In Colonial Village fight, city is smart to team up
The laundry list of housing horrors sounded almost identical to Chicago housing organizer Lilly Lerner.
“Rodents, roaches, black mold, leaks everywhere,” Lerner said. “You have a lot of the same issues at Colonial Village that we do at Ellis Lakeview.”
Ellis Lakeview is a federally subsidized affordable housing apartment building on Chicago’s South Side, a few blocks from the shore of Lake Michigan.
The high-rise building appears unremarkable in Google Street View, which uses an image of Ellis Lakeview taken in June 2019. That is about the time when tenants of the building’s 105 units noticed that conditions really started going downhill.
“The timelines line up with Colonial Village,” Lerner said. “Tenants report it being really bad starting in 2019 when he bought the property.”
“He” is Oron Zarum, the man behind the limited liability corporation that owns Ellis Lakeview and another LLC that owns Colonial Village. Colonial Village is one of the largest, and arguably worst, apartment complexes in all of Columbus.
Residents of Colonial Village have said that while the complex always has been flawed, conditions rapidly worsened there in the past year. More than a fifth of the 508 units at the complex are now vacant, and residents have complained for months about a failing sewage system, rampant crime, uncollected garbage and uncut lawns.
City Attorney Zach Klein’s office has been trying for two years to force the owners and their property managers to make improvements or face sanctions.
Earlier this month, city attorneys asked a judge to remove the owners, who have defaulted on mortgage payments and failed to bring the complex into compliance with a previous court order to fix code violations and other problems.
The city would like to see a thirdparty receiver appointed to oversee the improvements and the eventual sale of the property to new owners, who they hope won’t run it into the ground.
In Chicago, Lerner has been following the Dispatch coverage of the Colo
nial Village debacle, largely to collect intel that might prove useful to the beleaguered tenants of Ellis Lakeview.
They have been dealing for years with a host of problems shared by tenants at Colonial Village, along with others unique to their 11-story building, such as missing window screens in a building full of families with small children.
“The elevators break down all the time,” Lerner added. “When you don’t put anything into the building, things will just crumble pretty quickly.”
Lerner and other housing organizers hope that their fight might gain traction by sharing information and strategies that work with their counterparts in other cities where Zarum owns properties, including Indianapolis and Columbus.
Increased public pressure, she hopes, might persuade the owners that “the better out for them would be to sell to a responsible owner.”
I connected Lerner with Klein’s office, where Tiara N. Ross, an assistant city attorney working on the Colonial Village case, was happy to speak with her.
Ross said she is building similar relationships, having spoken just last week with representatives of a Chicago poverty center, the Indiana Attorney General’s Office, and a local Indianapolis social justice nonprofit group.
In Indianapolis, the Indiana Attorney General’s Office was taking an approach similar to the one moving forward here. The Indiana office filed suit this summer, asking for a third-party receiver to step in at another of Zarum’s properties, but the case was dealt a setback a few weeks ago when the judge overseeing the case instead ordered the parties to mediation.
Lerner hopes, though, that consistently applied pressure to Zarum’s holdings across the board might yield results that a more insular approach would not.
For tenants of Ellis Lakeview, she said, learning that tenants in other cities are fighting alongside them has provided a greater sense of community and strength.
“They know that this isn’t an isolated incident,” she said.
tdecker@dispatch.com