Hoarder couple fight to save home from razing
North side couple featured on ‘Hoarders’ cable show tell judge they can clean up their act at duplex
Ilona and Roger Stank admit they are hoarders but swear they are not beyond help.
The wife and husband, both 80, promise they can clean out the grotesquely cluttered home that was declared unfit for human habitation by the City of Milwaukee in June 2016.
They are asking a judge to set aside a raze order and stop the city from tearing down their duplex, located at 5511 N. 53rd St.
“I don’t want to lose that house,” Ilona told me. “Our life is in there.”
She’s not just talking about 50 years of memories. She means the actual physical stuff of life. All of it. The toys that entertained two sons now long grown. The papers and magazines and food packaging and garbage most of us toss out. Old clothes and knickknacks and perceived treasures. Boxes and boxes of who knows what, floor to ceiling, room after room.
“People throw away a lot of things, but I don’t. I got everything in there,” Ilona said.
This statement she made not to me but to the camera when the “Hoarders” A&E cable TV show came to town in September 2016 to exploit their mental illness and their mess as entertainment
for the masses.
Sure, it was at the family’s invitation, and the producers also offered to help clean out the house, but that didn’t go well. They tossed out tons of Roger’s outdoor junk, but Ilona held tight to her indoor kingdom of clutter. This show devoted to all things hoarding left town in failure after four days. The city relocked the house.
“You guys are making me look really bad,” Ilona says on the show, which aired in December 2016.
But the real villain, the Stanks and their son Jay believe, is the city inspector on their case, Eric Lemmer, who works for the Milwaukee Department of Neighborhood Services.
“The main thing we want to get across is how unfair my parents are being treated,” Jay told me. That’s his middle name, which was used on the show. He asked me not to use his first name.
Jay Stank accuses Lemmer of calling his parents scum and parasites, which he denies. He said the city had utilities to the house turned off last year and then expected the elderly couple to work there during cold winter months.
He said thousands of dollars of inspection fees and citations were heaped on the couple the past couple years. Their 2018 property tax bill shows an extra $4,978 for building inspections done well after they were forced out.
If you’re in Lemmer’s line of work, you get used to the criticism. From the start, he said, all he wanted was a realistic plan to make the house livable again. He’s still waiting. His inspections found exits blocked, no pathway to mechanicals in the basement, electrical issues, a barely usable bathroom and generally unsanitary conditions.
“I think at this point in time I’ve become an ogre in the eyes of the entire family. I can’t help that. I felt this was something our department had dropped the ball on for 40 years. We’ve had an incredible number of complaints from the neighbors, from the alderman, from various other city agencies about this property. It was not appropriate to let it slide again,” Lemmer said.
I talked to a couple of neighbors. One had no quarrel with the Stanks; one called the property horrible and worries that a fire in the hoarding house would spread quickly to neighboring structures.
Last October, the city issued an order to raze the home. The Stanks turned to Milwaukee County Circuit Court to block the order. Their lawyer in this matter is Christopher Carson. Many other attorneys turned down the job.
“They suffer from a trauma-induced psychological adaptation known as hoarding,” Carson wrote in a court filing. “The home is not merely a place of respite and happy memory to them. For more than a half-century, it gradually became a place in which the physical objects it housed became signs and physical incarnations of family memories.”
In other words, it’s awfully hard for them to let go of anything. But the Stanks told me they have benefited from counseling in recent years. They’re asking for six warmer-weather months to clean out the house, not to the bare walls but at least to a more livable condition that should satisfy the city.
Assistant City Attorney Heather Hecimovich Hough has denied most of what was in Carson’s claim. A hearing before Circuit Judge Kevin Martens is scheduled for June 20. A city appeals commission has upheld the raze order.
“Finally we’re at a point where we just don’t believe that this property is salvageable in any way,” Hough said. “In this case, it’s just clear that the resources that the city has already invested in trying to clean this up have not worked. So we’re done. Done.”
The Stanks own other property in the city, Ozaukee County and up north. They’re now living in their four-unit apartment building near 60th Street and Appleton Avenue. Ilona told me they’re not hoarding there.
She said she is an Air Force veteran. She later worked as a secretary at WRIT radio and at Woolworth’s. Roger served in the National Guard, he said, and then used his electrician and steamfitter skills to run the boiler room at St. Michael’s Hospital in Milwaukee.
Ilona’s brother, Milwaukee police officer Gerald Hempe, was shot to death on duty along with fellow officer Charles Smith in 1973. Hempe was Roger Stank’s closest friend, and his death ended their plans to build cabins up north. Ilona thinks the loss intensified the hoarding.
Son Jay quoted to me from the 4th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution regarding “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.”
The city is violating that right, he said. His parents should be allowed to live in peace, even if their housing conditions are unconventional.
Inspector Lemmer said he understands that the Stanks have a challenging mental condition. “We don’t have the tools to deal with that kind of problem. I can only deal with the outcome of their problem.”
“Where do you draw the line?” the couple’s lawyer, Carson, wonders. “Do we raze every hoarder’s house or apartment building?”
“It’s stealing,” Ilona said. “What would you do if it happened to you?”
Contact Jim Stingl at (414) 224-2017 or jstingl@jrn.com. Follow him at Facebook or on Twitter @columnboy.