Sunday, June 28, 2009
News, Atlanta
Crime, coming to a house near you
“Once a house becomes a problem, it drags down the neighborhood and others move away.”—Philippe Pellerin, Atlanta real estate broker
A scene from YouTube’s “Tour of a Crack House,” filmed in Atlanta last year.
By Patrick Bray
The YouTube video “Tour of a Crack House,” allegedly shot in Atlanta last year and narrated by a character who calls himself “the zookeeper,” is footage of every neighborhood association’s nightmare. The house is utterly destroyed, with trash and human feces everywhere. Another YouTube oddity? Not really.
According to experts in real estate, criminal justice and urban renewal, foreclosed homes, closed-up businesses, and urban decay all contribute to the growth of crack houses in Atlanta’s neighborhoods.
Philippe Pellerin, who has been in commercial real estate for several years, helped shut down a crack house across the street from his own home.
“There were drive-bys, vagrants hanging around constantly soliciting for something. There was even a dead body in my driveway when I got home one day,” he says.
That’s probably enough to make anyone want to move away, but Pellerin told the police what he thought was going on at the house, and in time a SWAT team showed up and shut it down. The owner of the home claimed he was not aware of the problem, but after the incident, says Pellerin, he was quick to move problem tenants out and keep them out.
Pellerin has seen a lot of problem houses and some of the issues that neighborhoods face in dealing with them.
“Crack houses and problem houses appear where foreclosure has hit the hardest,” he says. “Criminals want to stay out of sight, so they move into houses that are vacant and blighted.”
According to Pellerin, some neighborhood blocks in Atlanta have groups of three or four foreclosed homes.
“Once a house becomes a problem, it drags down the neighborhood and others move away. Without neighbors there to see this stuff, it keeps going on,” he says.
That’s just the crack houses where drugs are sold. There are also “use” houses where drugs are used, “prostitution” houses and houses for storing stolen goods.
“Where did they [police] find the flat-screen TVs? In abandoned houses where they can easily be stored,” says Pellerin, referring to TV-heisting gangs who have struck Atlanta bars and restaurants.
Gangs like those leave their marks on foreclosed houses, vandalizing them inside and out.
“Who’s going to buy that house? Those gangs know that they can go back there whenever they want,” says Pellerin, pointing to Atlanta’s over-supply of homes, created in part by homeowners who overestimated their ability to pay a mortgage.
Lou Arcangeli, criminal justice professor at Georgia State University, is a retired Atlanta police officer who was assigned to public housing projects within the Atlanta Housing Authority. As a young officer, he heard the expression “cloaking”—when criminals exploit the old, the infirm, or the poor in a community, often public housing, to carry out criminal activities. Sometimes, elderly people rent out a spare room in their house to someone who seems like a good tenant, but who then uses their space for illegal activity. In many cloaking cases, the actual tenants are unaware of what is going on.
“It was a big enough problem that the Atlanta Housing Authority had to implement changes to allow eviction of anyone using the home for illegal activities,” he says, including instituting thorough background checks on prospective tenants. SP