Landlord, city clash over causes of Crime
Megan Blaney, SB Sun Staff Writer Aug. 20, 2006
Ed Harding is a flashy guy. He wears gold bracelets on both wrists, a jewel-studded cross on his chest and a belt buckle with his initials spelled out in diamonds.
His company, Edward J. Harding Enterprises LLC, owns or controls the homes of thousands of San Bernardino residents - holdings worth as much as $100 million.
Police and city leaders know him well.
His properties, they say, are breeding grounds for the crime and violence that have made San Bernardino one of the country's 20 most dangerous cities for the past two years.
"His apartments are often central in the crime problems we have," said San Bernardino police Lt. Walt Goggin. "The apartments themselves don't attract crime; it's the way they're managed."
Harding rejects the notion. In fact, he says, it's just the opposite. He's asked repeatedly for the Police Department to increase patrols in the neighborhoods where he owns apartment complexes. The city, he says, has failed to respond effectively.
As for the crime, Harding contends it's not the property, but the people.
"The people we rent to are one step up from the homeless," he said. "They are F tenants in our C buildings."
At the same time, Harding, 62, insists he's providing a public service by renting to those who might not be able to find other places to live.
"We're not really slumlords even though we have slum tenants," Harding said.
But in a city where nearly half the residents are renters, city leaders contend that landlords and property owners must play a more active role in ensuring residents' safety by more diligent screening of prospective tenants and by keeping the properties in better shape.
Harding and his business associates have faced increased scrutiny since the shooting death of an 11-year-old girl at the Cedarwood Apartments on Citrus Street last fall.
Although Harding does not own the Cedarwood complex, he is business associates with those who do - his girlfriend, Paula Martin, and Riverside resident Kevin Brophy.
Harding, Martin and Brophy, along with their investors, collectively own about 30 apartment complexes in San Bernardino and Riverside counties.
As chairman of Edward J. Harding Enterprises LLC of Capistrano Beach, Harding is frequently the group's spokesman and has often served as a spokesman for Martin and Brophy.
The November shooting death of 11-year-old Mynisha Crenshaw has done more than raise Harding's profile, though. It has rallied the community and prompted local leaders to declare a new war on crime and youth violence. But Harding questions the effort behind the endeavor.
"It's not any different now," Harding said. "The gangs are just like organized crime. Why is this Police Department letting it happen? Why the underperformance?"
Man about town
The Cedarwood apartments where Mynisha died were once owned by husband and wife Joe and Paula Martin.
Now they're owned by Paula Martin and Kevin Brophy, both of whom have close ties to Harding.
After Joe Martin's death, Paula Martin and Harding moved in together.
"Joe kinda willed her to me," Harding said.
They live in Orange County, and sometimes they stay at Harding's second home in Indian Wells or on his Hattaras yacht, which is docked in Huntington Beach.
Harding met Kevin Brophy in the early 1990s when Brophy and his wife, Kathy Brophy, were living out of a van.
Kevin Brophy landed a job at one of Harding's apartment complexes and was such an effective maintenance man, and later a manager, that Harding brought him on as a partner.
Now, says Harding, Brophy is worth more than $5 million. Brophy is a minority landowner in nearly all of Harding's San Bernardino apartment complexes.
"I told Kevin, 'You give me free time and I'll make you rich,' " Harding said.
Harding himself is proud of his wealth, and it shows - from the gold and jewels he wears to the twin-turbo Mercedes Benz, which retails for considerably more than $100,000, that he drives.
"I know I'm a flamboyant, flashy guy," he said. "I'm a capitalist financially, but I'm a socially liberal human."
Harding took five years to finish high school. He attended college briefly but said he dropped out when a professor flunked him for referring to poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, whose sexuality has been widely debated, as gay.
"I then quit going to school entirely. Those people were idiots," he said.
He had a successful career in direct marketing and lived a "wild life" until he found religion.
"I was a real pretty kid," Harding said. "Women liked me and men liked me."
He has been sober for 30 years, he said.
"I made it my goal to do God's work," he said. "That I went from facedown in the gutter to where I am today is a miracle. It's just like winning the lottery."
Harding says he has a message he wants to impart. This was illustrated when he pulled up to a gas station earlier this spring. A scrawny boy on a BMX bike approached him for a handout. Harding turned him down, but then changed his mind.
"Hey, come here. Pump this gas," Harding said, after paying for the gas. "No! Not regular!"
Long black hair flopping over his eyes, the boy filled the tank with $67 of premium unleaded and Harding pulled $5 from a money clip in his sock and told him to go find honest work.
The boy took off on his bike, and Harding pulled out of the station.
He knows how to make an impression. On a recent afternoon, a young girl playing dodge ball with her friends at the Cedarwood Apartments saw him pass. As he walked away, she whispered, "I think that's the mayor.
Crime a concern
Uri Leder also owns an apartment complex in the San Bernardino area. His property, the Ridge View Apartments on Date Street, is one of the oldest in the neighborhood, but he works hard to attract good tenants and keep them. He refuses to allow his complex to deteriorate.
But the hardscrabble neighborhood and its denizens make it difficult for him to retain a good clientele, and for that, he blames Harding.
"Yes, you can blame the tenant," Leder said. "But who is renting to that tenant? He is."
The most recent statistics from the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department shows twice as many calls for service to Harding's two side-by-side apartments at the western end of Date as three neighboring apartments owned by other landlords combined.
Harding's rents are not much different than Leder's or those at other complexes in the area because he takes on people that no one else will, Leder said.
"He has a captive audience. No one else would rent to them," he said. "So, he can charge whatever he wants. He doesn't want to be a good landlord because it costs a lot to be a good landlord."
Harding's rents average $700 to $800 a month. At Alpine Village on Sterling Avenue, he described the $625 lofts as the "most basic" rental units where "the poorest people live."
Leder's apartments down the street start at about $640.
Mayor Pat Morris described Leder and the other active members of the Del Rosa Neighborhood Improvement Association as model landlords.
"These are quality people. They've lived here. They've worked here," Morris said. "Their retirement is wrapped up in multi-unit housing, and they maintain them as if they were part of the family."
Not so with Harding, the mayor said.
"He is a problem landlord," Morris said.
City and law-enforcement officials say Harding's complexes exacerbate the city's crime problems.
Mountain View Manor, owned by Harding and known as "The Yellows," was infamous as one of the city's most dangerous places. Several years ago, police officers were known to spend entire shifts at the yellow stucco apartment complex that was a base camp for many drug dealers.
Lt. Mark Garcia, who patrolled the area at the time, said Harding's complexes were worse than others.
"There were other complexes in the same area where we didn't have problems," he said.
Garcia said the landlords were not effectively screening tenants and allowed guests and visitors who were not on the lease to stay at the complex.
Brophy has in the past asked the Police Department to screen tenants, but police officials said it's not their responsibility to do so.
"I'm not in the property management business," Garcia said.
Changes take time
Harding insists his group is careful about people it rents to. They perform credit, eviction and criminal-history checks, he said, noting that bad credit doesn't necessarily disqualify a prospective tenant.
The company does its own screenings and often offers the service at no cost to landlords of nearby apartment complexes, Harding said.
The debate between Harding's group and the city, especially over the Mountain View Manor complex, has been going on for years.
Harding and Brophy desperately want to rid the complex of its nickname "The Yellows" and the image that accompanies it.
They installed cameras, repainted and increased private security patrols.
But, they said, the gang problem often overwhelms any efforts they make to secure the complex. They can't station a guard at the complex full time because the gangs have money and drugs to pay off security men, they said.
Harding and his associates have written more than 20 letters to the Police Department since 1996, asking for more police to help end what he describes as a mafia-style gang war.
Harding contends police don't do enough to help.
But former Police Chief Garrett Zimmon and Lt. Garcia responded in a letter to Brophy urging him to "take responsibility" for his complex.
"Your unwillingness to improve your property as suggested has (led) to continued problems within your complex. I have no other complex in my district that requires this level of service," Garcia wrote.
Several months later, former police Capt. Jenifer Aragon wrote to Brophy about the "mess" between the Police Department and the representatives of Edward Harding J. Enterprises LLC.
"Know in advance, I am not here to play," she wrote. "I am here to get some concessions from you and to put a stop to the violent and narcotic crimes occurring on/near your property on a regular basis. We will do our part. You will do your part. Everyone will be happy."
The exchange continues.
Earlier this year, Paula Martin's company, the Martin Family Trust, filed a claim against the city for, it alleged, ignoring the "urgent need for increased police patrols in the Cedarwood Apartments for years preceding the tragedy" on Nov. 3, when Mynisha was shot and killed.
Morris called the claim "over the top" and criticized the landlords for trying to shrug off the blame.
"It is, from what I understand from talking to city staff, a challenge to keep him maintaining his apartments in a quality condition and keeping them filled with quality people," Morris said. "He does neither well."
City Attorney James F. Penman said Harding's apartments have improved dramatically over the past decade.
Penman, who accepted $3,000 in campaign donations from Harding during his unsuccessful mayoral campaign, said he never would have accepted money from the group 10 years ago.
Harding insists that he tried just as hard to maintain the apartments 10 years ago as he does today. But many of the major improvements - cameras in particular - have come more recently. He is able to do more now because rents have increased, he said.
"We're getting better every year," he said.
The cameras offer a bird's-eye view of the goings-on at a handful of the complexes. The video feeds into a Web site that can be monitored by the Police Department, and by the landlords. Brophy set up a room at one of the complexes to watch the San Bernardino complexes as well as complexes as far away as Brentwood in Northern California. He can also access the streaming video from his laptop.
A large camera with loudspeakers will be installed at Mountain View Manor soon, Brophy said. It will allow him to speak to loitering people and tell them to move on.
"We're watching at all times," Brophy said. "We know what's going on - we can see it.
City seeks compliance
Harding's apartments may be getting better - they just passed the Fire Department's annual code inspection - but they are still a burden on law enforcement, according to police.
Sheriff's Lt. Paul Kellner was in charge of the unincorporated area surrounding Date Street in the early 2000s. Kellner said it was a constant battle to make Harding properly maintain his apartments.
"His apartments were crummy - barbed (concertina) wire, broken windows and mossy green crud in the swimming pools," Kellner said. "A lot of lower-income people are victimized by creeps and criminals, but they also get victimized by people renting to them."
In the first six months of this year, there were 41 calls to police for service at the Mountain View Manor apartments - more than the entire year of 2000 and just over the same period for last year, when there were 40.
Harding blames this on the gang wars raging around his apartment complex, but not in it.
Letters from Garcia show the Police Department blames Harding's tenants and their visitors.
The Cedarwood Apartments had 150 calls for service in 2005 - three times as many as in 2000.
The parents of a 1-year-old boy who last year slipped through a hole in a pool gate and drowned at the Breezeway Apartments on 25th Street sued Harding and will be paid $1 million as part of a settlement. Farmer's Insurance will pay the settlement, which Harding said was made without his knowledge.
Harding contends the management team at the complex had repaired the pool gate numerous times, but that residents kept breaking it.
Tenants are no longer allowed to use the pool because they cannot handle the responsibility, he said, adding that every effort landlords make is undone by the tenants, their visitors or loiterers.
"We can't keep the gates fixed, the graffiti off the wall," Harding said. "And yet we stick around."
That he hasn't cut and run is proof of his commitment to the city, Harding said.
"These buildings are much more valuable than the rents," he said. "Yes, I want to make a little money, but I want to (accomplish) something while I'm doing it."
A financial accounting of the Mountain View Manor apartments provided by Harding showed the company lost money - more than $40,000 - on the complex last year.
Harding fights loitering in an innovative fashion. For example, he instructs the managers of his apartments to smear black axle grease on the waist-high walls on the property boundaries to discourage people from sitting on them.
"I am standing strong with the city, hoping to make it better together," he said.
The Brophys patrol the complexes personally, backed up by armed security men and a 120-pound Belgian Malinois named Willie - a present from an investor in the Harding company.
In April, the Brophys got permission from several neighboring apartment complex owners to patrol their property in addition to the Harding Enterprises properties.
Harding has also retained an attorney to whom he sends copies of letters that he sends to city officials and fellow landlords and acknowledged that it is a "subtle hint" to the city.
Mayor Morris said Harding's claims are no surprise.
" 'The best defense is a good offense' seems to be his preferred style of management," Morris said.
The mayor, who was elected in February, has a plan to make problem landlords comply with city standards.
During his campaign, Morris pledged to hold all apartment complex owners accountable to the standards in the Crime-Free Rental Housing Program - a three-stage process to certify apartments as safe. He has drafted a city ordinance that requires all complexes with four or more units to qualify for the crime-free rental certification. Failure to qualify would restrict the landlord's ability to obtain the annual permit of operation.
Leder and his fellow landlords were pleased to hear about the additional requirements.
Last year, they called for the city to "crack down" on landlords - even themselves.
Many landlords in San Bernardino, like Leder, are renting to low-income tenants and have succeeded in making their apartment complexes relatively safe.
Harding's Grace Lynn apartment complex next to Mountain View Manor became certified in the city's Crime-Free Rental Housing Program last month. The 10-unit complex is the first to be certified in the test area for Morris' anti-crime plan, Operation Phoenix.
Morris hopes his initiative will coerce reluctant complex owners into compliance.
"This way we can better control the blight and crime issues," Morris said. "Good people will be delighted. The bad people will be concerned.
Staff writer Bonnie Boyd contributed to this report.
No comments:
Post a Comment