first one."

East Point has embarked on an aggressive program of using the city's fire code to declare abandoned properties safety hazards if owners --- often banks and absentee investors --- refuse to keep them secure and maintained.

Abandoned houses and apartments become magnets for criminals and vagrants and are fire hazards, Cloud said. The Los Erken Apartments on Central Avenue were in an industrial section of the city, but the next properties to be razed will be in residential neighborhoods, she said.

Fire Department Deputy Chief Corey Thornton, who works closely with the abandoned properties program, said the Los Erken became a hazard years ago. Property owners had knocked out load-bearing walls to create larger apartments, which made the structure unsafe, he said.

"The people living in here were mostly illegal immigrants," said police Sgt. Bruce Halliburton, who works in code enforcement. "They were living in terrible conditions and [the owners] would never fix anything."

Code enforcers in metro Atlanta have voiced frustration at trying to hold owners of abandoned houses and apartment complexes accountable. The properties often change hands before court dates, and many of the owners live out of state, which also delays repairs.

It can be difficult to serve the right person with notices of court dates. East Point investigators identified the most recent owner of the Los Erken as a real estate holding company.

Last year, the south Fulton city started using the fire safety code to attack the most dilapidated properties as safety hazards instead of simply building code violations, which moved the process through the courts faster.

East Point's vacant home task force, an interagency group, has identified at least 827 vacant structures. It has boarded up 45 houses in the past year and is maintaining them in the hope that the owners will eventually sell them, which would allow the city to recoup its costs through court liens.

"No other city has a program quite like this," said Mayor Earnestine Pittman. "We are working to stop urban blight and to reclaim the land."

Many of the properties, like the Los Erken, are so vandalized that in the current market, they have little value. Their owners may be happy the city is saving them the demolition costs.

Thornton estimated knocking down the Los Erken would cost the city about $15,000. It could be years before the property is sold and the city can recoup its money.

"It is not going to be a quick turnaround," he said.