Cuyahoga County property records show Aliarse owns 12 different properties scattered throughout Cleveland, East Cleveland and Cleveland Heights. A review of property records shows that they’re all behind on their taxes and accruing penalties. Many of them are in foreclosure.
The building at Hampton and South Moreland may be among the worst on the block, but it’s not the only distressed building along South and North Moreland, two key arteries that are lined with brick apartment buildings leading to Shaker Square and surrounding communities. The Morelands Group estimates as many as half of the buildings here are vacant or in poor condition, including several that have no heat, forcing tenants to use space heaters in order to stay warm during the winter. Many of them are owned by shadowy LLCs and out-of-town investors.
More than half the residents of the city of Cleveland are renters, and with the rise of investor-owned housing, conditions like this have become increasingly prevalent. Yet now, some additional help is on the way. Recently, Cleveland City Council introduced legislation authorizing the city to enter into a $1 million grant agreement with the United Way of Greater Cleveland to allow the agency to administer a “tenant resources and outreach program to increase tenant housing stability,” according to a city council press release. The organizations that are being funded – Legal Aid of Greater Cleveland, Cleveland Mediation Center, Smart Development, Fifth Christian Church, and the Morelands Group – will help vulnerable renters by providing tenant education and organizing, emergency housing assistance, and legal and mediation assistance.
It’s critical work because predatory LLCs like the ones on South Moreland Blvd. are running rampant in the city, said Ward 13 councilmember Kris Harsh, a sponsor of the legislation.
“Cleveland has a growing number of out-of-state owners for rental units,” Harsh said. “The LLC share of single family ownership has gone up dramatically, especially on the east side of Cleveland, which means a lot of people’s landlords aren’t in the state of Ohio anymore, and sometimes they’re not even in the country. That can present tenants with a challenge to fix something as simple as a leaky faucet, or more dramatically a broken furnace, if they can’t get ahold of their landlord.”
Harsh said the new legislation, if approved, would not only help with landlord-tenant issues, but could also help to address the city’s lead poisoning problem. He believes person-to-person outreach will be more effective than billboards and bus stop signs, and that these groups could help people address lead poisoning by fixing conditions like flaking lead paint. The city passed legislation five years ago requiring landlords to make sure their units are lead safe, but many landlords have not complied and the city’s rate of lead poisoning has remained stubbornly high.
“Working to make sure homes are safe, this is a big part of reducing lead poisoning,” he said.
The key to improving rental housing in Cleveland is empowering tenants through person-to-person organizing, he added. “Tenants are afraid to talk to their landlords,” Harsh said. “They’re afraid they’ll get evicted if they complain. They’re afraid the rent will go up if the landlord has to put money into the property. They’re living on the financial margins. So, if they have someone to talk to that can walk them through their options and put them in touch with people to help them, hopefully there will be less resistance.”
How it works
There are four basic components to the three-year program: intake, education and organizing, emergency housing, and legal mediation services. United Way will use its 211 line to refer tenants to organizations that can help them. Fifth Christian Church will lead trainings that help tenants organize. The Morelands Group will also provide tenant workshops to educate renters on their rights and form tenant organizations, and Smart Development will offer help to immigrants and refugees. Finally, Cleveland Mediation Center will offer mediation between tenants and landlords, while Legal Aid will operate its tenant info line to provide renters with info about legal options.
The big goal is to address the large number of problem landlords and vulnerable tenants in Cleveland through making sure tenants know their rights, helping them advocate for themselves, and providing direct assistance to help them avoid eviction and access stable housing. The program aims to partially replace the Cleveland Tenants Organization, a 40-year-old group that died in 2018, leaving a vacuum in the city’s system of support services for renters.
The five organizations were selected after United Way put out a request for proposals for the tenant resources and outreach program. Ken Surratt, chief development and investment officer with United Way of Greater Cleveland, said it’s intended to develop their capacity to address tenant issues, not create another organization like the Cleveland Tenants Organization.
“This is about us bringing the Avengers together,” he said. “We’re stronger together. We have this collective experience and outreach. It’s not rebuilding another organization. We don’t necessarily need another organization. We’re just bringing back the capacity to have these services within the community.”
Melanie Shakarian, director of communications and development with the Legal Aid Society of Greater Cleveland, said her organization could use the help. “This is exciting for us because after CTO closed, Legal Aid took on their tenant info line, but we didn’t have all the funding for the tenant info line that came with that responsibility,” she said. Legal Aid receives far more complaints in a given year than it’s able to address, including landlord-tenant issues.
Danielle Cosgrove, director of the Cleveland Mediation Center, said for the first time her agency will be able to offer not only landlord-tenant mediation but also direct support to help tenants move into stable housing. “There are a lot of tenants who are having issues with their landlords, and sometimes we’re able to mediate, but it’s hard with out of town landlords,” she said. “This grant provides us with some tenant assistance that allows them to move somewhere else.”
The shadow of Issue 38
Jay Westrook, one of the organizers with the Morelands Group, argued that to be successful, the program must involve all the players working in tenant organizing in Cleveland, not just the ones chosen for funding. He openly worried that there are groups being left out of the program who are already doing this kind of work, like the Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless (NEOCH).
“Does United Way intend to convene the grant recipients along with others who are working in housing?” Westbrook asked.
Chris Knestrick, director of the Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless, said his agency wasn’t funded for political reasons. “When the money first dropped, what NEOCH really wanted to see is that it would go fully to building out tenant associations and tenant unions throughout the city of Cleveland,” said Knestrick. “We wanted them to fund the organization that had been doing this work for the longest, but it sounds like for a variety of reasons, we didn’t get funded.”
Despite successfully organizing tenant unions in eight apartment buildings in the past year, Knestrick said NEOCH was cut out of funding because of their support for Issue 38. the participatory budgeting amendment also known as the People’s Budget or PB CLE. If approved, Issue 38 would have allowed residents to decide how to spend millions of dollars of the city’s budget. Issue 38 was defeated a year ago, but apparently some council members still hold a grudge.
City council has targeted NEOCH for scrutiny ever since the agency got involved in PB CLE. Earlier this year, when NEOCH was being considered for $225,000 in city funding for emergency housing services, the council requested monthly reports on their progress. “We have some serious concerns whenever we fund organizations that then in turn create a political arm, and for lack of a better word, utilize it to work against us,” city council president Blaine Griffin said at the time.
NEOCH spent $17,200 in funding and in-kind services to campaign for PB CLE. The group also led tenant organizing efforts at the Euclid Beach Mobile Home Park, another touchy issue because Ward 8 councilman Mike Polensek supported moving residents and turning the property over to the Metroparks.
Councilman Kris Harsh denied that NEOCH not getting funding was payback for their support of Issue 38, which he vigorously campaigned against. “City council gives NEOCH a lot of money, pre and post Issue 38,” he said via text message. “We are working with these organizations on this project. It doesn’t need to be drama filled to fund a diversity and variety of efforts.”
Knestrick confirmed that his agency receives funding from the city of Cleveland, but that funding is mostly for helping people avoid homelessness and find stable housing. He said his group would press forward regardless. “We’ve been doing this work for the past two years,” he said. “We’re going to continue to do this work with or without city funding.”
When asked if United Way would convene all the groups in the city working on landlord-tenant issues, Surratt said in an emailed statement, “Initial meetings will focus on the awarded entities to ensure we work out coordination amongst that group and finalize administrative processes and expectations. Ultimately, we want all the players in this space to know what we are doing and work with us because that’s how we help the most people and make the biggest impact. Again, United Way 211 being the front door is important because we already work with most if not all housing-related organizations within the city and county. Our local housing challenges are big enough that we need everyone working together to address them.”
Westbrook said the effort will only work if everyone is at the table. “I’d consider the ordinance to be shortsighted if they’re just saying, ‘Here’s your grant, good luck, go to work,’” he said. “There really is a crisis of property ownership, with increasing prevalence of predatory investors, from single families all the way up to apartment buildings. Facing that, we can only address it if all agencies are rowing in the same boat.”
Moving forward
Back on South Moreland Boulevard, it was already 11 o’clock and Meg Weingart was faced with yet another problem. One of the tenants she was helping to move that day had a stove and refrigerator, and the dolly that came with the U-Haul truck wasn’t a furniture dolly. One of the movers was going to have to make a separate trip to the U-Haul store to get one, causing further delays in an already tight schedule.
Ultimately, the Morelands Group was able to help several tenants move out of the property and either put their stuff into storage or move to a new place. After the final move outs took place, the city was slated to board up the property the next day.
While it remains to be seen how the tenant resources and support legislation will play out, since it still needs to wend its way through city council committees before being voted on, the need in Cleveland communities continues to grow.
The Morelands Group is working to hold owners like Aliarse LLC accountable, but tracking down predatory out-of-state owners can be like a game of Whac-a-Mole. The group has followed Aliarse, a New Mexico based company, to an address in Pasadena, California, and also identified the local property managers. They’re now working with the city’s Department of Building and Housing to cite the owners and take them to Housing Court so they’ll fix the building. None of this will bring immediate relief to tenants like Tatiana, who are being forced to move out.
Because Aliarse owns other properties in Cleveland, even once this building goes through foreclosure and is sold to a new owner, the firm’s hold on the city’s real estate may continue, creating more misery for out-of-luck tenants.
“This is a micro picture of these predatory investors that are so far removed from reality that when the dominoes start to fall, it creates a crisis,” said Westbrook, adding that Cleveland is being targeted for such schemes because it's seen by national investors as a place with low property values, high rents, and poor code enforcement by the city. “Greedy owners think they’re going to get rich, they find out that’s not true or they’re over their heads, and then they fail and the cost of failure is borne by the tenants.”
Source: Cleveland Scene - As Cleveland Renters Deal with Predatory, Negligent Out-of-State Landlords, City Council Plans a $1 Million Push to Help Tenants