Atlanta Police Patrol Vacant Homes Hit By Mortgage Crisis

By TIM EBERLY

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution


Published on: 06/20/08

Atlanta police Officer Brian Ernest didn't need to step inside the doorway.

He could have guessed what was waiting for him.

Rich Addicks/AJC/
Atlanta police officers Brian Ernest and Bernett Collins, with guns drawn, prepare to enter a vacant house in The Bluff neighborhood just west of the Georgia Dome. The pair have been assigned to watching over the large number of vacant homes that attract copper thieves in APD's Zone 1.

Rich Addicks/AJC/
Atlanta police officer Brian Ernest cq exits a vacant house in The Bluff neighborhood just west of the Georgia Dome.

• Photos: Police patrol homes

This is Ernest's special assignment — identifying and keeping watch over vacant homes — so he steps past the door that someone has kicked in, pieces of its splintered frame dangling like mistletoe.

Inside, a burglar has smashed holes in bathroom walls and pulled out the sinks to harvest copper pipes.

This is just the beginning, Ernest said. The burglars will be back, and they'll keep coming back, picking apart the house like vultures. They're known to pilfer appliances, cabinets, carpet and use homes for drug deals, prostitution or squatting.

It's a crime wave made possible by the nation's mortgage crisis and absentee property owners in metro Atlanta and beyond. Atlanta code enforcement officials say empty homes are their greatest headache, and have assembled a special enforcement unit to deal with it.

Many of the vacant homes are foreclosures, purchased during the housing boom and seized by mortgage lenders after the market bottomed out. But there are also homes whose owners can't find renters, and new homes that developers can't unload.

The problem appears to be most severe in the city of Atlanta, though Stone Mountain, College Park and Riverdale are getting bad, too, according to some in the real-estate industry. Officials in the two counties that trail Fulton County in foreclosure rates — DeKalb and Gwinnett — say that vacant homes are not a big issue there.

Atlanta's numbers, however, have grown dramatically over the past five years and are still on the rise, city officials say. The city has boarded up nearly as many homes in the first half of this year as in all of 2007.

"This is a phenomenon that is occurring all over the city, the state and the country," said Atlanta police Maj. Joseph Dallas, who runs the police zone in northwest Atlanta that has the highest number of vacant homes. "We had to do something about it."

The department put officers like Ernest on special assignment and also assembled a task force to fight the dominant crime that drives vacant home break-ins: copper theft. The value of copper has reached new highs in recent years, driving up the price scrap metal recyclers are paying.

Some impoverished neighborhoods in Atlanta have become overrun with plywood-covered windows and "No Trespassing" signs, such as Vine City and Mechanicsville. But there's one already infamous Atlanta community that has more than the rest: The Bluff.

Along English Avenue, The Bluff already has a hard-earned reputation as a place where drugs and crime are plentiful. Now it has rows and rows of deserted homes.

"This whole block is almost vacant," Ernest said, rolling through The Bluff during a recent shift. "Everywhere you look, there's vacant properties."

Crime at vacant homes in The Bluff and elsewhere has gotten so bad, Ernest said, that some property owners pay homeless men to look after their homes, sometimes giving them a key and letting them stay inside.

Quinon Miller's defense is checking on his home regularly.

Miller, 29, and his wife bought a fixer-upper on Melrose Drive in southwest Atlanta in December 2006, lured by ever-rising property values.

They saw it as a long-term investment, buying it for around $90,000 — about $20,000 less than what other homes in the neighborhood were going for.

The Millers spent $75,000 and six months cleaning and refurbishing the home before hiring a property manager to find tenants. Potential renters, however, only wanted to pay about half of what the Millers needed to cover most of the mortgage. Quinon Miller refused to lower the rent, not wanting to attract bad renters that could lower the value of the property.

It's been a year and a half and the home is still empty, forcing Miller and his wife to cover two mortgages.

"It broke us — without a doubt," Miller said. "It sucked us dry."

Burglaries made it worse. They've had at least eight so far, he says. "Me and my wife will not ever, ever invest in real estate again," Miller said. "As far as we're concerned, we're done."

For police, there is no silver-bullet solution to wipe out crime at vacant homes. But there are ways to minimize it: identifying deserted homes as soon as possible, securing them properly and having owners and neighbors keep a close eye.

Atlanta's police and code compliance officers are working together better than in the past to help each other identify deserted homes, Dallas said.

The hard part is tracking down the owners. About half of them are banks or mortgage lenders; many others are absentee property owners — investors who bought properties to flip them and have since dropped out of sight.

The Bureau of Code Compliance issues citations and fines to owners whose homes are deemed "placarded" — unsightly, unsafe or in disrepair. Atlanta police have leverage, too. Once a home is placarded, officers can arrest anyone found on the property for trespassing.

They also have gone after scrap metal dealers who knowingly buy copper from thieves by forming a scrap metal task force. Ernest, also a member of the task force, says officers have recently taken down three recyclers operating illegally in northwest Atlanta.

Recently, though, the Bureau of Code Compliance has fallen on hard times, losing nearly one third of its officers — 11 — to city layoffs. The bureau's director, Tim Hardy, also was "relieved of his duties" last week for unrelated reasons, Hawkins said.

The remaining officers are left to tackle a problem created by owners who walk away from their properties and mortgage lenders who fail to pay for foreclosed homes to be boarded up properly.

Scott Bland, who runs a business that maintains vacant homes, is all too familiar with the latter. His company, Georgia Property Preservation, works for 10 different banks and currently watches over 4,000 empty homes in metro Atlanta.

Banks typically follow the minimum federal housing guidelines in boarding up homes, which Bland says do little to stop burglars. As a result, it's Bland who keeps returning to homes — sometimes as many as 10 times — to secure them after break-ins.

"They just keep paying," said Bland, adding that the secret to securing homes is using lesser-known bolts or screws that are difficult for burglars to remove. "It's almost like you're robbing the bank because they don't want to do it the right way the first time."

Bland, 39, of Acworth is one of the few who profit off the foreclosure crisis. A former electrician, he says his yearly gross income is $1.6 million. Bland predicts it will undoubtedly grow next year, when he predicts the number of vacant homes in metro Atlanta will double.

If he's right, Atlanta will be in trouble.

Dallas, the police major, is feeling more optimistic. He's hoping that the demolition this summer of two large public housing complexes in his area — Bowen Homes and Bankhead Courts — will help fill some of the vacant properties.

"They're going to need somewhere to stay," he said. "They're probably not going to move outside city limits. That would be the biggest help — to have those homes occupied."