Tenants in Miami’s last rooming house face eviction as landlord fights with city
Charles Onaje pays $550 a month for one small room in downtown Miami.
The strikingly low rent affords him a space in a 100-year-old rooming house at 532 N. Miami Ave., a tired, creaky structure dwarfed by the towers sprouting nearby. The cost barely fits in a budget sustained by monthly $656 Social Security checks and government assistance for groceries. Onaje also lives close to PortMiami, where the 77-year-old former Carnival Cruise Line employee hopes to seek part-time work with the company again once the COVID-19 pandemic ends.
“I’m surviving,” said Onaje as he leaned against the wood-paneled wall inside the building’s stairwell, his face covered by a mask he fashioned from a necktie and handkerchief. “I can put a roof over my head.”
That roof could cave under the weight of code compliance problems dogging landlord Ron Bazak, who insists City Hall is uncooperative in resolving a thorny permitting issue. Onaje and 17 other tenants live in a rooming house, an arrangement where people can rent individual rooms and share showers.
Bazak, 60, cannot get a permit that would keep his 18 tenants in the second story of the building as they live now because rooming houses were outlawed when the city adopted the Miami 21 zoning code in 2009. Bazak’s building, with a green carpeted staircase, chipped metal handrails and through-the-wall air-conditioning units, has 20 rooms upstairs and empty ground-floor retail space. Once called the Arena Hotel, the building had been grandfathered under a special permit until 2014.
The only path to compliance would start with evicting the tenants, though city officials won’t respond to direct questions on the matter.
Miami administrators declined requests for an interview for this story. In an email to the Herald, a city spokesman offered a statement that listed multiple issues with Bazak’s property dating back years — a response the landlord said casts him as a scofflaw who failed to renew his permit when he had a chance to preserve the exception for his rooming house. Since the code enforcement board voted in February to fine Bazak $250 a day for operating an illegal rooming house, the city has issued about $79,000 in fines. Officials cited separate permitting issues and a string of unrelated littering tickets that Bazak says he believes are meant to make him look bad.
“The property is in violation of multiple aspects of the city code,” reads a written statement from the city administration.
Caught in the middle of a convoluted argument over missed deadlines are rent-paying tenants, some who have lived there for more than 20 years, who just want a cheap and convenient place to live in a notoriously unaffordable city. The struggle to find affordable housing and the risk of experiencing homelessness in the pandemic amplify the anxiety.
“This is an affordable place to live. It’s a clean place. It’s a secure place, and it’s very centrally located,” said John Crawford, 73. He’s lived in the building for 10 years, and he’s waiting to get vaccinated so he can return to work in construction.
“I don’t understand why the city of Miami isn’t helping the landlord out, why they’re giving him a hard time,” he said. “They should be encouraging him to stay here because this is affordable housing.”
Dispute with City Hall
In a statement, Miami administrators said Bazak has not taken steps to comply with the code after multiple department directors walked him through the necessary steps during a September Zoom video conference.
“Mr. Bazak has been running a rooming house without any city permits or licenses since 2014, collecting rent from his tenants throughout that time period,” the statement reads. “His property was a rooming house, however, he allowed the certificate of use to lapse, and under Miami 21, rooming houses are not allowed in the city of Miami. Therefore, he would have to bring the property up to current code.”
Bazak remembers the call differently. He described a circular debate where city officials said the building needed to be empty to comply, yet they refused to acknowledge that compliance would mean evicting tenants. In response to a Herald inquiry, the administration did not answer a key question: Is there a way for this property to come into compliance without evicting 18 tenants who are paying their rents?
“I don’t want to evict them, but the city don’t give me any other option,” he said.
Another complication: Congress extended the federal eviction moratorium imposed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention through Jan. 31. The law prohibiting landlords from kicking tenants out has been in place through the pandemic, preventing Bazak from vacating the Arena Hotel right now even if he wanted to. Meanwhile, the fines pile up each day.
Bazak has owned the property for about 16 years. Public records show the landlord does have some problems. Some of the issues might stem from miscommunication with the city, bureaucratic inefficiency, Bazak’s missing deadlines or a mixture of the three.
The landlord blames the city for not notifying him when his rooming house permit was about to expire years ago. The city could not produce any notice when Bazak asked, but Bazak could not produce any emails with the city when the Herald asked him what he did to make sure his old building had proper city approvals. He said he spoke years ago with a city official over the phone about renewing his permit.
“They said, ‘We’ll call you back,’ ” Bazak said. “They never did.”
There are other disputes, such as whether he’s been properly billed for a 40/50 year recertification he claims to have completely closed out in 2014. He provided the Herald inspection documents and a check showing he paid the recertification fee, but the city says he still owes the city another $600 in fees to close the case.
Tenants want to stay
Downtown Miami, Overtown and South Beach used to have several rooming houses — it’s how many Art Deco buildings functioned. Most have closed since the 1980s, and they were phased out of Miami’s zoning code over the years. One in Overtown, the Ward Rooming House, has been adapted into a gallery.
In the Arena Hotel’s weary halls, with cracked floor tiles, missing ceiling panels and tight living quarters, some tenants simply want a resolution that doesn’t put them out on the street.
“I’d really prefer to stay here,” said Terry Baldwin, a 69-year-old Navy veteran who’s lived in the Arena Hotel for about 20 years. Baldwin, who is diabetic and suffered from drop foot when he was younger, has used a wheelchair since his right leg was partially amputated.
“It’s difficult, right at the moment, for sure, to find anyplace else to live,” he said.
Baldwin said at the Miami Veterans’ Affairs Hospital he was initially advised not to move into the room because the building has no elevator — the rooms are all on the second story, above mostly vacant storefronts. He was eventually allowed to move into a room that has a half-bathroom, but he doesn’t have an easy way to exit the building.
“I would have to scoot up and down the stairs sitting down,” he said.
Still, Baldwin said he’s satisfied with his living arrangement because he only leaves for medical appointments.
Tenants have organized to demand city action before. Baldwin and Crawford both signed a 2011 petition to the city pleading with officials to help the people experiencing homelessness who were sleeping under the building’s wide overhang.
“For several recent months roughly 20 to 30 homeless citizens have been loitering and sleeping on the sidewalk along the hotel front. They have acquired the habit of urinating and defecating beside the hotel wall, on the nearby ground and on the sidewalk,” wrote Baldwin in July 2011 on a petition that had 19 signatures from his neighbors. The residents asked the city for more police oversight and outreach to assist those living on the street.
“The stench and matter is unbearable and looms inside the hotel,” Baldwin wrote.
People are no longer sleeping in front of the building, so tenants are not stepping over feces to walk upstairs to their rooms. Bazak said the situation made it hard for him to rent out the ground floor retail spaces for years. During that time, police were not permitted to harass the unhoused under legal protections that existed for two decades. Those protections were recently dissolved in federal court.
The situation at the Arena Hotel is playing out in a tough landscape for low-wage renters. Miami has an affordable housing problem that is now playing out in the pandemic. Studio apartments in the area surrounding Bazak’s building are renting for about three times what Bazak’s tenants pay, according to online listings.
Even though downtown Miami’s population continues to grow, prices are increasingly out of reach for locals. Coupled with the uncertainty around when the eviction moratorium will end, the future of the building’s residents is unclear. If Crawford lost his small room in the Arena Hotel, he’s not sure where he’d go.
“Really, I don’t know. I haven’t started looking for another place, and I don’t intend to until I have to vacate the building.”
This story was originally published January 12, 2021 at 12:43 PM.
