Atlanta's First Citizen, Mayor Kasim Reed, sat front and center in code enforcement court this week, letting the system know it better take this scofflaw down.
The scofflaw in question is Rick Warren, a real estate investor who for years has been buying up properties in some of the city's most dire neighborhoods. The city has targeted him as Slum Lord No. 1.
Warren owns or controls perhaps 100 properties, many of them near the $1.4 billion stadium the Falcons are building. That number is a guess; it's difficult to know how many properties Warren owns. He operates in a shadowy world where crappy properties are bought, sold and re-deeded by a maze of corporations.
In fact, Warren, who has the chiseled good looks of a game-show host, contends he has little or nothing to do with many of the properties the city says he owns. That was the argument he employed Wednesday during his hearing in municipal court.
But Reed, who was also in court 10 days earlier when the trial was postponed, isn't buying.
“In this case, you have an individual who engaged in a level of impropriety and lawlessness in an open fashion,” Reed said this week during a break. “This cannot stand.”
The mayor said there are 16 live code violation cases against Warren and potentially 80 more in the works.
At that pace, the city could grind him into the dust long before the Falcons kick off in 2017.
Reed vows history isn’t going to repeat itself. The history in question involves $110 million in public money “invested” (one could say “dumped”) into the neighborhoods near the Georgia Dome since it opened in 1992. The Dome was supposed to be the catalyst to revive the neighborhoods. Those millions went to churches, community organizations and businesses.
But, largely, the opposite of revival has occurred. Martin Luther King Jr.’s old neighborhood of Vine City remains shabby, and the community to its north, English Avenue, remains the region’s best place to score heroin.
This time will be different, the mayor promises.
Back then, “there was no quarterback for the long term,” said the mayor, metaphorically trading in his tailored suit for a pair of shoulder pads. “There’s a new effort; folks are going to try again. They will try a more thoughtful and concentrated effort.”
Part of that campaign, Reed said, is a more robust code enforcement effort. Funding for the unit is being doubled to $5 million, he said, with an aim next year to “clear, clean and close” 500 properties. Half of that clearing and closing could easily occur in the neighborhoods just west of the Dome and the Georgia Aquarium.
The Warren case, Reed said, is not just an example of the city going after the owner of dilapidated properties. It’s something bigger than that.
“This is a signal that we are going to stay engaged in this part of the city. If you move the needle in Vine City or English Avenue, you can move the needle elsewhere in the city.”
Deputy City Solicitor Erika Smith's opening argument echoed Reed's narrative about Warren: "This is a case of greed … preying on the weak … assembling properties for his own personal gain … basically stole her property from under her feet."
The last contention concerned a burned-out property owned by Margaret Anderson on Whitaker Street. The house’s ownership was already a saga of questionable deals long before Warren arrived on the scene.
Anderson bought the house in 2003 for $225,000. Just five months earlier, it had sold for $37,000. The man who sold it to Anderson, Kevin Wiggins, was her boss. He later went to prison for defrauding banks of millions in a long-running property fraud scheme with straw buyers and faked appraisals.
Anderson, who never lived in the house, eventually declared bankruptcy and walked away from the property. She was fighting code violations when Warren met her in court a few months ago. He offered to take the property off her hands. “I told him that God is going to bless him for helping me,” she said.
She turned the deed over to Warren and he had the charred ruins demolished and hauled away, although city officials say no demo permit was ever granted. And, it seems, the city may have jumped the gun, having ticketed Warren before he ever owned the property — if indeed he ever owned it, which he sort of argues but, then again, sort of doesn’t. (Much of what happens with him is a shadow, covered with fog, wrapped in an obscure LLC.)
After the hearing, Warren told me the Whitaker Street property “wasn’t free.” He said he’s on the hook for $11,000 in taxes and $4,000 in sanitation fees.
Warren's attorney, George Lawson, argues his client is merely assembling properties, speculating the area will someday come back. Warren, by Lawson's account, is simply a man ahead of his time. (My guess is he's waaaaaay ahead of his time.)
“If they were not building the Dome would this be an issue?” Lawson asked. “He’s been doing this for 12 years and suddenly he’s a predator?”
Lawson noted it’s more than a little odd that the mayor of the most important city in the South would spend an afternoon with his posterior planted on a bench in municipal court. He said the message to Reed’s employees — the prosecutor and the judge — is unmistakable: This dude is guilty!
“Can he get a fair trial with that?” Lawson asked.
The judge said she’d weigh the evidence and will come out with a ruling in June at Warren’s next fair trial.
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