Cleaning up crime

Diving through the mobile home parks on the south side of Airway Heights is a study in opposites. Neat, brightly painted homes share a fence with residences that seem abandoned, with windows boarded up and yards littered with trash, broken furniture and all manner of odds and ends rotting from exposure to the rain.

It’s a sight Airway Heights code enforcement officer Kristina Blake sees every day, and one she says has improved dramatically since she began her duties nearly a year ago.

“When I got here, it looked like a war zone to me,” Blake said. “Now, it’s more like a refugee camp.”

Blake is the one-woman show behind code enforcement in the city, and the majority of her work comes from local mobile home parks where broken-down junk vehicles in the city right of way and piles of debris as tall as she is are a regular occurrence.

Unsafe conditions

Code violations “absolutely” contribute to a safety problem, Blake said. Her research indicates that the mobile home parks are some of the city’s highest crime areas.

An ADT Security crime map linked on the Airway Heights Police Department website shows that the area encompassing Airway Heights experiences total crime reports at a rate 1.4 times the national average, with property crime reports 1.64 times higher and burglary reports 1.77 times higher.

“When park owners and I started working together, we did some evictions and removed people who were running criminal enterprises,” Blake said. “Once we removed that element, we stopped having so much crime coming through the parks.”

Blake likens an abandoned or trashed home to a “bad apple” in that it can quickly sour the rest of the neighborhood, attracting squatters or transients with no way to maintain a property.

Also concerning to Blake is the tendency of some tenants to leave out food scraps and garbage, contributing to a feral cat population that can spread disease.

It’s no secret that city officials would eventually like to rezone the area where the majority of the mobile home parks are located — partly because of the crime statistics and partly due to the area’s location in a Fairchild- designated Accident Potential Zone.

However, to rezone the space would require giving current residents 18 months’ notice to vacate the premises.

Regular code enforcement increases the livability and the quality of life of an area, Blake said. And she knows that from experience — she lives in a fifth-wheel in the Sands Mobile Home Park on Lawson Street.

“There’s still a long period of time where people are going to be living here, and there’s no reason they should be living substandardly,” Blake said. “Just because you live in a poorer area doesn’t mean you have to live in trash.”

Working toward solutions

Most mobile home park tenants are “at least trying” to maintain their property, Blake said.

Mobile home parks on the south end of town have different renting requirements than other housing options. Parks are able to accept renters who have eviction histories, very little or no income or criminal records that make it difficult to pass background screenings. The houses tend to be extremely affordable and operate rent-to-own, with no first, last and security deposit required.

“With those rules, you’re giving people a chance,” Blake said. “I think about half of them appreciate that chance and try to make it nice, but the other half just trash it and don’t care.”

A big problem in the park is a lack of mandatory waste management services, so about a month ago the city intervened and paid for dumpsters to be brought into the parks so residents could get rid of the junk on the properties for free.

The dumpsters helped some tenants avoid eviction, Blake said, and most tenants were more than happy to clean up their properties with the city’s help

“I’ve met most of the people out there,” Blake said. “I have a nursing student who just graduated, people on Social Security and disability, a lot of people who are unemployed, a lot of people with criminal histories who can’t find jobs and they’re very much marginalized.”

Blake said many tenants would have nowhere to go if they were evicted. “And in fairness, that is because of them (the tenants),” she said. Evictions can be long, arduous processes spanning months or even longer.

Soon, those that declined to take advantage of the city waste removal will begin receiving citations. Citations include a $250 fine the first day, $500 the second day, $1,000 the third day and so on until the resident reaches $5,000 in citations. At that point, the city usually goes to court and gets a warrant for an abatement to clean up the property, resulting in a lien on the park property with park management ultimately footing the bill.

The citation process also includes matching residents with mental health counselors and attorneys.

“Soon we’ll start issuing citations because we’ve given people every opportunity and made them aware of the problem,” Blake said.

Unfair burden

One of the biggest causes of continuing code violations is the policy of selling of units “as is.” That means trash and abandoned furniture are left in place for the new tenant to clean up.

According to the city’s most recent annual code compliance report, the majority of tenants who take on these homes cannot afford to remove the junk and become financially responsible for the problem. One such mobile home became occupied by a disabled older woman with no means to clean up the mess.

“She inherited this stuff and didn’t even have a car, so she had no way to remove any of it,” Blake said. “Nothing can be donated because it’s been left outside and many of these folks can’t pay the dump fees. And, it isn’t their junk.”

Blake would like the mobile home park management to take responsibility for debris removal when someone leaves the park instead of passing it on to the next tenant, who may not be able to afford to fix up the space even if they want to.

The city’s two dumpsters, paid for via grant funds, cost about $1,000 each. Often, that’s more than tenants make in a month, and $500 in citations on someone making less than $15,000 a year is significant, Blake said.

“The parks kind of put people in a bad position, because they’re giving tenants these trailers as is with the condition that they clean them up, but they’re also giving them to people who have no financial ability to clean them up,” she said.

Mobile home park management will be left with a few options, Blake said. One is doing the clean up themselves and footing the bill, while another is developing stricter rental requirements.

“Or they’re going to have to start being on top of this faster,” Blake said. “Because this did not happen overnight.”

Shannen Talbot can be reached at shannen@cheneyfreepress.com.