Crack down on landlords
No one should have to live in apartments without adequate heating or plumbing. Or where rats scurry across kitchen tables. Or with damaged front doors, windows without screens in the summer or bed bug infestations. And yet that’s the case in too many Milwaukee apartments where the city’s neediest residents live.
It’s a shameful condition created by some landlords who make Ebenezer Scrooge look good, some tenants with no respect for property and city officials who should be far more aggressive in cracking down on those slumlords who hide behind legal constructs known as LLCs to escape notice.
There are many responsible owners of inner city property, and they face difficult challenges in maintaining old buildings with a transient population. But what some landlords allegedly are doing is reprehensible. City officials need to be much more aggressive in making sure that such landlords clean up their acts.
Take the case of James H. Herrick, brought to light by a Journal Sentinel investigation by Cary Spivak and Kevin Crowe. The reporters linked Herrick, an executive at Robert W. Baird & Co. who lives in a $1.1 million home in River Hills, to limited liability companies that own or owned apartments in the inner city. One was boarded up after city building inspectors declared it “unfit for human habitation.” In another, building inspectors ordered that bed bugs be exterminated and residents be provided with at least one window screen in each room, the Journal Sentinel reported. The violations were the latest of more than 70 written up at the building since 2014.
Records analyzed by the Journal Sentinel show that LLCs owe about $3 million in past-due municipal court fines for building code violations and at least $9 million in back property taxes, Spivak and Crowe reported.
And while city officials say they can do little to identify who is behind the LLCs, a review by the Journal Sentinel was able to identify connections with scores of LLCs. Private attorneys contacted by Spivak and Crowe say city officials can do more to go after the owners of LLCs with problem properties.
Legal Action of Wisconsin was able to pierce the veil in the case of Elijah Mohammad Rashaed via a deposition in which Rashaed eventually listed 14 LLCs in which he said he was the sole owner. Municipal court records show six of those LLCs owe more than $65,000 in fines for building code violations.
City officials have begun moving more aggressively recently. In October, the city attorney’s office filed a $1.25 million racketeering lawsuit in civil court against veteran landlord Mohammad Choudry. But, as Spivak and Crowe reported, that only came after a Journal Sentinel investigation exposed how he and others game the system by delaying payment of fines and taxes, run properties into the ground, then abandon the homes and their tax burdens, even as they pay cash to buy more properties at the weekly sheriff’s sale of foreclosed properties.
Seems to us that if the Journal Sentinel and Legal Action of Wisconsin can get the information necessary to crack down on such landlords, so can the city. City officials need to do more — now. And state legislators should look at the law governing LLCs to see if any changes are needed.