Co-founder of Malibu House, Max Meckes, stand outside a house he runs. It is one of the properties owned by Pendragon that the city is revoking an occupancy permit for in June.
(Devan Ridgway, WTIU News)
The city of Bloomington is revoking occupancy permits for 11 properties owned and run by Jeff Jones of Pendragon Properties, a rental company in Bloomington.
A letter to Jones from the city said occupancy permits at all of his other Bloomington properties will not be renewed after the current cycle. Jones owns about 34 properties in Bloomington, a city spokesperson said. Occupancy permits with the city have a cycle of three to five years.
“This is the ending of years-long communications and a lot of effort on the city's part to try to bring his properties into compliance,” Mayor Kerry Thomson said.
Jones did not immediately respond to an interview request.
Thomson said the city’s recent action was sparked by WFIU/WTIU’s investigation of Malibu House, a for-profit sober living business. Malibu House operates at two of the 11 homes for which Jones is losing his occupancy permit June 1.
The WFIU/WTIU stories about Malibu House found, among other problems, homes in disrepair, an environment experts said makes it harder for addicts to recover. Malibu House rents its homes and essentially sub-leases them to addiction recovery residents. Most, if not all, of the seven homes it runs are owned by Pendragon.
Thomson said she and staff with the Housing and Neighborhood Development deparment visited the 11 properties where permits will be revoked June 1 and talked with some residents about the city’s action. Those properties have about 70 residences.
“I met a woman who is set to deliver her first baby in the next month, and she doesn’t have any HVAC in her unit,” Thomson said. “There’s roach infestations, there are faulty electrical systems. We just cannot have people living in unsafe situations.”
Thomson said Jones “has a history of rental violations and then not bringing them into compliance.” She said the Pendragon violations are “extreme enough that we are concerned for the health and safety of people.”
If Jones continues to rent the 11 residences past June 1, he could be fined $2,500 per violation per day, according to the city’s letter to him.
Thomson said the city explored what it could do about Malibu House specifically. Sober living is a protected housing category in Bloomington ordinances, meaning the city can’t enforce a definition of family. She said the city can’t inspect issues at a rental unit unless someone calls to report it while they are living there. Otherwise, the city must follow its permit inspection schedule.
“We don’t have oversight over businesses generally in terms of their operations, but we do have oversight over rental housing, and so our concern and our area of enforcement is around making sure that our rental homes in the City of Bloomington are safe and healthy to live in,” Thomson said.
The city is committed to working with residents and want them to remain housed Thomson said, and active leases must be fulfilled. The city left the number for HAND at the doors of the 11 properties.
Thomson is meeting on Thursday with a team of “housing providers and others” she assembled, “in case we do find that people become unhoused. But it's not our expectation that will be the situation.”
Thomson said when she was visiting the Pendragon properties, “100% of the doors that were answered when I was out knocking said, ‘we have been looking to get out of this lease. This is such a terrible place.’”
