Building Inspectors from Hell, Part 3: Mr. Colonoscopy

When my son was planning to build his house, I stupidly offered to go to the town hall and apply for his building permit. Now, this is the town I’ve lived in for 30 years.  But I pretty much keep to myself, and don’t really know the elected or appointed officials. I figured they didn’t know me, either.  Wrong. Well, not exactly wrong.  They thought they knew me.  And my little dog, too.

I gathered the application, blueprints, and payment and went to see the building inspector, who I’d never met before.  He only worked part-time, so I made sure I got there early, even before he arrived for the day.  There was one man ahead of me, so as we waited in the little anteroom we made small talk.  The man happily told me “I’m getting my building permit today”.  Usually an innocuous remark, but his appearance smacked of a man just let out of the asylum:  the grin a little too wide, the eyes a bit too bright.  I asked him if it was his house.  No, he answered, he was the architect.  How long has the process been? “Since October”.  What??? It was March already, and he was trying to get a permit since October?  An architect?

I felt the twitch I developed when working with the Undertaker, and all of a sudden it was getting very warm in there.  But I figured I’d see how it went.  So I waited my turn.

The inspector, who I soon and forever more would refer to as Mr. Colonoscopy, came in, took one look at me, and announced “I’m not seeing you today”.  I was beyond shocked.  I quietly said “It’s okay.  I’m waiting my turn”.  He repeated again:  “I’m not seeing you today.”  With a question in my voice, I repeated, “But I’m waiting my turn”.  The third time he said “I don’t care how long you wait, I’m not seeing you today”. 

Well, that was it.  I was weaned on The Undertaker.  I was not going to be intimidated by this jerk.  So I told him that I was waiting my turn, and he was going to see me today.

At that point, he told me that if I didn’t get out (of the town office, not his private office!) that he would have me arrested!  I replied that if he weren’t going to do his work, I’d have his job! Like bullies before and since, he started backpedaling and whining about a sick wife.  What drivel.  Hiding behind a sick wife’s skirts.  At this point I figured “what the hell”, so I pointedly told him if family obligations prevented him from performing his duties, perhaps someone else should be doing the job. 

The long and short of it is that he did take my application, and when he told me to pick up the permit (no, it didn’t take six months), he wasn’t there.  He left it with the women in the office.  They were so intimidated that they left the permit perched on the edge of a desk, and never looked up from their paperwork when I took it.  It was like I had leprosy.  And it still frosts me because, to people who actually know me, I’m a pretty reasonable person.

Ironically, as far as we could tell, he never walked through the house during construction, and the only communication we had was when my son would phone him for permission to continue after different building phases were complete.  He always said yes, and the Certificate of Occupancy quietly came by mail when the house was done.  

To this day, I have no idea what that was all about.

The Girl Who Refused to Cash the Winning Lottery Ticket

A nice couple, both successful professionals, lost two children tragically, within a year of each other. One son died in a commercial airplane crash.  Almost a year to the day later, a daughter became ill while an exchange student in South America.  She developed an infection her mother said would have been cured easily in the States. But the poor hospital in the poor country didn't have the medicine.  And so, despite the doctors' best efforts, she died.

A few years later, the parents decided to go back to South America and make a donation to the hospital that tried so valiantly to save their daughter's life.  Though it wasn't part of their original plan, while there they thought about adopting an orphan from that country.  For, as the wife said, "The house was empty." 

As things turned out, there were four siblings in need of a family.  And so the wife traded her days at the office for days at the supermarket, pushing, pulling, and keeping count of her new brood.

Time went by, and the kids were growing up as nicely as the older children had.  Well, almost.

The oldest adopted daughter decided to leave home shortly after high school.  By that time the parents had invested some money for each of the four, so the girl had a nest egg to supplement her fast-food job.  She took an apartment, and soon after, a boyfriend.

My office at that time was directly across from the police station, where court was held every week, and a lot of my applicant pre-screening was done from my office window.  And sure enough, shortly after being on her own, I looked out my window, and there she was.  Although I couldn't hear her, I could see by her body language she was becoming what we called back then a "Ricki Lake Girl"... all head bobbing, finger pointing, teeth sucking attitude.

I sort of kept up with her, seeing her at one dead-end job after another, hanging around town in bad company, going nowhere fast.  One day her mother called me.  Apparently out of funds, the daughter now needed a place with rental assistance.  Would I rent her one of our subsidized apartments?  With nothing concrete to deny her, I did, but with misgivings.   

Bad news travels fast, especially in a small town.  Our other tenants soon told me her apartment was becoming a hangout for druggies.  We did an inspection.  It was filthy, nothing like the way she was raised.  Since she had to report any income changes, we also knew that she kept losing job after job.  Soon she wasn't paying even the nominal rent she owed.  We began eviction proceedings.

By the day she was due to be out, the whole building was in an uproar.  Traffic at all hours, random bell-ringing to get in the building, the usual drug behavior.  The constant traffic, and the prostitution which provided the drug money, was causing all our other tenants to lose sleep.  She herself was in jail.  I went to the apartment to see if her things were out, and discovered a crackhead girlfriend there.  The "friend" tried to tell us she was visiting, but it's hard to be convincing when you're wearing dirty Victoria’s Secret at 3 in the afternoon.  I called the police, and they escorted her out. On her way out, she loudly proclaimed ownership of the TV. Since my soon-to-be-ex tenant was otherwise occupied and not there to object, the police shrugged their shoulders.  I sure didn’t care.  It was just one less thing for us to eventually throw out.  The “friend” lugged this huge TV, and never missed a beat.  She immediately set up housekeeping a few doors down in another crack house, and a few minutes after her "move" was on the cordless phone on the front porch, like it all never happened. I changed the locks.

A long time afterwards, I spoke with the girl’s father.  He said that no matter how they tried, she was just headstrong and kept going in the wrong direction.  He commented that she was like a person who was holding a winning lottery ticket, but refused to cash it in.   

Diamond Park

The Rowhouses and the owner-occupied housing were back-to-back,  and it was nice to have new families with kids in the neighborhood.  But the kids were playing ball in our parking lot, and our tenants were complaining about their cars getting dinged.

At the same time, a thriving drug trade was being conducted in a vacant lot a few doors up.  So one day I was standing in our parking lot, trying to figure out a way to keep the kids out, and had an epiphany.  Why not get the city to convert that drug lot into a park?  It would move the drug dealing out, the kids would have a place to play, and I’d have them out of my parking lot.  

We got some of the neighbors together and presented our proposal to the city council. The city wasn’t interested.  Didn’t want to buy the lot, maintain another park, police it, lock it at night, blah, blah, blah.  So I called the lot's owner.  I told him if he’d have the junk cars hauled, we’d clean it up if he gave permission.

He laughed at me.  Said nobody would do it.  I told him to meet us at the lot the next week and we’d see.  So we went door-to-door, spoke to the neighbors again, and told them we’d all meet the owner that night.  At 7 PM on a nice summer night, a large group of people walked up the street to the lot, another large group  walked down the street to the lot, and the drug dealers, seeing this crowd, walked across the street.  The owner couldn’t believe all those people showed up, and I couldn’t believe how easy it was to move drug dealers.

We got big garbage bags, rakes & shovels, and everyone pitched in. Other people and businesses heard about what was going on, and donated stuff, unasked for but welcome:  gravel, picnic tables, a sign.  There was a barbershop next door to the lot, and the men used to sit out on the porch anyway.  Now they had something to watch out for. We never did get a fence around it, but we didn’t need it.  Too many eyes for the drug dealers.  They moved elsewhere.

The name Diamond Park was the brainchild of my assistant, B.  Columbia Street used to be called Diamond Street, back in the days when it was the red light district.  The new name worked on many levels.

And for a number of years it served as a simple but useful park for the neighborhood – until the owner lost both a building and the lot to a tax sale, and title transferred to new owners.  By then the crack epidemic had calmed down some, so while it never again was maintained like when it was Diamond Park, at least it didn’t revert back to the awful drug hangout it had been.

Until recently I had a magazine article in my desk drawer with pictures of a similar lot in a similar type of urban location, which had been turned into a small neighborhood splashpark.  I showed it to a few people through the years, but nobody picked up the ball, and I’m tired of crusading.  Recently I gave up & reluctantly threw the article in the trash. 

The American Dream

Working with government means you're usually behind the curve, and its decisions often seem random.  After many committee meetings, and poll-trolling, Word will come down that grants for this or that are available.  Then, every city worth its grant writer will miraculously find a need which must be filled to save the sky from falling.  In ensuing years I’ve often thought that if the government decided it was giving grants for fertilizer, we’d wake up one morning to find Warren Street covered in horse shit.    

So during one of its Eureka! moments, government realized that owner-occupied housing stabilizes a neighborhood.  Hudson applied for grants to build some, and when they were awarded, as Captain Picard would say, we were asked to “Make it so, Number Two.”  So we started building on one of the worst streets in Hudson – nice little 3 bedroom ranches on small but separate infill lots.  And started selling them.  We were knocking on our tenants’ doors to tell them of this opportunity.  Word of mouth got out, and we were getting calls. 

It was a pretty simple and straightforward deal for the buyers.  They received a $15,000 no-interest loan towards their purchase price.  For every year they lived in the house, $3000 was forgiven, so if they stayed five years, the loan was forgiven completely.  

We were on a roll, and had built 13 houses, when our architect clued us in that B, the unscrupulous new director of the community development agency and her husband S had been shopping our materials suppliers with our blueprints.  Apparently they figured if we could do it, so could they.  But they couldn’t.  Our construction came to a screeching halt, and although we were still fielding lots of calls about the houses, we told people to call the community development office.  Sadly, but not surprisingly, not a single additional house was ever built when we stopped.  Sometimes, while it’s good to be vindicated, it’s not really good overall.

Epilogue:  B and S didn’t last too long afterwards in Hudson, but not before making all kinds of internal deals, in which the community development agency passed along all its money to S’s private non-profit to “develop”, thereby squeezing two layers of administrative fees, and God knows what else, out of each round of funds.  She also “sold” many of the city’s loans to her husband’s private non-profit company, and later bought them back when he’d made a mess of things and needed quick cash.  Amazingly, none of this came to light while it was happening, despite my very loud protesting to anyone who’d listen. 

P.S.  I called them B & S because it reminds me of b.s., which is what this duo fed the city during their years here.  

Building Inspectors from Hell, Part 2: Revenge of the Undertaker

THE ROWHOUSES were 5 dilapidated townhouses, actually just shells. The city wanted to jump-start fixing that neighborhood, so they asked us to renovate those buildings.  Running the numbers showed that we couldn’t afford to just do the five townhouses, but if we added 10 new units on the lot, it would work.  But we were warned we’d have to work with The Undertaker, the local building inspector, on this job.  We hired an architect, kissed ass, and got the building permit.  But The Undertaker still had it in for us. 

Work moved along, and we were days away from occupancy.  Nothing new had been done in this neighborhood for about 50 years, so there was a lot of buzz.  By our projected opening date, we were fully rented and tenants were waiting to move in.  We were all just waiting for our Certificate of Occupancy.  All through construction The Undertaker had remained relatively sane, so we expected our final walk-through to be nitpicky, but doable.  Well, being the insecure jerk that he was, The Undertaker  said he had to call in backup, another inspector from the state.  While The Undertaker was nitpicking his way through the punchlist items, the state inspector took a quick look around, and announced that we had bigger problems: we didn’t have a firewall dividing the 10 new units.  By code, a firewall has to separate every 8 units.  There was a design change during construction on the new building that caused this problem, and the architect hadn’t picked it up. Neither had The Undertaker, despite his many preening walk-throughs.  His incompetence helps explains his inertia.     

At certain times in my life, when something momentously bad is about to happen, I get this strange feeling.  Everything sounds like I’m under water, my stomach drops to my knees, and I have to use the bathroom.  That’s how I know something is really bad.  And it happened with that announcement.  In one fortuitous fell swoop, The Undertaker was about to get revenge for his years of pent-up anger and frustration. 

He loudly announced that nobody could move in until this issue was resolved. Not in the original 5-unit building, not in the new one.  He wouldn’t issue a C.O. for any unit until we applied to the state for a variance from the building code.  With pressure from the mayor’s office, a few weeks later he relented somewhat and allowed us to rent the front building.  He also permitted occupancy of 8 of the 10 new units.  But just in case we were liars, we also had to not only guarantee that we wouldn’t occupy those two, but sheetrock over the windows in two brand-new apartments, to make sure they were uninhabitable. We begged him not to make us ruin perfectly good apartments.  We offered to give him the keys to those units, to check as he saw fit, but, no.  Sheetrock it was.

Meantime, in a small town, news travels fast.  The buzz that helped us rent the apartments now worked against us.  Word got out that our apartments were “unsafe”, and people asked for their deposits back. Every time we had a prospective tenant, we first had to go through the litany of the building being perfectly safe.

The state variance process usually took six months to wade through.  Throughout this whole process we would need to make payments on the maxed-out construction loan, with insufficient income to offset it. We begged and cajoled the state to hurry our application through. They moved as fast as government can, and it only took about 3 months for them to issue a variance.  Among the things the state required in a trade-off was a fire alarm system which rang in every apartment. 

The locations of the smoke detectors required by code, and high sensitivity of the system caused its own problems.  Every time a tenant made popcorn or took a steamy shower, the whole building’s alarm system went off, and everyone, including the person in the shower, was out in the street until the fire department came and the cause was discovered.

And usually when we opened a new project, the timing of the rents against the loan repayment schedule resulted in a little cash cushion.  This was just the opposite.  It felt like we were always playing catch-up, and it left a bitter taste in my mouth. Years later, when the neighborhood didn’t change for the better, exhausted from trying to make a dog sing, we were forced to sell for less than we owed. 

Undertaker, if you’re reading this, you’ll be pleased to know that we’re still paying back part of the loan that we were upside-down on.

Building Inspectors from Hell, Part 1: The Undertaker

We cut our teeth on the worst building inspector in the world. He was so bad he was a major contributor to the economic downturn in Hudson when he was working here, effectively Hudson's personal undertaker.  There were so many reasons why improvements “couldn’t be done”, that nothing ever was.  And with all the Monday morning quarterbacking about why Hudson suffered a horrible slump in the ‘70s & ‘80s, nobody ever puts his name into the mix.  Yet it should be.

The Undertaker was one of those people who are frozen into inactivity by their demand for perfection, and their knowledge of their own inadequacy.  They’re so afraid to do something wrong, they freeze and can’t do anything at all.  They push their weight around in insignificant areas, but can’t sign on the dotted line for anything big.  The Undertaker would routinely nitpick and put off actually giving a building permit or C.O. until it was impossible not to. The relief must’ve felt like doing a big shit when he finally did something decisive.   

People couldn’t fix anything unless they brought everything up to code.  The word "repair" wasn't in his vocabulary.  He made no allowance for the section of NY Building code that gives the building inspector latitude to find acceptable options when dealing with historic buildings.  The Undertaker had no options.  You want to use that store and apartment above?  Impossible.  The third floor apartment?  Don’t make me laugh.  That inflexibility, no, inability, stalled projects all around town for years.   All the while he hid under the cloak of "civil service"(an oxymoron if I ever heard one), and although everyone agreed he was a liability, they simultaneously insisted it would be near-impossible to fire him.

Our first Hudson project consisted of six derelict buildings, vacant and off the tax rolls.  We hired an architect, jumped through all of the federal and state government’s hoops, and even dealt successfully with the State Historic Preservation Office.  But The Undertaker wouldn’t issue a building permit, nor would he unlock his office door so we could retrieve our blueprints for the closing the next day.  We had to do an end-run to get a building permit.  The mayor unlocked the door, the Urban Renewal director issued the building permit, and we were able to close.  Even though he should’ve been grateful that somebody else “took the blame”,  The Undertaker never forgave that incident, and every chance he had after that, he made our lives hell.

While he bit around the ankles for years, one day he finally got his revenge. 

Habitat for Stupidity

Everyone’s seen those warm and fuzzy pictures of President Carter wielding a hammer.  Sounds like a great idea.  People put sweat equity into their homes, volunteers help, and everyone goes home glowing.  My experience wasn’t quite like that.

The X family lived in a rent-subsidized apartment for a number of years. The missus was very nasty, with an entitlement mentality, and they were scamming the system. She left the building the same time each morning, wearing white scrubs, yet insisted she wasn’t working.  Their rent was something like $150 a month, utilities included, yet for six months they gave me every excuse and promise to pay, but still were so far behind on their ridiculously low rent that I started eviction proceedings. 

I guess, in some ways, I was scamming the system myself, because the only reason I’d kept them this long was because they were “warm bodies”.  Placeholders.  They cost us less, even if they didn’t pay their rent, than it would’ve with a vacant apartment, because the HUD subsidy covered the bulk of the rent.  But it couldn’t continue forever.  It was just such a slap in the face on so many levels.

When they finally got the eviction notice, Mrs. X haughtily informed me that they were moving shortly anyway.  They were selected for a Habitat house, and would be out within the month. 

I couldn’t believe my ears!  I called the local Habitat group who confirmed their selection.  I ranted.  “You’re giving them a low-interest mortgage?  Didn’t anyone think to call the landlord to see if they even pay their rent?  I thought applicants were supposed to be living in substandard housing.  My buildings are definitely not substandard, and they’re not crowded into an apartment too small for their family!  How did these people meet Habitat’s criteria?”

They hemmed and hawed, but the fact was that Habitat, being new in town, didn’t get many applicants for that first house, so the X family moved into a new house – maybe (and hopefully) the most undeserving family ever to get one.

The final indignity for me was cutting my losses while waiting for their house to be completed.  I postponed the eviction, because it would’ve cost me more money, and the same time, to go to court as to wait it out.  And they sure weren't out within a month, as the Missus predicted.  By the time they actually moved, and I got a money judgment, it was into the thousands of dollars. 

I’m still waiting to collect on my judgment, and, ironically, I probably never will.  People usually will clear up their credit when they want to do something big, like, say, buy a house.  Obviously that won't be necessary.

And I never donate to Habitat.  I  already gave at the office.