Lodi property owner fights to keep squatters out of her building
For almost a year, Lodi property owner Debbie Lehr-Lee has been living a nightmare trying to maintain her vacant commercial property at 226-228 East Lodi Avenue as it continuously burglarized and destroyed by squatters and criminals.
Her ordeal is becoming more common in a town that is grappling with homelessness and related issues — as are cities around the state and the country. While Lehr-Lee is sympathetic to the challenges and hardships faced by those living on the financial fringes, she also believes her rights as a citizen and property owner should be respected and protected.
A little less than a year ago, in November 2017, Lehr-Lee and Harvest Property Management became aware that the basement of her commercial building had been taken over by squatters.
“We do drive-bys of the property and we noticed that once again, the tenant at the time was allowing people to loiter outside the front of the building. So we did an inspection of the exterior of the building and noticed several people coming and going from the basement of this commercial property,” said Shelley Nolen of Harvest Property Management.
The tenant couldn’t be reached, so Nolen called Lodi police to join the management company’s maintenance employees in a sweep of the building. Officers asked several people to leave the property.
“There was a person hiding in one of the crawl spaces in the basement, and so then we called police back out. They reswept the unit,” Nolen said. “I did make a citizen’s arrest of one of the people there, and the rest just scattered all over Lodi Avenue in different directions.”
The company secured that portion of the building, but a few days later, squatters broke in again. Some of them claimed the tenant of the building was allowing them to stay there, and they were paying him rent.
However, the tenant adamantly denied those claims and said that they broke in, Nolen said. Once again, Harvest Property Management cleared out the basement and secured it.
“They made makeshift little sleep areas for different individuals. They were quite comfortable there,” Nolen said.
The basement is not meant to be a living space, Lehr-Lee said. It is just a storage area, and has no facilities.
“What happened was they were down there cooking, and they had electrical cords strung and they had hot pots,”
Lehr-Lee said. “There was obviously filth everywhere, so we started interacting with code enforcement and the police at that time trying to get rid of those people, but they kept breaking in.”
She and Harvest Property Management would board up all of the building’s access points, but squatters kept breaking in, even going so far as to chop through boards.
“We put metal over things, and they’d cut through the metal,” Lehr-Lee said. “We could not stop them.”
When the tenant’s contract expired, Lehr-Lee decided not to renew it. It took her three months to evict him, she said.
The building is now completely boarded up.
Behind the building are two storage structures, one wood and one cement, Lehr-Lee said. She had previously rented out the wooden structure for storage, and was ready to rent it again after a vacancy.
That’s when the squatters broke into that structure, too.
“At first they went through doors, and we literally welded the doors shut. Then they started breaking holes in walls, so then we started putting sheet metal over them, and they started cutting through the sheet metal,” Lehr-Lee said. “We were getting constant calls there and every time we would have someone come out there to repair this, they literally would sit across the way and watch us board it up, and two days later they’d be back in.”
Nolen was the one who received the calls whenever there was a break-in.
“On March 10, we called the police because we had an homeless encampment inside this building,” Nolen said.
Several people had moved in, including a juvenile, she said.
“It broke my heart because there was a little girl with a pink backpack living in there with her mom,” Lehr-Lee said.
Police checked the building and let Nolen know when it was clear. She and a maintenance employee from Harvest Property Management went out to document the issue and secure the building.
“Lo and behold, there were people still in the building,” she said. “So we called the police back, and they did a resweep of the interior of the building.”
Even though the property management firm secured the building again, squatters continued to break in. Calling the police became a regular chore.
“They had a barbecue in there. They had hot plates. They had all sorts of stuff,” Lehr-Lee said. “It’s a wood structure. I was scared to death this was going to catch fire and people were going to die.”
Because the squatters left fecal matter and needles scattered around, Lehr-Lee had a hard time hiring people to make repairs. The squatters even tapped into her electricity.
Finally, she decided to tear the structure down and install lights to deter the squatters.
So the squatters broke into the cement structure, which was Lehr-Lee’s private storage space and formerly her father’s “man cave.”
“They completely destroyed the fencing and broke into my personal property, and that’s when they went through every single box and every single bin. They were in there for hours,” she said.
Several items were stolen or damaged, including Lehr-Lee’s wedding dress, her daughter’s jogging stroller from when she jogged across America and parts from her dad’s boat. Again, welding the door shut didn’t deter the squatters.
One night a neighbor heard activity in the back yard and called the police. An hour after police checked the property, the squatters cut the electricity to Lehr-Lee’s buildings and damaged the electric box.
That same day, she received a message from someone warning her about a hole in her front commercial building. Lehr-Lee discovered that the air conditioner had been stolen. A repair person she hired discovered that the someone had tried to hot-wire the commercial roll-up door to her personal storage unit.
Lehr-Lee shared her experiences at Lodi City Council meetings on July 18 and Aug. 1. The city manager and police told her they would step up patrols in that area. She also recently installed cameras that allow her to watch a live feed of her property.
While the criminal activity seems to be easing, Lehr-Lee has spent more than $30,000 on repairs and trying to keep squatters out of her property. She has been unable to rent her building, as she cannot keep up with repairs. She expects her costs will exceed $40,000 in the end.
Lehr-Lee says she isn’t the only property owner facing this issue.
At a previous Lodi City Council meeting, Councilwoman JoAnne Mounce shared a similar story from another property owner she knows.
“It’s becoming more and more frequent because, you know, there are a number of people that are in the homeless realm of things,” Lodi Police Chief Tod Patterson said. “They’re down on their luck, and you’re seeing more and more.”
He didn’t speak much about Lehr-Lee’s specific case, but said such break-ins are handled on a case-by-case basis.
Having organizations like the Salvation Army in Lodi is important because they can help the homeless get into some transitional housing, Patterson said.
“You have some of these committees that we’ve partnered with to try to get this moving in the right direction because we are seeing more and more of this,” Patterson said.
It’s also up to the owners of these buildings to make sure they’re keeping an eye on their properties, he said.
“A lot of times ... people from out of town own these buildings and businesses, and they don’t come out and check on them,” Patterson said. “Therefore, they are having people live in them for a longer period of time.”
Police have to follow certain procedures when it comes to evicting squatters, so the sooner they’re aware of a problem, the better, he said.
“It becomes a real problem for us if we don’t have the proper authority to remove the people from the business,” he said.
Nolen said she’s never experience what she’s experienced with Lehr-Lee’s property during her career as property manager. She is frustrated by the entire ordeal.
“I understand the plight of a lot of the homeless. However, I find it very disrespectful on their part to destroy another person’s property for their benefit. They have no care for other people’s property,” she said.
Nolen wondered if there might be some way police could track and deter habitual squatters.
“They need to have some way to curtail or get a better grip on these people, because evidently it’s not just our property. Other properties are going through the same thing,” Nolen said.
Lehr-Lee asked the Lodi City Council how she could help the city’s homeless population and prevent future problems. She plans to reach out to Mounce to discuss options.
She doesn’t want to be a victim, she said, but part of the solution.