Several months ago, as many as ten men were living in a house at the end of East Chris Lane in Bloomington that was serving as a sober living home.
But it sits vacant now, after receiving rental code violations, as do some other homes owned by Pendragon Property on the cul-de-sac.
Jeremy Nottingham lives in a house owned by Pendragon on East Emery Court, which is just off East Chris Lane. He’s rented there for 10 years. The house has city code violations, though he and his partner are allowed to stay.
The air conditioning went out this summer and hasn’t been fixed, faulty smoke alarms, and a roof that needs repairs are among the issues he and his partner have dealt with at the house.
“I think that the frustrating thing is that when it comes to the point of, I really do need somebody to come in here and handle this, it's tough,” Nottingham said.
His partner Denise Travers moved in with him a few years ago. Throughout the summer, she said they tried to avoid going upstairs during the day because of the heat. But it was the issues with the house’s roof that landed it on a list of properties with more pressing issues in the city of Bloomington’s settlement with Pendragon.
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The city settled a legal dispute with Nottingham and Travers’s landlord, Pendragon Properties, this fall. After years of noncompliance with rental code, Pendragon’s owner, Jeff Jones, agreed to sell his Bloomington properties in the next 3 years.
Pendragon is required to sell a handful of properties faster, within one to two years, including where Travers and Nottingham live.
They’ve considered buying a home to escape these problems but can’t afford it. As a two-person household with one on disability, Travers and Nottingham fall within a demographic that lacks housing options in Bloomington.
Bloomington’s Housing and Neighborhood Director Anna Killion-Hanson told attendees at an October town hall that 72 percent of the city’s workforce does not live in city limits because it’s cost prohibitive.
“Bloomington is the most housing cost-burdened metro area in the state: high cost, low wage,” she said. More than half of Bloomington households are cost burdened by housing: defining that as spending more than 30 percent of monthly income on housing.
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And the city hired a housing consultant to evaluate its housing needs to help with the Hopewell development downtown.
Alli Thurmond Quinlan with Flintlock told community members this month that the average household size is decreasing, fueling issues of availability.
“We need more total units to house the same number of people,” Quinlan said.
Considering these stresses on housing, Killion-Hanson said the market is too complicated to speak to any one landlord’s impact and it’s not her department’s job to control these factors. But HAND does enforce building code violations known as Title 16.
“One of the things that the rental program does is prevents a concentration of poverty within Bloomington, she said. “We are trying to enforce Title 16 to make sure that we're protecting tenants that are living in these properties. How that impacts the market? I can't make that direct correlation.”
Bloomington’s settlement with Pendragon said it must sell its properties to a disinterested third party, but it can’t control who that is.
Most of its properties are in Perry township. Its trustee, Dan Combs, predicts whoever buys them will invest into repairs and increase rents.
“It doesn't seem like things are priced on what something costs to build,” he said. “It's worth what the market will bear, and we have such an artificially inflated rent value.”
His office provides rental assistance and acts as a landlord for 12 senior housing apartments. He thinks medium-sized landlords are more likely to let their product deteriorate than small- or large-scale operations.
“They're trying to pull a profit, maybe before it's time to,” Combs said. “But they've invested everything they have…so they will start cutting corners.”
According to a GIS search, Pendragon owns more than 40 properties in Bloomington, including a couple apartment complexes, totaling more than $17 million in property value.
With over a billion dollars of assessed property value in Perry alone, Combs said, Pendragon is a small portion of the Bloomington market, and he doesn’t expect it to have an impact on sale values.
But Steven Finnerty, who bought his home on East Chris Lane fifteen years ago, said Pendragon’s management and upkeep have had a real impact on him.
Of 20 homes surrounding his on East Chris Lane and East Emery Court, eight are owned by Pendragon, according to the Monroe County’s GIS.
“I can't imagine anybody could drive down the street and not notice that you have half the houses that are well-maintained and the other half aren't,” Finnerty said.
He’s asked himself: “If I wanted to put my house up for sale right now. How bad is that going to hurt the value of my home?”
Finnerty is across the road from Travers and Nottingham. Nottingham fears that whoever buys their house will fix it up to a price point they can’t afford.
“Are they going to raise the rent by 500 bucks? Are they going to be better at maintenance than what we have now?” he said. “I think it's hard to say. It's not great not knowing what's going to happen. I lived here for 10 years, so it feels like home.”
WFIU/WTIU News contacted Pendragon Properties for comment on this story, but did not receive a response.
