Housing complex owner has poor record
The more you dig into the East Side quagmire known as the Colonial Village Apartments, particularly its ownership, the more things start to stink as bad as the raw sewage that has backed up there for months.
In motions filed in court on Tuesday, Columbus City Attorney Zach Klein’s office asked a judge to remove the owners of the complex, long plagued by crime and neglect.
The city said the move is needed because the corporate owner of Colonial Village – Apex Colonial Ohio LLC – has defaulted on mortgage payments and failed to bring the complex into compliance with a previous court order to fix code violations and other problems.
Start looking into Apex Colonial even briefly and you will arrive at the conclusion that the city attorney’s office should have plenty of governmental company when it comes to investigating the LLC. This mess is begging for a state-level – dare I suggest federal? – investigation.
The Colonial Village complex contains 508 apartments and is one of the largest affordable housing providers in the city, although last spring about a quarter of the apartments were vacant.
Residents have complained for years about crime, pest infestation, mold and sewer backups, and the city has turned up the heat against complex management since 2019.
The owners have not leaped into action to make things right.
In court filings, the man behind Apex Colonial Ohio LLC is listed as Oron Zarum; the same name appears on registration papers filed with the Ohio Secretary of State’s office.
Zarum may not be a household name in Columbus, but he has developed a reputation when it comes to property ownership and management in other Midwest cities, including Chicago and Indianapolis.
It is not a good one.
In fact, Zarum at this very moment is facing a court battle in Indiana, where the state is taking action against the corporate landlord of a
rundown complex, a landlord that critics charge has misused low-income housing funds and for years abused its tax-exempt status. Earlier this summer, the Indiana attorney general sued the property management companies behind that complex, one of which is Aloft Management.
“At this point, I’m surprised the apartments are still open because nobody should be living there,” one former complex tenant told The Indianapolis Star.
A company named Aloft Management is, notably, identified as managing Colonial Village here in town.
The Indiana complex was full of roaches and mold, with broken windows and malfunctioning heating and cooling systems. Sound familiar?
In Chicago, federal housing officials and housing rights advocates have been butting heads with the owner of a similarly problematic complex owned by Apex Chicago IL, LLC, according to the Chicago Sun-times.
Apex, you say? And who might be behind that LLC?
Oron Zarum, for one.
The fall before that, in 2019, tenants of the Big Country Chateau in Little Rock, Arkansas, were living with mold and without heat, according to local television station KATV (Channel 7). Their complex owners were identified as Apex Big Chateau AR LLC.
The man behind that LLC? You guessed it. Oron Zarum.
Public records point to Zarum living and working mostly out of Brooklyn, New York, and Lakewood, New Jersey. Records also tie him to a Newark-based nonprofit known as JPC Charities that is registered here in Ohio, according to business filings with the Secretary of State’s office.
The nonprofit was formerly known as Good Deeds Matter.
Indeed.
In its IRS Form 990 from 2018, JPC Charities listed Zarum as its president and provided an address for him in University Heights, a Cleveland suburb.
The charity that year reported more
than $15.6 million in revenue, about double what it reported the previous year. In the document, it defined its mission as being to, “provide low-income housing. Organization owns and operates low-income housing and is a supporting organization, whose role is to coordinate activities and further the exempt purpose of other entities that provide exempt housing.”
All of this is just scratching the surface. Zarum’s name is linked through public records to a string of LLCS, a good number of them with the Apex moniker.
Zach Klein has been hammering away at Colonial Village for years now, to his credit and the credit of his office. But this morass sure looks bigger than that. If the situation hasn’t drawn their attention already, it cries out for scrutiny from Attorney General Dave Yost, the U.S. attorney’s office, and Gov. Mike Dewine.
If the governor can order an investigation into the admittedly strange saga surrounding the purported football team of a charter school, he should have the resources to review the actions of a man tangled up in low-income housing boondoggles nationwide and whose actions, and inaction, have left a central Ohio apartment complex and its beleaguered tenants in the lurch. tdecker@dispatch.com @Theodore_decker