OGDEN — For some Ogden renters, stable housing remains elusive, particularly when their complaints about substandard conditions reap eviction notices rather than remedies.

Tenants on both sides of the 112-year-old duplex at 742-744 28th St. received three-day “pay or vacate” eviction notices this month, and under Utah law, withholding payment of rent provides instant grounds for eviction — rather than the leverage renters hope to gain.

Kimm and Robert Perez teetered on the brink of homelessness late last week. Their landlord, Paradigm Real Estate Ogden LLC, launched eviction proceedings against them in Ogden’s 2nd District Court on Aug. 12. By Aug. 20, the court had issued a $2,886 judgment against the couple that included the landlord’s attorney fees, plus treble damages on top of the $637 they owed in unpaid rent.

Treble damages applies to cases where the plaintiff seeks a monetary judgement. In such cases, the judge must assign triple the rent for each day the tenant occupies the unit after the three-day “pay or vacate” period has expired. Triple charges for damage caused by the tenant can also be assessed.

“We haven’t paid for two months (July and August), because the landlord won’t fix anything,” Kimm Perez said Thursday. “We’re supposed to be out today, but we have nowhere to go, no storage unit, nothing. My husband is not well, he’s had five seizures since April, we can’t drive anymore.”

The one-bedroom unit in which they lived for the past year and a half has had its share of deficiencies, but none were initially obvious.

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“We’ve been without hot water since June. Supposedly, it’s a new hot water heater, but there’s something wrong with the ignitor switch. There’s a hole in the kitchen roof that caved in a year ago. He sent somebody out to fix it, and all they did was put a piece of wood up there, so every time it pours rain, I have to get pots out,” Kimm said. “A year ago in July, I opened our bedroom window because it was so hot. And the window won’t come down. If you try and force it, the whole frame is going to come right out. We can’t close it.”

They weathered the winter by putting cardboard and plastic over the opening, “But it was so cold some nights, we had to sleep in the front room,” Kimm said.

This May, their electricity got shut off. Kimm called the power company and discovered the property owner, Glen Knight, had the electricity in his name.

“They came back out and turned it on, but the light had gone out on the hot water heater,” Kimm said, explaining she’d asked Paradigm’s Bill Caldwell for two weeks to do something about it and were told they’d have to handle it themselves or pay a plumber $35 to do it.

Next door in 744, Merryellyn Grundie shared a similar story about the two-bedroom apartment she has shared with Jennifer Drain since March 2015. Both are on disability and survive month-to-month on minimal Social Security checks.

“It took almost four months to get a stove. The burners wouldn’t light,” Grundie said. “A ceiling tile hit me in the head in the bedroom, and I’ve had neck problems since.”

They also spent a couple of recent months without electricity, and both sides of the duplex have battled poachers who enter the unsecured basement area to crash and do drugs.

“He never boarded it off, so he says to call the cops” when those incidents occur, Grundie said. “We called the cops at least 100 times last year, and we got to the point where we said, Screw this.'”

Caldwell declined to comment for this story.

Who wins, who loses

Paradigm manages several properties in the Ogden area, and over the past 13 months has filed nine eviction cases in Ogden’s District Court, a paltry number compared to Diamond J Management LLC’s 38 filed since August 2015. 

Of Paradigm’s nine cases, five resulted in sizable judgments against tenants: $2,154, $4,133, $7,818, $3,207 and $2,886 in the Perez’s case. Each of those judgments included a combination of overdue rent, late fees, treble damages, attorney fees, court filing and services fees. In none of those five cases did defendants have legal representation.

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Orem-based attorney Jeremy Shorts handles eviction cases along the Wasatch Front, representing landlords for the most part, including Paradigm. Reached Friday, Shorts said that evictions occur in a wide variety of circumstances, but the bulk are for nonpayment of rent. 

“I realize that nobody wants to hire me, and some wait a month or two to give tenants a chance to work things out . . .  We rarely get people who are a few days late on the rent. Landlords will generally work with their tenants,” Shorts said. However, tenants who fail to respond leave him little choice. “If the landlord has asked, ‘what’s your plan?’ and there’s no response, it limits our ability on the practical side.”

Shorts said his policy is to ask tenants to arrive at court a half-hour early to “see if we can get something resolved” prior to appearing before the judge. 

“In a settlement, we can work through things if both sides are agreeable. But in a judgment, the judge has to award treble damages,” Shorts said. Even with a judge’s ruling, some landlords allow tenants more time to vacate the premises if needed, Shorts added.

But Martin Blaustein, managing attorney for Utah Legal Services, believes Utah’s eviction statutes are heavily stacked against the tenant. 

“The law does favor the landlord. It was created by landlords for landlord protection,” Blaustein said, noting a pervasive attitude in the property-rights-loving Beehive State that tenants are basically transients with no long-term interest in the homes they temporarily occupy.

“Utah has a fraternity of landlords. With a bad reference, you never get into another property, especially if something shows up on your criminal background check,” Blaustein said. “Then it leads to renting dumps that shouldn’t be rented.”

Blaustein, who grew up in Brooklyn, New York, where he said renters have more protections, decried the lack of statewide standards that would ensure that apartment units are fit for human habitation.

“There are no inspections to make sure they’re rentable,” Blaustein said. “It’s a nonregulated industry and 30 percent of the population rents.”

Blaustein cited data that showed that only 4 percent of tenants had legal representation in eviction cases last year. But roughly 10 potential clients flow through the doors of his Ogden office every day.

If he could, Blaustein said he would change Utah’s laws regarding treble damages, three-day pay-or-vacate notices and 15-day no-cause notices that permit both landlords and tenants to terminate a month-to-month unsubsidized lease for no reason.

Retaliation for speaking up?

As noted on the www.utahlegalservices.org, “a month-to-month tenant may get a ‘no-cause’ eviction after calling the health department or the building inspector to complain about conditions in the rental unit. Unless the landlord admits that the eviction is retaliatory, it is usually impossible to prove retaliation.”

The nonprofit Utah Legal Services also notes the damage that evictions heap on tenants who are likely already struggling to stay afloat. For starters, they leave a black mark on a person’s credit history, making it difficult to find another decent place to rent. And if a monetary judgment is entered, the landlord can force that person to appear in court and answer questions regarding their finances.

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“If you are mailed a notice to appear in court on a ‘supplemental proceeding,’ you must go. Otherwise, a warrant for your arrest may be issued. Much of what you have will be exempt from execution. But your wages can be garnished. And even if you have nothing that the landlord can take to satisfy the judgment, you must still appear in court when ordered,” according to the site.

Diamond J Management LLC owns hundreds of rental units in the Ogden area. Of the 38 eviction cases it filed since August 2015, eight involved treble damages, resulting in judgments ranging from $1,549 to $2,538.

An ongoing case filed in late February involved a $2,104 judgment against Kenneth Decius, a former tenant of the Park Avenue Apartments at 2433 Adams Avenue. Diamond J sought a $2,104 judgment against Decius.

Decius vacated the studio apartment in early March and joined the ranks of Ogden’s homeless. He also filed an answer and counterclaim, agreeing to pay all rent, legal and late fees but objecting to the assigned treble damages as unfair.

“I pray the court considers that I am very low income, and after being tripled, the amount due would debilitate my ability to become financially stable again and put undue burden on community resources,” Decius said in his written answer to the court. Decius also described how Diamond J’s towing company illegally hauled his vehicle away in mid-January.

“I had been parking in the same spot for two years, with the plaintiff’s parking sticker visible, and my vehicle’s information on record in Diamond J Management’s database,” Decius wrote. A 24-hour notice had been posted sometime on Jan. 17, and when Decius took out the trash on Jan. 18, he saw it, ran back in to get his keys, and by the time he’d returned, his car was gone. 

“Brett’s Towing company claims they’re not liable because the tow was called in by an employee of the plaintiff. This caused me a loss of $1,793, the Kelly Blue Book value of the vehicle, as I could not afford to get it out of impound,” Decius wrote in his counterclaim seeking payment of $1,600, the least he believed he could have gained from selling the vehicle. 

By phone Monday, Decius said that he and Diamond J’s attorney K. Bradley Carr had previously arrived at a verbal agreement that evidently evaporated.

“I dropped my counterclaim in agreeing that they would drop the case. But they didn’t,” Decius said. “I moved out and applied for another apartment, and they said I had an eviction on my record and wouldn’t rent to me.” 

Diamond J did not return a call seeking comment.

Since March, the 26-year-old Decius has been living at the Lantern House, Ogden’s homeless shelter, and said he’s recently landed a job as a groundskeeper. He hopes to move into his own apartment in early September.

Contact reporter Cathy McKitrick at 801-625-4214 or cmckitrick@standard.net. Follow her on Twitter at @catmck.