Owners of foreclosed homes in Hollister to be held accountable
for neglect
Vacant, foreclosed houses present an attractive target for drug
users, thieves, vandals and squatters.
Hollister officials hung a notice on the front door of a
foreclosed house on Line Street warning that the building is unsafe
to occupy.
Owners of foreclosed homes in Hollister to be held accountable for neglect
Vacant, foreclosed houses present an attractive target for drug users, thieves, vandals and squatters.
Hollister officials hung a notice on the front door of a foreclosed house on Line Street warning that the building is unsafe to occupy.
The dirt yard is covered in broken glass. A rusting tricycle sits near a boarded up shed. A record player and VCR rest atop a pile of broken furniture and old clothes.
The inside of the house smells strongly of cat urine. The carpet is stained where the floors have not been stripped down to the plywood.
It was a suspected drug house, said Mike Chambless, Hollister’s code enforcement officer.
There were “tons” of illegal alterations to the house, Chambless said. People were setting up illegal apartments in the attic, he said.
Neighbors were concerned about the illegal activity.
Ellen Lowes owns a house nearby. Born and raised in Hollister, she has lived in the city for 77 years.
“You’re afraid of someone breaking into your house at night,” Lowes said. “I ask God to protect me, and that’s all you’ve got.”
Danny Cordova and his wife rent a house a few doors away.
“My wife runs a daycare here, and she was worried,” Cordova said. “Ever since they left, it’s been a lot quieter here.”
It is a nice neighborhood, said Ed Hernandez, another neighbor.
“Everybody knows each other, waves to each other,” Hernandez said.
It hurts to see all the abandoned houses in Hollister, he said.
“Sometimes I think it’s turning into a ghost town,” he said. To deal with the issue of absentee owners, city council members recently passed a resolution that allows them to fine owners – often lending institutions who have taken back the deed on houses after foreclosure – of the homes for neglect.
After a lender’s staff forecloses on a house, it usually takes between four and eighteen months for them to put the house on the market, Chambless said.
There are 589 homes in Hollister at some stage of foreclosure, as of Feb. 21, Chambless said.
On some streets there are multiple homes close to foreclosure.
“Locust has experienced a little bloom of pre-foreclosures,” Chambless said.
One block of Locust Avenue had five pre-foreclosures, Chambless said.
The resolution streamlines the process whereby city officials can take the owner of a vacant house to court for violators, Chambless said.
“You will be held accountable in court a lot faster,” Chambless said. “It will cut up to eight months of the process.”
Hollister’s ordinance was based, in part, off an ordinance passed in Chula Vista.
Fines motivated absentee owners of foreclosed homes in Chula Vista to maintain them, said Doug Leeper, code enforcement manager for Chula Vista.
Officials from Chula Vista passed a foreclosed house ordinance in October 2007, Leeper said.
“We’ve had properties that were stripped of appliance and fixtures,” Leeper said.
After Chula Vista’s vacant house program was instituted, code enforcement officers got little response from lenders to violation notices, Leeper said.
“We got relatively no response, so we started sending out fines,” Leeper said. “And then we started getting a response.”
Staff from one lender was fined tens of thousands of dollars, Leeper said.
“They actually received one of the $500 per day for over 64 days, so over $32,000, Leeper said. “That got their attention.”
Leeper has received calls from staff from other lending institutions inquiring as to how they can avoid such a fine, Leeper said.
The owner of any vacant house in Hollister would have to post the name and 24-hour contact number for someone that is authorized to handle any calls related to the house, according to the resolution.
The law is designed to deal with lender or investor owned houses, not houses owned by individuals.
The owner of any house that is determined to be a nuisance, including houses with broken windows, graffiti, or unmaintained landscaping, would be forced to register in a neglected vacant house-monitoring program, according to the resolution.
The owner or a responsible agent would need to live within 60 miles of the house and inspect the house two times per week.
Owners could be removed from the program with no violations for six months, Chambless said.
“It’s hopefully going to teach responsibility,” Chambless said.
The time it would take for an absentee owner to end up in court would depend on the decisions that city council members made and the city attorney’s schedule, Chambless said.
Violations come with a maximum fine of $1,000 per day per violation, Chambless said. The maximum fine given for violations in Hollister was $500 per day, Chambless said.
Hollister’s vacant house ordinance came after years of frustration, Chambless said.
Bill Avera, Hollister’s development services director, and Chambless were frustrated over the past two years with their inability to deal effectively with vacant houses, Chambless said.
“The big impetus were the 200 calls I got in the last couple of years,” Chambless said. “And not being able to help people out.”
By the numbers:
497 number of single family residential units sold in San Benito County in 2006
286 number of single family residential units sold in San Benito County in 2007
589 foreclosed homes in Hollister
677 units planned for West of Fairview
