BALTIMORE — Broken glass is left on the street outside the home on East Lombard Street. You can still smell the smoke. Last week, a fire ripped through the property in the middle of the night.
An 8-year-old and 13-year-old brother and sister, and their 22 year-old cousin died.
"We look at the property to see what the history was - were there any holes? And this is a property that did not have any violations prior, did not have any complaints from the community or the occupants,” Deputy Commissioner Jason Hessler says of what the Department of Housing and Community Development does after a house fire.
Hessler says there was no way for the department to know the home didn’t have working smoke detectors.
City records show the landlord had not renewed the rental license after it expired in November. A renewal application would have required an inspection, and an inspection would have required the owner to fix or install smoke detectors.
Hessler says requiring all rentals - not just multi-family properties - to have third-party inspections has only been on the books in the city since 2019.
"It's still a relatively new law, and you're trying to reach a population that is not super organized. With multi-families, it’s a small-knit community, they have trade organizations, so it’s very easy to say, with a multi-family, we’re requiring this now, and the word gets out quickly. Whereas half of our rental units are 1 and 2 family, and a lot of those are just owned by one person, who has some other job, or it was their mom’s house; they thought it was a good second-income, but it’s not their primary focus. And they’re only focusing on it when their tenants call in to complain, they need to fill an empty unit, or it’s time to collect rent. They’re not set up to have a maintenance crew go around and do the same kind of maintenance that you should be doing on your own home,” Hessler said.
The department sends out email alerts to landlords letting them know when they're not licensed, And then the fines begin - starting with $1,000 citations, which double if they go unpaid for a certain period of time.
But Kevin Agahi, owner of an LLC that has several properties in this neighborhood, hadn't been fined by the time of the fire.
"It did not come up during that time. We do different checks on properties and this one hadn't hit that point yet. And the tenants had not made any complaints about the conditions of the property that would've gotten a housing inspector inside the property," Hessler said.
Calls to Agahi went unreturned today.
We asked Hessler how the department ensures people aren’t living in homes without a license.
“That’s a big challenge because you don’t want to make anybody homeless. You don’t want to punish the tenant for the crimes of the landlord. So whenever we find a property that is so unsafe that it needs to be vacated, we would take those steps, and we would work with the occupants to relocate them. But in most cases, we’re able to issue a violation notice, saying these are the things that need to be corrected. Anything that deals with smoke detectors or carbon monoxide detectors is an emergency notice so it’s a much shorter timeframe for them to correct it, and we’re reaching out directly to owners and saying, this needs to be corrected immediately,” Hessler explained.
We also asked - when the landlord in this case would have been cited.
Hessler said, “It’s tough to say; there’s not really a set timeline for that. We do send out email alerts to landlords to advise them that they’re not licensed. In some cases, the property might not be a rental anymore - they might have sold it, they might have decided to move into it so it does take an investigation into this to determine a citation is appropriate. So we are limited in that respect of man hours to be able to do that. So laying out some kind of time frame is tough. But we do a lot to make people aware that the properties need to be licensed. Licenses are supposed to be posted inside the property. We also have that online so tenants can look up if there’s a valid license.”
The Highlandtown section of Baltimore has a large immigrant and Latino population. Breaking down that language barrier was the focus of several city agencies this past weekend, as they went door to door with translators and Spanish-speaking city officials, eventually installing about 85 smoke detectors in just a couple of hours.
"They were able to connect, speak with the residents, and I believe built quite a rapport with them,” Kevin Cartwright, spokesperson for the Baltimore City Fire Department, said.
"But we're not done. Our work is never done. We're gonna continue being out in every community in Baltimore City until every household has a working smoke alarm."
If you need a smoke detector, Cartwright says you can call 311 and someone will come to your house within 2 hours to install it for free.
“My sense is that the more we do this, the more people are gonna take proactive steps for fire safety in their homes and put these practices in place, and in doing so, will certainly minimize the potential for us to experience encounters like we had last week with three people losing their lives in a house fire," Cartwright said.
Hessler stressed the importance of tenants reporting unsafe conditions, invalid licenses, and code violations to the department. He said people should not be afraid of any repercussions they fear would come with reporting their landlord.
"If it is an interior issue, we do need to be able to contact you and get into the property but there are, on the books, tenant retaliation laws that prevent or punish landlords that would take any kind of retaliatory eviction action. And as far as immigration status, that doesn’t come into play when it comes to safe housing in Baltimore City. We’re just looking to see if the property meets code standards, not who’s living in it or what their status is,” Hessler said.
Agahi’s last name is spelled both “Agahi” and “Agaghi” in city records, and his LLC is spelled both KFRNA, and KERNA in different spots online. We asked Hessler if this should be seen as a red flag to tenants.
“It is curious; I came across that as well, and we look into that, but it’s difficult to say. For tenants, doing some due diligence, checking to see if the property is licensed, because that’s on our website, checking to see if there’s open violations on a property, which there shouldn’t be if it’s properly licensed, but sometimes if it’s in between years, those kinds of things are key. And then before you put any money down, doing a walk-through the property. But it’s difficult, because people are in a tough spot where they’re just trying to find a place that they can afford and sometimes it’s difficult to find that," Hessler said.
The cause of last week’s fire is still under investigation.
