Falling Eaves

It’s been ten years since Mary Kletchka noticed that the house next door was starting to slump closer to her two-story duplex at 2744 Holmes. Kletchka called city officials to report the problem. Now seventy years old, she has spent the past decade watching the house lean toward hers in freakish slow motion while city codes enforcers and dangerous-building inspectors repeatedly filed reports saying they didn’t see much of a problem.

Kletchka doesn’t know her next-door neighbors. They’re renters whose landlord, Mitchell Gale, lives in Leawood and receives more than $700 a month in federal Section 8 funds in exchange for housing low-income tenants. Kletchka says that Gale was never around in the early ’90s, when she first realized that the channel of light in the thin strip of yard between her home and the house next door had narrowed. So she called City Hall.

Kletchka phoned the Action Center, the city’s all-purpose complaint hot line, four times between December 1994 and May 1996 to report “structural problems” at 2742 Holmes. Codes inspectors were dispatched, but the Codes Department deals with aesthetic housing problems, not structural ones. Rather than explain the nuances of their job to Kletchka, inspectors Mario Mendoza and Allan Fischer, who no longer work for the city, and Patrick Egberuare and Lupe Salazar logged violations for minor problems such as peeling paint and a leaky roof.

In the late ’90s, the Action Center finally referred Kletchka’s complaint to the Dangerous Buildings Demolition Program, a city division with the power to mandate that a building be repaired or face condemnation. Months later, Kletchka received a status report that said nothing about how officials had investigated her property. The city, without explanation, closed the dangerous-building case.

By 2000, Kletchka was able to stand on her own rooftop and lean over to touch the shingles on her neighbor’s roof. Later that year, State Farm Insurance Company denied her coverage because of the “very unusual exposure” caused by a home leaning on one side of her house. State Farm denied her coverage again in February 2002, explaining that the house dipping against her gutters posed both a fire hazard and a safety threat. Still, Kletchka’s complaints about the building ping-ponged unanswered through city offices.

Kletchka hired Renner Surveying Inc. to track the building’s migration. In July 2002, the surveyor reported that the house next door had slunk 4 inches across her property line. Kletchka then called the Jackson County assessor to ask for a tax break, arguing that the domino-style threat from the building next door made her property worthless. In May, the county assessor devalued her house by more than 30 percent, dropping her annual property tax by a projected $7.44.

Yet none of the official watchdogs in the city’s Neighborhood and Community Services Department acknowledged the intruder in Kletchka’s yard as anything more than an eyesore.

This fall, Kletchka expanded her attack, calling the Housing Authority of Kansas City, which is responsible for keeping track of Section 8 funding. The Housing Authority sent one of its staffers, but Kletchka says he wouldn’t even acknowledge the existence of a house arching across her property line — she says he ignored the problem by looking straight ahead rather than up. The report to the Housing Authority following that inspection says that the offending house needs only tuck-pointing (more mortar in the rock foundation) and new siding.

“Fortunately, we’re a separate program from the city,” Housing Authority Executive Director Edwin Lowndes tells the Pitch. “The standards we have are not the exact building standards. We can only go by appearances. If it appears to be sound, that would [abide] by minimum quality standards. Two houses can be touching each other and not be posing a danger from a liability standpoint.”

Kletchka was misrouted to the Codes Department a second time when she called the Action Center again in August. Codes inspector Vincent Jones took pictures of the building’s cracked foundation, then e-mailed the complaint to Dangerous Buildings.

Though he had access to a report that there were foundation cracks and “breaks on the north and south walls,” Nathan Pare, head of Dangerous Buildings, tells the Pitch that the Codes Department report wasn’t specific enough for him to declare the building dangerous. In late September, Pare says, he stood on the sidewalk in front of 2742 Holmes and determined, from at least 10 feet away, that the building was safe.

Apparently, the good old-fashioned streetside walk-by is a common tool for dangerous-building inspectors, because an inspector is barred by law from walking onto a property unless there’s a fire or unless he witnesses a building actually collapsing. Or unless the tenants have given him permission.

Pare tells the Pitch that he asked neither the Section 8 tenants nor Kletchka for permission to do a closer inspection. By the end of the month, Kletchka had received a message on her answering machine: Pare said the house at 2742 Holmes was safe and that he had referred the case back to Codes. Again.

On October 3, landlord Gale showed up with a Housing Authority inspector to check the tuck-pointing. Gale, who owns at least two other unblemished Section 8 homes in the area as well as a handful of properties in Overland Park, says he has received funding for the Holmes property for the past fifteen years.

“They’re close, yes, but is my house close to hers, or is her house close to mine?” he asks. “Maybe her house is leaning north. I don’t think we have any leaning houses.” Codes inspectors have given Gale until November 10 to repair the cosmetic violations. He says city officials have never sought his permission to do a thorough on-site inspection.

During the past ten years, Kletchka would have guided any city official through her yard for a tour of some house-on-house action. “No one ever asked,” she says. “I don’t think they know anything about how to cite property. They can cite peeling paint, but they don’t know beans.”