FAYETTEVILLE — It was a Saturday afternoon during one of the hottest and driest summers on record, and Mary Drane and her husband Matt were asleep.
Mary Drane was the first to hear the knocking on their Betty Jo Drive apartment’s back door and taps on the windows, as if someone was throwing pebbles at them. When she opened the door, flames rushed inward.
She slammed it shut and hurried to grab her children with her husband.
By the time the family got outside, smoke was billowing from the four-unit building. When firefighters arrived, the rear of the building was, as Matt Drane put it, “torched,” because a neighbor’s smoldering cigarette had ignited a bucket of cigarette butts.
The fire, which displaced eight people, happened July 21, 2012. A couple of months later, the Dranes returned to the street, moving into a unit a couple of buildings up the road. One of their former neighbors moved across the street. They recovered, more or less.
More than a year and a half later, however, the wrecked building at 546 Betty Jo Drive is still there, because of a quirk in city building codes and a depleted housing market, a city official and the owner said.
The doors and windows are gone. The rear walls are little more than charred studs, while jagged holes have been punched in the front. The blue threads of an old shredded tarp stretch like cobwebs across holes in the roof.
At A Glance
Timeline
July 21, 2012: Fire ignites on rear deck of 546 Betty Jo Drive.
Oct. 19, 2012: Building sold to Stroud Investment Properties.
March: City inspects building, notes renovation progress.
November: City again inspects building, notes no work being done at the time.
Feb. 1: City says building must be stripped to its wood and brick frame, or condemnation process begins.
Source: Staff Report
“It makes you relive it all over again,” Mary Drane said last weekend, adding she thought it might be dangerous for kids who sometimes venture inside. “I don’t even go that way anymore.”
The two blocks of Betty Jo, near the intersection of Interstate 540 and Wedington Drive, are home to a diverse group of families. On mild weekends groups of children play with rubber balls or coast on bikes or scooters down the sidewalks. The burned building on the southern end is something of a neighborhood mystery, residents said.
“How has the city let this stand like this?” Marsha Beard, who owns the apartment building next door, said in her cramped office. “Usually the building codes are just so strict around here. It’s such an eyesore.”
Beard said her mother owned the building at the time of the fire and sold the lot a couple of months later. It went to Stroud Investment Properties for $20,000, or less than the value of the land it’s on, according to Washington County property records. Anita Stroud, the owner and real estate agent in Springdale, said she plans to rebuild.
“It’s a good spot, I think, and it needs to be renovated so the neighborhood will be in better shape,” she said by phone. “It’s just been delayed.”
Her son, Joel Stroud, is a general contractor and has been looking for the necessary financing. He said banks are unwilling to back the reconstruction, particularly because housing values in the area plummeted during the past several years. Even before the fire, the building was valued at less than 10 percent of its 1999 value, according to property records. Across the street from the burned building, another four-plex is boarded up.
“We’re talking to a couple different investors to get some money to get it fixed up,” Joel Stroud said. “I know it’s in disarray now, but it was just completely filled with trash. We ourselves spent about $10,000 just cleaning up the property.”
The Strouds are within the limits of the demolition and renovation permits they got from the city, said Jeremy Pate, city Development Services director.
The rules changed since those permits were issued, he said. New rules aren’t in play in this situation. Renovation or demolition is now restricted to 90 days with inspections every two weeks, Pate said.
Under the permits, if the Betty Jo building isn’t cleared down to its wood and brick frame by Saturday, or three months after the city’s last inspection, the city will begin to condemn and tear down the building, Pate said. The property is nearly in that condition, but Joel Stroud said Friday he hadn’t been informed of the deadline.
“Honestly, for permits now, we substantially decreased the time frame because of issues just like this,” Pate said. “A structure that is not safe should not be sitting around for a year and a half.”
If the financing falls into place, Joel Stroud said the full renovation would follow quickly.
“It’ll actually be pretty easy to get back together,” he said. “I’m expecting to have it done before year’s end.”