Camp House Blight Critiqued, Revival Promised

Walter Camp will rise from the dead.

Ocean Management’s Shmuel Aizenberg made that promise Friday to build 13 new apartments at the Walter Camp House, the fire-ravaged former home of the father of American football.

Meanwhile, city officials gathered outside the shell of that home Friday to celebrate a new law that will let them file faster, bigger fines against Aizenberg’s company if, instead of finally rebuilding the house after five years of inaction, he continues to let it remain a blighted eyesore.

Mayor Justin Elicker, Livable City Initiative (LCI) Executive Director Liam Brennan, a dozen uniformed LCI inspectors and supervisors, and a handful of Dwight neighbors held a press conference Friday outdoors in the shadow of the long-blighted property at 1303 Chapel St. 

They gathered in Day Street Park, just a few feet from the fenced-off, overgrown lot that holds a shell of the historic three-story house that Camp used to live in.

An affiliate of Ocean – one of the city’s largest private landlord-property management-real estate investment companies — has owned that property since 2019. It has long planned on converting it into new apartments. The building has sat empty and decaying ever since, as exacerbated by a December 2019 fire that the fire department determined to be caused by arson.

The primary purpose of Friday morning’s event was the celebration and signing into law of a new Elicker administration-proposed, Board of Alders-approved bill that increases fines for landlords who violate the city’s blight code from $100 per day to as high as $1,000 per day. As Brennan explained, blight can be broken windows, crumbling foundations, overgrown lots, structures left to decay and decay, and other examples of the property deterioration that drags down a neighborhood.

The newly signed bill also allows LCI to alert derelict landlords of blight code violations via first-class mail, instead of by certified mail – a provision that Brennan and Elicker heralded as preventing bad actors from dodging city enforcement by refusing to sign for violation notices sent by LCI.

“Our goal is not to fine people,” Elicker said on Friday. ​“We’re interested in compliance.” But there are ​“some landlords that just do not take care of their properties.” That’s not fair to their neighbors. That’s not fair to the city. And that’s what these newly enhanced fines and other anti-blight enforcement mechanisms are designed to help address.

Elicker, Brennan, and Dwight neighbors Dottie Green pointed to the Camp house behind them as Exhibit A of the type of persistently blighted property that harms a community when left to rot by an absentee landlord.

Tracy Claxton, a 20-year vet of LCI and the agency’s neighborhood specialist for Dwight and West River, walked around 1303 Chapel after the press conference — taking notes on overgrown vegetation, graffiti, a chainlink fence falling into the sidewalk, piles of plywood, rubbish and debris, and parts of the damaged building that are open to trespass.

All count as blight, she and Brennan said, and all will lead LCI to send a new notice of violation to the landlord. If the landlord doesn’t address the blight within 10 days of getting the violation notice, then the city could issue a civil citation — which would carry the $1,000 per day fine. (The newly signed law allows the city to find landlords who violate the blight code $150 per day for occupied properties, $250 per day for unoccupied properties, and the state-allowed maximum for properties with three or more violations. The state-allowed maximum is currently $1,000 per day.)

“This is an eyesore,” Green said about 1303 Chapel. She described it as an example of a landlord viewing a neighborhood as a ​“feeding ground” as opposed to a place where real people live and work. She urged the landlord do donate the blighted, vacant property to the Greater Dwight Development Corporation so that a responsible neighborhood actor could bring it back to life.

Reached for comment Friday after the press conference and bill signing, Aizenberg said he is on the cusp of reviving the long-vacant property.

“We just started this week. I’m surprised the city didn’t know,” he said.

Aizenberg sent the Independent a copy of a building permit his company received on Aug. 1 for Sams Contracting LLC to do an estimated $50,000 in work at 1303 Chapel. That permit is for work needed to ​“structurally stabilize the existing 3‑story building.” 

Aizenberg said that this is the first phase of two phases of rehabilitation work planned for this property. The second phase will involve its renovation and conversion into 13 new apartments.

He added that construction work should begin on Monday. In total, he said, this full project — of creating 13 new apartments at this site — should take 10 months to complete. He also said the building will have ground-floor amenities like a gym and a laundry room.

“We have all the equity ready to put in the building and do a beautiful building,” he said.

Why has it taken so long to get to this point of renovating and rehabbing the Camp house?

“We had a fire back then” in 2019, Aizenberg said. ​“We had a claim with the insurance company. A few months ago, we settled everything. We are ready to continue.”

What does he make of the mayor holding a press conference and bill signing all about blighted properties right outside of a property he owns?

“He wants to get attention,” Aizenberg said about the mayor. ​“I think it’s better for him to take care about homelessness and squatters walking into apartments [instead]. No one is taking care of them.”

Aizneberg said that 1303 Chapel is one such property that has struggled with squatters setting up and causing trouble. Claxton noted during Friday’s press conference that people have broken into the property, slept there, and left belongings. That was one of the reasons why LCI views this property with such concern — and why it’s acting urgently to press the landlord to fix it up.

“My guys are running around the street taking care of every issue that we found, even this building,” Aizenberg said. He said his team repeatedly closes off and repairs the fence, only for squatters to break inn ​“again and again.”

He promised to send his team to 1303 Chapel on Friday ​“to make sure it’s all clean [and] to cut the grass.”

During Friday’s press conference, Brennan said that Aizenberg’s company has consistently not responded to violation notices and civil citations sent by LCI about 1303 Chapel. Brennan said that the property has been accruing $100 per day anti-blight fines since March 2024. He said that those currently add up to around $45,000. Thanks to the bill signed into law by the mayor on Friday, he said, LCI will send a new notice of violation to Aizenberg’s company about this property — and, depending on what happens next, may issue the landlord $1,000 per day fines until the property is actually brought into compliance with city law.