Poor Fairmount Avenue can’t catch a break: name a Richmond slumlord and dollars to donuts they own a vacant house on the once grand street. Richmond Slumlord Watch today outs Linilton Realty, owner of vacant properties on Fairmount Avenue and Whitcomb Street.

In light of issues that have been highlighted on this blog in the past (vacant City-owned property, vacant houses that are not included on the vacant property registry), the report is refreshingly candid, both acknowledging shortcomings in the department and offering practical recommendations for improvement.

Selected pieces from the report (PDF):

The above maps depict that areas of high code violations have a higher number of crime incidences. Based on the above results and the broken window theory, there appears to be a correlation between code violations and crime. In addition to making the City aesthetically unacceptable, blight caused by unaddressed code violations may be a factor in encouraging criminal elements. However, the effect that code violations have on crime cannot be quantified.

Richmond Slumlord Watch notes the demolition of 606-608 North 29th Street and offers a word of warning to owners of other derelict properties in the area…

Richmond Slumlord Watch does it again, this time shining the light on Eric Burrell, owner of vacant houses in Church Hill North and Union Hill…

Inspired by the Richmond Slumlord Watch post on the city’s Vacant Property Registry, I started digging around the ownership of some vacants near by. I quickly ran across variations of the same name: some sort of investment group and “c/o Stacy Martin”.

Searching the city’s Parcel Mapper by name then turned up that both Premier Investment Properties Llc C/o Stacy Martin and Clayton Investment Group Llc C/o Stacy Martin each own over 50 houses across the city, many of them vacant. Stacy Martin also turns up on Tower Building Properties Llc C/o Stacy Martin, who own more than 30 houses across the city.

To state this directly: collectively these 3 companies c/o Stacy Martin own ~140 houses, 90+ of which are vacant, most of them in the East End.

As RSW points out, Stacy Martin is a real estate agent at West End real estate firm Hermitage Realty, Donald Lacey’s firm. Donald Lacey, you might recall, took a buch of invester money to fix up houses but instead apparently burned through millions on vacation homes, boats, and expensive cars.

Here is where it starts to feel kind of personal and a touch wicked: these companies own at least 15 vacant houses within 4 blocks of my house, including one directly behind me. They own 3 on the 2300 block of Fairmount Avenue and another in the 2200 block. They own 3 more vacants on the 1200 block of 24th Street and one each in the 1110 and 1300 blocks. The own vacants on the 1200 and 1300 blocks of 22nd Street and the 1300 block of 21st Street. None of these house are being renovated.

None of the houses are apparently for sale. Few if any have seen improvement in the past 5 years other than the boards that went up over the windows. These century-old frame houses are let to sit and age and slowly degrade.

These companies, together with the notorious Bayou Properties, easily own 80% of the vanant houses in almost a half-mile radius of my house. These 3 companies c/o Stacy Martin are the anti-BHC, if you will, single-handedly stalling any progress towards rebuilding the physical fabric of the community.

Unlike Lawrence Oliver’s Bayou Properties, these investment groups at least seem to have a handle on how to keep up with the basic maintence on the properties. None are outrageously overgrown, none are strewn with trash or appear to be the center of illicit activity. They are, though, dead spots in a neighborhood fighting to fight the good fight to reverse decades of decline and abandonment.

Beyond this pocket of vacancies in Fairmount, these three companies own almost 100 properties in the East End (many of which are vacant, of course).

Each marker on the map below represents a property owned by one of the 3 companies connected to Stacy Martin. Zoom in and scroll around to get the full effect or check out the big map

The yellow houses above are the vacants in Fairmount that initially caught my attention. The blue markers indicate properties in the East End listed to Premier Investment Properties Llc C/o Stacy Martin. The green markers indicate properties in the East End listed to Clayton Investment Group Llc C/o Stacy Martin. The red markers indicate properties in the East End listed to Tower Building Properties Llc C/o Stacy Martin.

Richmond Slumlord Watch does it again, this time bringing to light what they call The Goswami Scheme:

Ok, “scheme” might be giving the Goswamis too much credit. Basically, their business model seems to work like this:

Buy dilapidated house in North Church Hill.

Sit on house for a few years, let deteriorate further.

Try to sell house three years later for a four-to-five figure profit.

The new Richmond Slumlord Watch is quickly becoming a must-read by digging into the ownership of many of the more iconic vacant houses in the area. A recent post profiles Herman Massenburg’s 1980s disaster at 1300 North 29th Street, another looks at both Charles Parham’s crumbling vacants at 2117-2119 Cedar Street AND his McMansion out by Willow Oaks Country Club.

A new watchdog blog, the Richmond Slumlord Watch, has recently began publishing. In their most current post, they connect the dots on vacants in northside and Mechanicsville Turnpike owned by William J. Earley. Another post looks at the city’s Vacant Property Registry through the lens of vacant properties in Church Hill North.

I love the photographs, they really document the situation on the ground. Perhaps these folks could hook up with the minds behind the now-defunct Vacant Richmond and get a mapping feature put together?