Thursday, March 29, 2012
Plans are in the works to sell them as single-family homes.
Looking to get rid of some rooming houses — as well as the uptick in crime that goes with them — the city approved the purchase of two of them on Wednesday night. The homes, at 1436 Grace Avenue and 1446 Mars Avenue, are among the last of the city’s boarding houses left in the city. There are only 11 remaining. At a special meeting, city council approved the purchase of both homes in a packaged deal, from Aivars and Anita S. Auzenbergs, for $207,000. The city used $150,000 from its land acquisition fund, and another approximately $67,000 from the general fund, to pay for the properties. The city will sell the homes — with new deed restrictions — as single-family homes. Lakewood Mayor Michael Summers said the city might even turn a …
Monday, February 13, 2012
Last summer, city administrators and building and housing officials set out on foot examining 11,000 homes in the city. Now comes the hard work.
Correction: The city sent out 1,500 letters to homeowners. Hundreds of color-speckled dots on a satellite image of Lakewood tell the story of the current state — as well as the future — of the city’s aging housing stock. Red is bad, green is good. Last summer, city administrators and building and housing officials set out on foot to examine 11,000 homes in the city. The result is the Residential Housing Survey, a collection of data that highlights areas of Lakewood that need some attention. “Now we’re talking about using that information to figure out what we’re going to do with this inventory,” said Dru Siley, the city’s director of planning and development. “We know that 84 percent of our houses are in good shape.” He said that of …
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Summers says the seminars are "selling out;" three more were recently added to the calendar.
There are 1,557 landlords in Lakewood. The city administration hopes to reach out to all of them. As part of Mayor Michael Summers strategy to address the city’s aging housing stock, he’s passing out “landlord manuals” and hosting landlord training sessions. “We’ve had three sessions, with about 200 landlords attending each,” said Summers, who has said that housing remains a priority. “The good news is we continue to sell out.” There are about 950 landlords the city has yet to reach. New licensing requirements by the city, seek to ensure that landlords meet two of three criteria by the city: Screen the tenant; attend one of the seminars; or have a written lease. “They can do two of them,” Summers said. “I think the smart ones are trying to…
Friday, January 20, 2012
John Salim says his tenants is a victim; city orders him to pay up.
A Lakewood landlord has been ordered to pay up after several nuisance complaints on one of his 10 Lakewood properties triggered action by the city’s law department. And, following the shootings on Waterbury Avenue, he may face additional fees. John Salim appealed the city’s decision that his property at 1588 Lakewood Avenue was a nuisance. Then, in the early morning of Jan. 7, the SWAT team responded to his property to arrest at least one of the Waterbury Avenue shooting suspects. Last week, the city’s Nuisance Abatement Board of Appeals upheld the law department’s findings. Salim was fined $312. However, following the investigation into the Waterbury Avenue shootings, there may be additional fees levied against him. At least one of the …
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
After one year in office, Mayor Michael Summers lays out his objectives for the upcoming year.
Michael Summers learned quite a bit about priorities during his first full year as mayor. When he accepted the post — filling the void left when then-mayor Ed FitzGerald left for the county executive gig — housing was his No. 1 priority. It still is. But Summers said he’s got a list of nine objectives he’d like to work on in 2012. “These objectives define the scope of our planned work,” he said. “From last years' experience, issues will come to us that are not planned as well.” He laid them out with Lakewood Patch. Here they are: Continue to provide core services that meet the needs of all Lakewood citizens Right-size local government following state cuts Improve ease and speed of customer access to information, answers, concerns and …
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Police responded to the home eight times in 2011.
In 2011 alone, there were at least eight police visits to 2051 Waterbury Avenue — the location of last Friday’s shooting that left one 17-year-old boy dead and another Cleveland man injured. Last week, just two days before the deadly shooting, the police department sent notice to the law department that the property was a “chronic nuisance." The law department hadn't sent the letter out to the landlord before Friday's shooting. Charles Wilson, 17, was killed in the shooting at 2051 Waterbury Ave. Friday night, and 20-year-old Frederick Burt was shot in the leg, but treated and released from MetroHealth Medical Center. But weeks and months before the shooting, the home at 2051 Waterbury Ave. was on the radar of the Lakewood police. Some of…
Carl Roloff
8:40 pm on Thursday, March 29, 2012
As someone who has had to endure the annoying, disgusting, and sometimes dangerous spillover from one of these properties for a number of years, all I can say is "thank you" to Mayor Summers and the City Council for taking this action. From firsthand experience, I can say that the problem has always been the landlord, the tenants, AND the rooming house business model, which just doesn't work … more ›