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E-mail StoryParty vigilance falls to neighbors
| Friday, Mar 28 2008 7:18 PM
Last Updated: Friday, Mar 28 2008 6:47 PM
Leticia Avila’s blood pressure plummeted when she saw what partyers had done to her south Bakersfield home.
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Not all of the houses where young people have thrown large, unsupervised parties lately are foreclosure properties. But law enforcement officials and real estate professionals say the large number of local foreclosures does make it easier to find an empty home in which to party.
According to county records the number of foreclosures in Kern more than quadrupled between February 2007 and February 2008, reaching 586 a month. In February of 2006, only 12 were recorded.
• Secure the property with locks
• Install a burglar alarm system
• Keep the property in good condition (green lawns, no garbage around)
• Be on the lookout for empty beer cans, broken windows and other signs that someone has entered the property
• Check up on the property
• Stay in contact with neighbors around the property
• Report poorly maintained vacant homes to the Bakersfield Association of Realtors (635-2300)
How to report an illegal party in a vacant home
• Call Bakersfield Police (327-7111) or the Kern County Sheriff’s Department (861-3110) if you see an unauthorized party in a vacant home
• Make sure to provide as much specific information as possible
• Persuade neighbors to call and report the party as well
Source: Bakersfield Police Department, Kern County Sheriff’s Department, local real estate professionals
Photos:
Leticia Avila, sits on the front steps to the home she owns that was thrashed on Sunday, March 2, after an illegal party was thrown there and one person was beat unconscious. She was very upset and had to put her own money into fixing it up. It is now being rented out.
Neighborhood children check out the vandalized home in the 5100 block of Yellow Rose Court on March 2 after it was trashed by people who were throwing a party the night before. The property has since been repaired.
Broken windows are seen on the front side of a home in the 5100 block of Yellow Rose Court after the illegal party. The windows have since been repaired.
Blood stains are caked onto the driveway of this home on Yellow Rose Court. The property has since been cleaned.
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Blood and spray paint stained her upstairs bedroom. Beer bottles littered the kitchen. Her fence had been partially torn down and many of her windows shattered.
The scene was all the more shocking to Avila because she had put the home up for sale only about a month before, and was living just a few blocks away when police and neighbors say a large, unruly party broke out at the house.
By the time police arrived to break it up, a young man had been beaten unconscious and two others were badly hurt.
“It can’t continue like this,” she said.
But continue it has. In March, young people staged at least four large illegal parties in empty homes around Bakersfield, including the one March 2 at Avila’s home in the 5100 block of Yellow Rose Court, near Monitor Street and Pacheco Road.
Youths partying in vacant houses is nothing new. What’s new, local authorities and real estate people say, is that the troubled housing market has widened the selection of empty homes, and so the parties are taking place in nicer, larger homes in more affluent neighborhoods.
So far there has been little coordinated action to address what some fear could become a bigger problem. With local police and sheriff’s deputies relying largely on nearby residents to notify them of the parties, and city officials more focused on pushing for strict maintenance of foreclosed homes, the task of keeping an eye out for unsupervised parties seems to have fallen to neighbors.
The problem has gone largely undetected outside of Bakersfield and Fresno, where two such parties were reported recently, one of which involved a shooting that left a man dead and three others hurt.
City and county officials say no data on the frequency of such parties exists, partly because of the difficulty of classifying them.
Bakersfield City Councilman David Couch asked police earlier this month what could be done to crack down on the parties. He has since become convinced that only more police staffing money will solve the problem.
“We’re going to have to respond with many more officers and do many more arrests, which I am perfectly fine with,” Couch said. “But we as the City Council and the elected body have to realize that this is going to cost us more money.”
Representatives of the Bakersfield Police and Kern County Sheriff’s departments say their effectiveness at breaking up the parties depends mainly on two factors: what level of detail neighbors provide when they call to report the parties, and what else is going on around town when the calls come in.
They said their response to a report of trespassing or vandalism will not be as timely or as forceful as a report of 75 young people smashing windows and fighting.
“A lot of it just depends on the calls at the time and sheer officer availability,” Bakersfield police Sgt. Greg Terry said, adding that the department gets 100 to 150 reports of loud parties on a typical weekend.
In addition, sheriff’s deputies do their best to monitor vacant homes on their beat, sometimes after being alerted to them by neighbors and Realtors, Sgt. Ed Komin said.
Real estate professionals have taken an interest in the problem lately, given their incentive to keep for-sale properties in good condition. But other than keeping up lawns, making sure the property is secure and checking up on the home in person or through contacts with neighbors, real estate agents say there is little they can do to keep out partyers.
“Every time I hear it on the news, I have to listen for the address to be sure it’s not one of our properties,” said Janet Staat-Goedhart, a property manager at Karpe Real Estate.
Ultimately the owner of a property — a mortgage lender, in some cases — is responsible for what happens there, including making sure it does not become a nuisance. This is the basis of new cooperation between the city and local real estate agents that, although not directly related to the party problem, could help the situation.
The Bakersfield Association of Realtors recently agreed to give local authorities information on foreclosed and otherwise troubled properties. City code enforcement officials now use the information to track down the owners of abandoned properties that have fallen into disrepair and require them to make repairs.
City Building Director Phil Burns drew a distinction between forcing owners to maintain the appearance of vacant properties and actively preventing parties.
“As far as ... trying to curtail the teenagers, we don’t really have the staff to do that or to police the houses,” he said. But Frank St. Clair, real estate broker and owner of St. Clair Realty, linked code enforcement to party prevention. If a lawn is brown or a window broken, he said, young people are more likely to try to host a party there.
Perhaps the most proactive effort to address the party problem has come from the local Neighborhood Watch program, headed up by the police department’s crime prevention supervisor, Karen Bennett.
Two months ago, when Bennett said it became apparent that young people were targeting vacant homes, she started encouraging people organized into Neighborhood Watch groups to call police about broken windows and other signs that someone is trespassing on a property.
“That’s what we tell people — to get involved,” she said.
Avila, owner of the home on Yellow Rose Court, said the efforts to date have been insufficient.
Some of her frustration stems from the fact that she and her husband spent $650 and four days cleaning up the house after receiving a written warning from a city code enforcement officer that she had 48 hours to repair the property or face a fine.
She thinks the people who attend the parties, or their parents, should be forced to pay for the damage. She also wants the police to do more to catch the trespassers.
“In a while,” she said, partygoers “are going to do bigger things.”