For this week’s newsletter, we asked Dispatch reporter Jim Weiker to share the story behind today’s cover story on problem properties in Columbus. Here’s what Jim has to share.
Since December 2022, two large Columbus apartment complexes have shut down because of chronic and dangerous lack of maintenance: Latitude Five25 on the Near East Side and Colonial Village on the East Side.
Both complexes had code violations stretching back years that landlords repeatedly failed to address.
In an effort to understand how such violations mount and to explore whether another Colonial Village or Latitude Five25 is on the horizon, The Dispatch examined more than five years of housing code violations in Columbus.
Reporter Peter Gill and I focused on emergency violations, which are the most serious. They found that about 2,400 landlords were cited for nearly 6,000 violations between January 2019 and February of this year.
The vast majority of the landlords had only one or two violations, but a handful were repeat offenders. The top seven violators alone accounted for more than 10% of all emergency code violations and 11 landlords had more than 40 violations each.
Gill and Weiker discovered that several of the most-frequent offenders were out-of-town investors with similar problems throughout the country.
To better understand what it is like to live in complexes with such violations, we and Dispatch photographer/videographer Doral Chenoweth spent hours with city code inspectors at Carriage House apartments off Innis Road on the Northeast Side, which had been cited for 42 emergency code violations over the past five years.
We spoke with multiple tenants who had repeatedly and unsuccessfully sought to get their apartments repaired, including one 73-year-old man whose apartment was so uninhabitable that he had been sleeping for weeks in his car.
The results of this work can be found online at Dispatch.com.
Reporter Jim Weiker can be reached at [email protected].
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Your Week in Columbus: Why we’re investigating problem rentals
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