DETROIT – Lou Hatty is sick of looking at it. He’s lived on the 4000 block of Courville Street in East English Village since 1956.
He owns three houses on the block, his own home, plus two others that he rents out.
But it’s the two-story brick-and-wood house next door, one of the rental properties, that has become the bane of his existence.
“If ever there’s been a definition of a house that’s been neglected, this is it,” Hatty said, standing outside the home on Monday. “It’s past being an eyesore; now it’s a hazard. It’s a physical hazard.”
“Heaven forbid if a body ever gets found in there,” he said. “You know weird (stuff) happens.”
The home has sat largely abandoned since 2009. It’s haunting, dingy, and gray with black wooden shutters. Hatty says that he and a neighbor once chased squatters from the home.
The home is covered with peeling paint, rotted-out gutters, and a slowly crumbling porch, which is covered in broken glass after one of the windows fell from its frame.
“There are four acorn trees or oak trees in the backyard,” Hatty said. “Nobody’s bothered to rake the leaves or pick up the yard waste. It’s knee deep back there.”
“My fear is a fire,” he added. “It’s my garage next to it and it’s the fellow on the other side, that’s his garage.”
The house’s run-down condition has scared off potential buyers for both of Lou’s properties. When we went to the house on Monday, we spotted two blight tickets from the city -- both addressed to the home’s owner, Vitaliy Grytsyuk, who lives in Sterling Heights.
Hatty says the man has owned the home for 10 years, and he has only seen him on a couple of occasions. Reached by phone, Grytsyuk claims that he’s in the process of selling the house and doesn’t understand the big deal.
“It’s the city of Detroit, and there are abandoned buildings all over the place,” he said. “Who cares!?”
“The house has windows and doors,” he added. “It’s Locked up. What’s the problem!?”
The city often uses tickets to compel wayward owners to keep their houses up to code. When they don’t respond, things escalate, first with a warning letter from the city. Then it goes to the law department.
“This is totally unacceptable,” Dave Bell, the director of the city’s Buildings, Safety Engineering, and Environmental Department – better known as BSEED – said on Monday. “There’s no reason where you should have a blighted property like this in a nice neighborhood like this.”
In the case of the home on Courville, the city had been after Grytsyuk for years with no response.
“We’re going to get this guy into a meeting this week,” he said. “And if he doesn’t come to the meeting, we’re gonna sue him.”
“If you’re not going to take care of your property, it’s going to cost you one way or the other,” he added. “We can issue tickets every day if we need to.”
Hatty would love nothing more than to see something done to the house -- whether it’s sold, condemned, or renovated. He is just plain sick of looking at it.
“It’s a damn shame,” he said. “If you’re gonna buy something, then you make something of it. You don’t buy something then let it go to seed or ignore it.”