San Jose takes action on neglected property plaguing neighborhood
For six years, residents near downtown San Jose have put up with a blighted piece of private property that has attracted drug dealing, homeless squatters, trash dumping and even a pair of fires.
Now, the city has had enough and has taken the owner to court to force a change.
The property at the corner of Fourth and St. John streets is along the route that Xzander Smith takes to his classes at San Jose State.
"So, I've walked past this lot pretty much every day and seen the debris and have wondered every day what happened," he said. "Just kind of seeing the debris and trash and everything around it, it's an eyesore for sure."
The lot is actually four different addresses, enclosed behind a ramshackle chain-link fence since 2018. There used to be a pair of empty Victorian homes on one end, but they both burned to the ground in March in a fire started by some homeless squatters. Brian Coria lives in a duplex right next to the lot where the houses burned.
"It got lit on fire twice, actually," he said. "Somebody burned the house down and then somebody came back a few months later and they lit the rubble on fire. So, that rubble was lit on fire twice."
That's the kind of thing that neighbors have been living with and complaining to the city about for a long time. Now, Mayor Matt Mahan is also fed up.
"This property has been blighted and neglected for far too long," he said. "This is a case where there's a very appropriate legal pathway, which is the one we're pursuing."
The city filed a lawsuit in November against the owner, a Saratoga man named Brent Lee who controls a company with the obtuse name RPRO152N3 LLC. In the court filing the city says the company "was a mere shell and sham without capital or assets and was conceived, intended, and used by the Alter Ego Owners as a device to avoid individual liability and for the purpose of substituting a financially insolvent entity in its place."
In other words, the company has no money to sue for. So, the court has granted San Jose's request to turn the property over to a receiver who will make all the decisions about cleanup and maintenance and put a lien on the land until the total bill is paid. After that's been done, the mayor said the city will have one more goal in mind.
"Finding a new owner who is going to actually, not just maintain the property, but hopefully invest in it and turn it into some kind of use," said Mahan. "You know, housing, jobs, something that actually benefits society."
That's also something Xzander has pondered as he walks to school.
"When you see constant construction going on downtown," he said, "And how fast some of these projects are being worked on and then you see something like this, you kind of wonder what makes the timeframe on this longer than what people are doing just a block over."
A notice taped to the fence says a hearing was scheduled for Thursday, Oct. 24th, at City Hall to officially begin the process of forcing the cleanup of the site. The city said it has gotten no response or cooperation from the owner over the years. Now, with the property falling under sole control of the receiver, they no longer need it.