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Patty Hendrickson, a resident living near Northeast 133rd Avenue and Prescott Street, showed up at the Argay Neighborhood Association’s July meeting and gave the community a snapshot of itself. It wasn’t pretty.
Hendrickson told the Memo that she and her husband moved into the area two years ago from Spokane; he was studying at the nearby Western States Chiropractic College, and the houses looked “cute and well kept up” to the Hendricksons. Since then, she has seen the neighborhood, and especially the behavior of tenants at the Melrose and Columbia Station apartment complexes deteriorate. Litter lands on the street and blows into homeowners’ yards, she said. She once saw an apartment manager use a leaf blower to blow a pile of garbage from the complex parking lot into the street beyond. The garbage includes soiled diapers, condoms and syringes. Hendrickson said she tries to remove the debris from her own property and the street in front, but this fills two shopping bags daily and, in the last weeks of pregnancy, bending is difficult. Earlier this year the city repaired a local street and in the process cut off access to it; three hours after they left, Hendrickson said, the street “looked like a landfill.”
Noise is also an issue. Recorded music, played both in the apartments, in cars and on the streets, is played nightly at loud volumes after 10 p.m. “Someone will play the music they like to hear, and someone else will play something else louder to drown it out,” Hendrickson said. There is also public drinking and the behavior that accompanies it, she said.
She asked one man why he was doing car repair in the street. He replied, “They won’t let me do this in the apartment parking lot.”
“I can sympathize with that,” Hendrickson said. “I wouldn’t want to pay someone $300 to do a repair if I had the skills to do it myself. But they need a place to do these things somewhere other than on the street, depositing beer cans in our yards.”
Hendrickson said local apartment managers have refused to take responsibility for their tenants’ behavior. She has complained to public officials, to no avail. A phone call to Mayor Tom Potter’s office was never returned, she said.
In July Hendrickson made a presentation to the Argay Neighborhood Association, complete with PowerPoint and slides. For the most part, she said, it was well received. An exception was Randy Slipher, owner of K.C.’s Mini-Market & Deli and the land on which the El Carreton restaurant sits. (See related article this issue.) “He told me I had to take this up with the tenants, not the owners,” Hendrickson said. “He used very vulgar language and was really hostile. He said, ‘Tough shit.’ Other people there were really taken aback.”
She added, “I will lose money when I sell my house, but there’s no way I can raise a child in this neighborhood where it’s not safe to let him play in his own yard, let alone the street.”
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