Philicia Barbieri sat on the stoop of her Central Oakland apartment building, flipping through Pitt News apartment ads and working her cell phone. After eight months in one of 343 McKee Place's dozen apartments, the Chatham College student wanted out, and was desperately seeking better digs for the fall.

Martha Rial, Post-Gazette
University of Pittsburgh junior Ellen Metz stands in the doorway of her Bouquet Street apartment in Oakland where the broken plaster around the attic door has never been repaired.
Click photo for larger image.

"There was a rat in my ceiling a month ago," she said. "People see roaches all the time. ... I don't know anyone staying here next year."

Over the next few hours, student tenants sipped mixed drinks on the stoop, trading tales of roach infestations, balky radiators, faulty light fixtures, screwy plumbing, broken ovens, busted locks and tumbledown ceilings.

Repairs come slowly, if at all, they said. Told that one of the apartments in the building had been declared unfit for human habitation by the Allegheny County Health Department last summer, none were surprised.

Later, the landlord, Atallah Khalil, blamed his tenants.

"I put in something new, they break it. ... They party and they break the walls," he said, gesturing toward a swath of lathe shorn of its plaster.

"They call the Health Department and the Health Department will come and nitpick you to death about absolutely nothing."

  

Rundown student housing in Central Oakland and nearby neighborhoods is a problem that the city and the University of Pittsburgh have tried to address for years. Their efforts, though, have been hamstrung by a lack of focus, landlord indifference, weak penalties and a failure to reach the people on whom success depends: students.

State rules governing Health Department actions stack the deck against students, many of whom have a jaundiced view of the neighborhood.

"Oakland in general is rotting because of this," said Ron Parker, a Pitt graduate student from Washington, D.C., living in 343 McKee.

"[Central] Oakland is, for the most part, an upscale ghetto," said Mike Shanley, a student and Oakland native living in the building.

Extra man, extra results?

A few blocks away, a building at 254 Meyran Ave., owned by Robert Eckenrode, is missing sections of green siding and has large holes in its wooden soffit. Wires curl lazily on the sidewalk, which is badly cracked and broken. One 20-square-foot section has disintegrated into gravel, weeds and broken glass.

Those are the kinds of problems building code enforcement is supposed to address. In March 1997, the city and Pitt teamed up to add muscle to code enforcement in Oakland. Today, though, there's confusion about the program's purpose, and little evidence that it has worked.

Oakland has one building inspector, which it shares with the South Side. For about a decade, a second inspector, James King, has worked primarily in Oakland. In a unique arrangement, Pitt pays half of the inspector's salary and benefits, or about $23,000 a year.

That collaboration is one component of the Oakland Improvement Strategy adopted in 1995 by community organizations, Pitt spokesman John Fedele said.

"We wanted to increase the code enforcement in the Oakland area," Mr. Fedele said. "The impetus behind this was we are concerned about our students having safe housing."

But Mr. King's boss, Ron Graziano, chief of the Bureau of Building Inspection, said Mr. King was focused primarily on permits for new construction and checking for crowding, and that writing up code violations was secondary. He said there was no contract outlining the arrangement.

The number of code violation notices the bureau issued in Oakland dropped from about 287 in 2003 and 303 in 2004 to 236 last year, according to Mr. Graziano.

Despite the extra manpower, those figures represent 3 percent to 4 percent of the violation notices issued by the bureau citywide and are just fractionally above the average for the city's 32 wards.

Mr. Graziano blamed the drop last year on a surge of complaints from the South Side which drew the attention of one of the inspectors across the Monongahela.

Eli Shorak, Pitt's associate vice chancellor for business, said the school encouraged Mr. Graziano to devote more time to student housing but that it's the city's call on how to deploy its personnel.

Even when a citation is written, it doesn't mean the problem gets fixed.

In September, a city inspector cited Mr. Eckenrode for the sidewalk damage on Meyran Avenue.

In January, Pittsburgh Municipal Court fined him $50 plus court costs for not making the repair, according to the building inspection file. It still wasn't fixed this month. Mr. Eckenrode said he would try to get to it this summer.

Mr. Graziano said the bureau soon would file another legal action regarding the sidewalk.

Mr. Eckenrode, of Mt. Lebanon, faced 34 complaints in Pittsburgh Municipal Court from 2003 through early last year. At that point, the court changed from a city operation to part of the county-run court system, and it no longer provides data on building code complaints.

Mr. Eckenrode owns 28 Oakland properties, rented primarily to students. As he walked through a Semple Street property he owns, from which students had recently moved, he argued that the conditions weren't his fault.

"This guy had 13 broken windows," he said. "The front door was kicked in."

He pointed to holes in the wall.

"I'm going to court with him right now," he said of the tenant. In the recent past, Mr. Eckenrode has sued former tenants for as much as $8,265 in damage to apartments.

Several of his tenants have complaints about him, too, saying he's slow to make requested repairs.

"We gave him a list at the beginning of the year of things that needed to be fixed. Most of them weren't," said Ellen Metz, a Pitt student who lives in a house Mr. Eckenrode owns on Bouquet Street.

Problems include a dishwasher that pulled away from the wall, holes in the walls, a cracked window and ineffective steam heaters, she said.

Martha Rial, Post-Gazette
Robert Eckenrode, owner of a rental unit at 254 Meyran Ave. and 27 other properties in Oakland, was cited and fined $50 for the disrepair of this sidewalk. He promised in January to repair it, but another citation is coming.
Click photo for larger image.Martha Rial, Post-Gazette
University of Pittsburgh junior Ellen Metz stands in the trash-strewn back yard of her Bouquet Street apartment in Oakland.
Click photo for larger image.

Mr. Eckenrode said his three-man maintenance staff, plus extras he hires for the summer, do a good job of maintaining his apartments. "Right now, I have 50 percent of my [tenants] staying for next year," he said. "If they didn't like it, they wouldn't stay."

Ms. Metz said she was moving on, but that some of her five roommates would stay on Bouquet Street. They pay $350 each, a total of $2,100 a month, plus all utilities for six bedrooms on the top floor of the two-story building.

A landlord's market

The 1999 book Rent-O-Vation, self-published by local landlord Victor Scotti, described the allure of the off-campus market in a chapter titled, "Dogs & College Kids Mean More Money."

"Off campus means that Mom and Dad still foot the bill," he wrote. "Which means filled houses with guaranteed rent!"

He recommended having student-tenants do their own repairs and maintenance "for an extra $20."

Another city-Pitt collaboration was designed to prevent landlords from taking advantage of students by driving business to quality landlords. It has fallen into disuse.

In 1997, the city offered Oakland-area landlords voluntary inspections, charging $32 for the first apartment and $10 for each additional unit.

Those that pass are listed on the Pitt Housing Resource Center's Web page as "city-inspected apartments."

Theoretically, students would flock to those apartments first, encouraging landlords to submit to the inspections. In recent months, though, the number of properties listed on the Web page has hovered around 37, including 18 in South and Central Oakland, a fraction of the 2,800 rental units in those neighborhoods.

"It worked for a while, but it fell by the wayside," Mr. Graziano said.

The level of demand for rental housing near campus might have defeated the program, said David Blenk, executive director of the nonprofit Oakland Planning and Development Corp. "Most landlords, whether they're good or bad landlords, can rent their units in Oakland."

Mr. Shorak agreed that "there are still landlords who don't feel the need to participate." But, he said, Pitt has upped the number of on-campus beds by 1,500 to 7,000 over the past five years, reducing demand for Oakland apartments and thus putting pressure on landlords to compete for students by better maintaining their property.

Pitt offers an online housing guide which includes a system for finding roommates or subletting for the summer.

None of the 55 students interviewed for this article said they had used the university's Web site to find a place to live. Most said they relied on The Pitt News, other online resources such as Craig's List, or word of mouth. Many had not heard of the Housing Resource Center.

Mr. Shorak said the center and its consumer-focused information was a valuable asset whose use is demonstrated by the 4,000-plus people who visit its Web site each month during peak apartment-hunting periods. Walk-ins to the office, he said, are common.

He said the center's Bellefield Avenue location in North Oakland was adequate and moving it closer to Central Oakland rentals wasn't necessary because so much information is available online.

At Pitt, students can get free legal advice on matters that include housing through the student government, Mr. Fedele said. But they are on their own if they have to hire a lawyer to represent them in a landlord-tenant dispute.

Not so at Ohio State University. Students there at odds with their landlords have access to free legal representation though a housing law clinic formed by a partnership between student affairs administrators at Ohio State and the school's Moritz College of Law.

Roughly 1,000 Ohio State students get help every year on matters that range from understanding the language in their lease agreements to getting repairs done or security deposits returned. A couple of dozen lawsuits are filed annually, but most matters are resolved short of court. Sometimes, the cases involve a student contesting an eviction or a bill for damages.

"We've saved over $300,000 on behalf of students," said Susan Choe, director and supervising lawyer with the 7-year-old housing law clinic.

Inspections, but few options

"It's tough to find a decent place, period, in Oakland," said Matt Paden, a senior studying mechanical engineering at Pitt. In August, he found a three-bedroom at 233 N. Neville St., North Oakland, for $700 a month and jumped at it.

But when he moved in, he was surprised to find the back porch rickety, a hole in the bathroom wall and evidence of water damage. "I don't know if they showed us a different unit and then rented us this one," he said.

He didn't know it at the time, but two months before he moved in, a Health Department inspector had visited his apartment. She found missing handrails, faults in the water heater and gas line, missing smoke detectors, drafty doors, a window painted shut, damage and leaks in the ceiling, a leaky bath tub, mold, holes in the wall, improper wall outlets in the bathroom and a lack of grounding in other outlets.

The department declared the apartment, owned by a division of Lobos Management, unfit for human habitation. It sent Lobos a notice June 29 informing the company of the finding, saying, among other things, that "no one may move in until all repairs are made and the Health Department gives written permission to reoccupy the dwelling."

An August inspection by the department found 11 of the original 16 violations still uncorrected. Nonetheless, Lobos allowed Mr. Paden and his roommates to move in.

"We would not let someone move into an apartment that we deemed uninhabitable," said Ron Sobol, an executive with Lobos. He said he did not know of the unfit-for-habitation designation until the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette told him about it, and that he believed that most repairs must have been made before new tenants moved in.

Mr. Sobol said his company bought the property five months before the department's inspection, and that it was "not reflective of my company's properties."

He said the apartment building at 4629 Bayard St. was a better example of a Lobos property. During a brief walkthrough, the building, where efficiency and one-bedroom apartments are connected by carpeted halls appeared neat, and the interior of one unoccupied apartment was clean and its walls in good shape.

Health Department records show letters dated Aug. 11 and Dec. 14 to Lobos Management chronicling repeat inspections and continuing violations at 233 N. Neville. The apartment was cleared of all violations April 24, 10 months after the first inspection.

When the department declares an apartment unfit for human habitation, as it did for 129 rentals within the city limits, including three in Oakland, last year, the tenant has the right to deposit rent into an escrow account until repairs are done. That's supposed to be a tool to compel quick repairs, but it rarely works for students, according to Dan Cinpinski, chief of the housing program.

That's because, under state law, once a tenant starts paying rent into escrow, the landlord has six months to make repairs. If the tenant moves out, as many students do every year, the landlord gets the escrowed money, whether the repairs are done or not.

As long as rent is going into escrow, the department is barred from taking swifter measures, such as suing in Pittsburgh Municipal Court, or assessing civil penalties. Partly as a result, six tenants are now using the rent escrow program, including one student.

"If somebody is living without heat in the wintertime, we will file a legal action immediately," Mr. Cinpinski said. In Oakland, though, such actions are relatively rare. The department received 122 complaints about Oakland landlords in 2004 and last year, and filed eight legal actions.

Students generally don't know their rights or responsibilities, and in the scramble to find a decent place at an acceptable price, they overlook defects, Mr. Blenk said. Oakland Planning and Development tries to remedy that by making presentations or providing literature to freshmen, and hanging brochures on off-campus door knobs that provide phone numbers, including the Health Department's, to call in complaints.

Students don't seem inclined to dial those numbers.

Complaining "doesn't matter," said J.P. Hanish, a Pitt sophomore and tenant of Mr. Eckenrode's, who said he endured faulty plumbing and slow repairs. If he left, "six new guys would come in here anyway."

Resigned to decline

Caught in the crossfire between students and landlords are Central Oakland's dwindling number of homeowners. Occupying a quarter of the dwellings in the neighborhood in 1970, they now hold one in eight housing units there.

Nunzio Sciulli, 64, gets upset when he scans Atwood Street and talks about how different it was in 1968, when he and his wife, Maria, moved into their red brick house and raised a family. A neighborhood where the sounds of children dominated and "everyone knew everyone" is now a college ghetto.

The church down the block has become a cafe, they say. Once neatly maintained homes are now ramshackle. Most of the other owners left long ago.

"We're the survivors," his wife says woefully.

They blame a poisonous mix of absentee landlords, noisy, abusive students, a city that doesn't do enough to enforce building codes and a university that hasn't instilled a sense of respect in its students.

"It's gotten worse," Mr. Sciulli said.

He pointed just down the street toward a house where, he said, garbage is strewn outside and described others where students line up on the front steps to pay admission to parties that run deep into the night.

"They urinate everywhere," Mrs. Sciulli said. "There's bottles everywhere."

She recalled a nighttime encounter with a student who told her " 'Pitt owns Oakland.' He said, 'What are you doing on our turf?' " she recalled. "I told him, 'What are you doing? You're going to school but you haven't learned a thing.' "

Students are learning one thing: That Pittsburgh's vaunted quality of life and affordability don't necessarily apply to them.

Pitt student Jenny Heiskell lived the past year in a Halket Street apartment. For $925 a month plus utilities, she and two friends got crumbling plaster, leaks, a back door that was almost impossible to shut and windows that didn't lock until they were recently replaced.

"We did know what we were getting into," she said. "We knew we were getting screwed when we moved here, because it's Oakland."