The Antioch City Council held a workshop recently to explore options for addressing blighted residential and commercial properties in the city.
The Jan. 9 workshop took place just hours after Mayor Lamar Thorpe held a news conference at the Delta Fair Shopping Center where he spoke about the city’s oversaturation of deserted commercial properties with absentee corporate landlords. He said several squalid properties throughout the city have become magnets for homeless encampments and illicit drug activity.
“This has existed like this for decades. This isn’t brand-new,” Thorpe said during the news conference. “The question is when are we going to utilize the tools that are in front of us in order to take action? All we’ve utilized up to this point is code enforcement and some fines, but obviously we need to take greater legal action to ensure that these properties are in a state that is fair to everybody.”
He proposed four measures to address the issue: preliminary injunctions, summary abatement, health and safety receivership, and eminent domain.
Eminent domain occurs when a city takes ownership of a property needed for a public project, such as a road, and compensates the owner at fair market value. Receivership is when a judge appoints a receiver to facilitate cleanup and renovations of a property that presents a health or safety hazard to the community.
Dealing with ‘nonresponsive’ owners
During the workshop, Charisse Smith, director of civil code enforcement practice for Best Best & Krieger LLP — a law firm contracted by the city — detailed the legal tools available to Antioch. Unlike the news conference that focused on gaining compliance from commercial landlords, Smith’s presentation also delved into such topics as abatement, criminal and civil prosecution, and the receivership remedy for residential properties in disrepair.
“Receiverships are also really good for nonresponsive owners — those owners you can’t find, but you can’t determine that they’re deceased, or you know where they are and notices have been served on them, and they just don’t respond at all,” Smith explained.
She warned the council that it would be difficult to get a judge to appoint a receiver to take over owner-occupied properties as the receiver can legally remove occupants from the property in order to repair and renovate.
“This has existed like this for decades. This isn’t brand-new. The question is when are we going to utilize the tools that are in front of us in order to take action?” Mayor Lamar Thorpe
According to California Receivership Group — a health and safety receiver of nuisance properties in California — after receivership work is complete, the owner has the option to pay the receivership and community costs and retain ownership.
But Smith warned that’s usually not the case.
“It is very likely that the owner will lose their home through the receivership process, so we should do everything we can when the property is occupied by an owner to work with them for compliance first, because we wouldn’t want to put somebody out on the street unnecessarily,” she said.
Focus on commercial properties
Smith explained that renter-occupied or abandoned properties were better targets for receivership and would need to be considered in violation of state health and safety codes.
“The nature of the violations must be so extensive in such a nature that the health and safety of the occupants or the public is substantially endangered by the conditions,” she said.
Public speakers on the topic returned the focus to commercial properties.
Speaker Leslie May, who identified herself as a leader of an Antioch nonprofit that serves those who are severely mentally ill, wondered if organizations like hers would be able to obtain seized properties for their work serving the community.
“I do feel it’s time we do something. We cannot let this city just keep looking like this,” said May. “I know there’s economic problems. I know that, but there’s a lot that’s not economic (problems); there are a lot of people that would like to come in and do something to help improve the city.”