LAWS UNFAIR to low-income renters, advocates say.
At least eight city agencies and seven circuit judges in Pulaski County have dealt with problems at Imran Bohra’s rental properties over the past three years, court records and documents show.
More than half of his approximately 150 properties have been cited by North Little Rock and Little Rock code enforcement officials, and many properties have been declared unlivable.
Yet Bohra continues to find tenants — mostly those who have lower incomes or are desperate for shelter.
Neil Sealy, an advocate with Arkansas Community Organizations, said landlords like Bohra can keep operating because of unfair landlord-tenant laws and underfunded code enforcement departments. Arkansas Community Organizations is a group that advocates for low-income families in Arkansas, according to its website.
“There is a real problem with substandard housing here in Little Rock,” Sealy said.
Much of the housing stock was built in the 1970s and ’80s and is in need of repair, he said.
He’s been working on landlord-tenant issues for years and said he’s received several calls about poor living conditions at Bohra’s properties.
“They’re in deplorable conditions,” he said.
Sealy said the penalties on landlords who don’t keep up their properties need to be harsher because Bohra “just brushes it off” when he gets fined.
Sealy’s group also advocates for a statewide warranty-of-habitability law. Arkansas is the only state in the country that does not have such a law, which would set minimum housing standards statewide. That leaves housing standards enforcement to cities with a city code.
In lieu of statewide housing standards, Sealy said, code enforcement departments need more funding to hire more officers for inspections.
Terry Hall, senior code enforcement officer for Little Rock, said that in order to visit rental properties every two years, he’d need more than 50 officers.
The North Little Rock code enforcement agency has one officer who focuses on rental inspections, said director Tom Watley.
Little Rock has five officers, Hall said.
Little Rock inspectors get cases from complaints from renters and routine inspections, Hall said.
In North Little Rock, most citations are issued while officers are driving around the city and notice problems — usually with grass that’s too tall, Watley said.
When asked about Bohra, Watley said the landlord has a lot of violations because he has a lot of properties. It’s hard to tell whether the number of violations is unusual, he said.
Edward Garland, the Little Rock code enforcement director, said he’d heard of Bohra, but didn’t think he had many properties in Little Rock.
Bohra owns about 150 properties in Little Rock. One on Broadway bears a red legal notice alerting passers-by that it’s an unsafe structure.
After a citation is issued, owners typically have a few days to fix the problem, depending on its severity. Officers then check back to ensure the property is fixed. If it’s not, the owner appears in environmental court and might be ordered to pay a fee in addition to any code enforcement fines that have already been levied.
Bohra has appeared in Little Rock’s environmental court at least 25 times since 1995, records show. Environmental court is authorized to issue citations to property owners who don’t adhere to code enforcement citations, especially those designated “life safety” issues.
Little Rock District Judge Mark Leverett presides over the court, and Bohra has been fined for such things as “failure to maintain structure,” failure to repair or demolish some houses and not having proper “sanitary facilities” in a house.
In one instance in 2013, he was cited for leaving a “For Rent” sign on a building that had been declared unsafe.
Little Rock city code states that the penalty for violations is a fine less than $1,000 or less than $500 per day for continuous violations.
City boards vote on whether to condemn a property, meaning that it must be demolished or repaired in a small window of time. The code enforcement agency can state that a property is “unfit for human habitation” or unsafe and then refer the case to a city council.
Both Little Rock and North Little Rock have voted to condemn at least two of Bohra’s properties over the past two years, and Little Rock sued him in 2011 and in 2013 because of problems at his properties. In 2011, he agreed to rehabilitate them, and in 2013 the judge dismissed the case.
Bohra also has at least one Section 8 tenant. Section 8 is a publicly funded program that provides rental assistance to people with low incomes. These properties are expected to meet national standards and are subject to routine inspections.
“The inspection is, to put it mildly, uneven,” Sealy said of the Section 8 program.
The Metropolitan Housing Alliance did not respond to requests for comment.
Other agencies that have dealt with problems at Bohra’s rental units include police departments, North Little Rock Animal Control, the Little Rock Fire Department and both cities’ governing bodies.
Police and firefighters have responded to a fire, the theft of a water heater and reports of homeless people camping in Bohra’s properties. Animal-control officers went to one property to pick up dogs that had gotten out and alerted the code enforcement agency that a tenant didn’t have water or electricity.
At least six circuit judges — Tim Fox, Wendell Griffen, Mary McGowan, Mackie Pierce, Herb Wright and Alice Gray — have been assigned eviction cases that Bohra files against tenants.
Bohra submits affidavits in these cases regarding nonpayment of rent or other violations of leases. But the filed affidavits often don’t match leases submitted as evidence.
Some leases are dated with only a year or a guess, such as “sometime in 2005.” Many of these eviction cases remain open more than a year after filing.
Tenants interviewed by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette say they believe Bohra sought to evict them after they complained about the conditions of their rentals.
Sealy said there should be an ordinance or law that prevents landlords from retaliating against tenants for calling code enforcement officials.
“How can we provide some protections to renters?” he asked.