Behind the Door: A Series on Condemned Houses in the Wheaton Area

When Jackie Familia and her husband moved into her new house, they found a cracked, rusted pipe underneath the family-room floor. It was the main sewage line from the house, so any time someone flushed a toilet, raw sewage would bubble up from underneath the floorboards.

Familia was shocked, but not necessarily surprised. She and her husband had bought a house that was previously condemned by Montgomery County and had gone into foreclosure.

Condemnation — a word that brings to mind scary haunted house tours and broken windows — can actually mean a variety of things are wrong with a house in Montgomery County.

If a fire destroys a key portion of a house, making it structurally unsafe, the fire department works with the Department of Housing and Community Affairs to condemn the house and prepare for either renovating or razing the house.

But a fire is not the only reason a house can be condemned. Daniel McHugh, manager of code enforcement at DHCA, says unsafe levels of mold, broken windows, dangerous items on the outside of the property (such as Familia’s open pool), nonfunctioning utilities or flooding. Multiple citations of the housing code are usually involved.

The threshold that DHCA uses for condemning a house is that it must be deemed “unsafe for human habitation,” and the decision lies with DHCA’s inspectors.

“They condemn it,” McHugh said. “If they have questions, they bring it to their supervisor.”

McHugh estimates that 90 percent to 95 percent of citations are a result of complaints, which can be made anonymously to the department.

That doesn’t sit well with Barbara Syska, an octogenarian who lived in her condemned house for several months and believes she was bullied into allowing the inspector into her home, after an anonymous complaint was made.

Syska has been in and out of court with DHCA for the past several years, on numerous citations for her house on Fairoak Drive in Kemp Mill, including the problems that lead to its condemnation.

Once a house is condemned, homeowners have 30 days to acknowledge the citation and to contact DHCA to explain how they will fix the repairs.

“If we don’t hear anything from the owners, and we don’t have a plan together,” Mc Hugh said, “we issue a civil citation. It starts the court process.”

Getting into court takes several months. A guilty verdict means the homeowner must fix the problems cited for the condemnation. If the repairs are not made, the county can demolish the house and charge the owner.

McHugh says they’ve not had to demolish a house in the past several years but that homeowners themselves have done so preemptively. Currently, seven condemnation cases are going through the county’s district courts.

But the recent increase in foreclosures has made DHCA’s job harder. Foreclosure freezes the condemnation process, leaving little that DHCA can do legally with a house owned by a bank.

“We really can’t cite the owner since they’re going through the foreclosure,” McHugh said.

Abandoned houses that will become part of a larger development are also allowed to stand. The three houses across from the mall parking lot on University Boulevard will become part of a BB&T bank project, and the houses stay as the project works its way through the Planning Board.

“We work with the owners of the property to maintain it and cut the grass,” McHugh said. “They’re very responsive.”

What goes on beyond a door where a condemned sign is plastered is a much more personal event. Wheaton Patch has looked at several houses condemned in the past few years in Wheaton, Glenmont and Kemp Mill and found out how the house came to be condemned and what the future holds for the property and the neighborhood.

In our first story, we look at a house in Kemp Mill whose elderly resident is determined to stay, regardless of the condition of the house, and how the court system works for a house in limbo.

For the entire Behind the Door series, .