07-25-11 Council Agenda & Packet

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Area Board of Zoning Appeals—June 1, 2011 MR. HAWLEY: I'm struggling maybe with what Jerry is struggling with and that is if that house sits there vacant and it's a mess now and it's going to be a mess a year from now, it didn't accomplish anything. Maybe when we have an opportunity to speak to this gentleman again he can share with us, maybe it's resources, the money he needs to move from one house to another to improve it and I would like at some point to hear what he has in mind to improve this property so that it does meet what you find acceptable. MS. PFEIFER: Most of the time when people don't pay their taxes, I guess people don't pay their taxes for a variety of reasons, one of the reasons might be that they don't have the resources to pay their taxes. If you don't have resources to pay your taxes, I don't see how you have a resource to take care of your property. MR. HAWLEY: Valid point. MR. URBANSKL Thank you ma'am. Anyone else wishing to speak in opposition to? MS. NOREEN MORAN: I live at 716 W. Colfax. I've lived in the neighborhood for 50 years. I won't repeat what Charlotte said but in precise answer to your question, someone did buy if from the tax sale with perfect ability to re-do it or something else. When that was done that was when the owner chose to redeem it on the tax sale. There's very mixed zoning extending from large houses, post second world war, but in 1991 the Board of Zoning Appeals went through alI of the property areas and made it single family zoning except for the bigger apartment houses and so forth. That is almost, well it is twenty years ago. The current I've been informed by Code and zoning and even though it was built and I'm not sure that it was built as a duplex because the architecture does not support that, the doors do but it does not matter it reverts to the more conservative zoning when it's Ieft open at that point. We have perhaps 60 to 70 per cent of multi family housing. South Bend Heritage's Washington Place Apartments are there. We have no objections to that. They're kept up very well. They look like houses, they're there. There are the Washington/Colfax apartment. There are other large buildings. So it's not like we're taking to make this some suburban Granger situation. What we need is more places for single family housing,people to come in. They don't want to come in completely overpowered by the alternative situation. This property was not kept up. The roof in the front is coming apart from the main roof and so forth. The house that was burned, We would have not objections to the lot changes and so forth but it's not been taken care of and they only redeemed it because somebody else bought it so there is a purchaser. It's just that there's nothing about it. We don't need more duplexes which become rental, large rental units of people who are living in conditions that are not very good for them and the landlord does nothing about it. So this is not a way to clear away any kind of multi family housing. We have plenty of it. Like I said the majority structures are from the early 1900's. We like the fact that you would obey the current zoning laws that are setup which is that it reverts to conservative zoning and that a duplex does not get grandfathering if it's not grandfathered. Thank you. MR. URBANSKI: Just one quick question. Are you aware of any of the other house that have be revised, approximately 10 houses that Mr. Givens...? MS. MORAN: No I'm not but I would make the point that people who have a Iarge numbers of houses, I would say and I'm president of the neighborhood organization, 100% of the time we do not see any improvement. What we see are people who come in and they put signs, "we buy cheap houses", "we buy this", the houses go, they're large groups. We have Paul Kusbach right now as a landlord doing that on west 20