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House of Horrors 2037 Greenwood Ave.
photos: ericengland.net
Maria Calderon’s MySpace page reflects a life of leisure, wine and song. Under “Interests,” she lists “floating through life,” “pimpizm,” “siestas” and “making love to Miami.” Her days seem to be filled with trips abroad. (“I’m Off! Obrigado Brazil” is the title of one of her blog posts.) Calderon’s photo gallery includes pictures of her and other fashionable twenty-somethings drinking and partying with abandon at swell locales.
Though she may be a socialite, Calderon, 25, is having a serious impact on a small corner of East Nashville—the corner of Greenwood and Porter, to be exact. She and her mother have acquired three properties there and are eyeing a fourth, the home of the venerable Family Wash, and are looking to transform this rough-around-the-edges area into something more.
“I fell in love with East Nashville a long time ago,” says Calderon, who has lived in Nashville for three years. “The ghetto was just kinda coming up, and all the broke musicians just came in there and started making it beautiful.” She says that East Nashville reminds her of San Francisco’s Mission District, where she grew up. “All the dot-commers moved in there, and now the place is full of million-dollar properties,” she says of her old neighborhood.
She sees a similar future for East Nashville. To that end, she bought the market at 1115 Porter Road and rented it to a group of Egyptian friends who have opened the Smoke Shop. They currently sell beer, chips, cigarettes, glass pipes, hookahs and digital scales.
Across the street from the Smoke Shop is the soon-to-be-opened Niko’s, a bar named after its owner, who now works at Red Door East. It shares a building with a now-empty space that Calderon hopes to turn into a restaurant. Her recent attempt to get that project off the ground failed when the restaurant application “fell through.”
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She and her mother are also trying to acquire the building that the Family Wash now inhabits but Calderon says that it will “take forever, probably” due to “details.”
Details are a big part of being a landlord, and recently, some of her tenants say, Calderon has overlooked some important ones.
Calderon and her mother bought the house on 2037 Greenwood Ave., across from the Family Wash, in September 2006. It’s a drafty old house with white clapboard siding and 12 rooms divided into four apartments of varying size. A creaky wooden staircase leads to the second-floor apartment of Mark Barrett and his girlfriend Wendy French. They love the place, and why not? High ceilings, crown molding, tall windows and plenty of space—including an extra room for Barrett’s music gear—all for just $505 a month. But when Calderon bought the property in September, trouble quickly followed.
First it was the water.
In the beginning of October, the residents began to lose water pressure. It got so bad that Val Sells and Curtis O’Marah, another couple who have since moved out of the building, had to wash their dishes in their bathtub.
The tenants wondered if all the construction going on downstairs, in an apartment that Calderon was rehabbing for herself, might have been responsible for the pressure drop. When the tenants investigated, they saw a jet tub being installed for their new landlord.
“While they’re working on it,” Barrett says of the jet tub installers, “the pipes explode in the basement…. We start losing all of our water—all of it.”
The tenants went without water for two weeks. Repeated phone calls to Calderon, when they were returned, brought promises but no water.
“We had to eat at restaurants because we couldn’t fix meals at home,” Barrett says. He contracted a nasty case of food poisoning, and couldn’t flush the toilet because it wasn’t working. The couple finally contacted an attorney, who called Calderon. After the call, the problem was fixed “within eight hours,” according to French.
Calderon admits that there were water problems but denies trying to install a jet tub for herself. “Once I figured out about the plumbing situation, I knew that was out.”
But there’s one complaint she doesn’t dispute—a lack of heat at 2037 Greenwood, an issue confirmed by county housing inspectors.
Calderon replaced the gas heat in the building with wastebasket-sized electric radiators and motel-style wall units that couldn’t heat such large rooms.
Shawn Hayes, who lives in a downstairs apartment, says that his electric bill increased sixfold from last year.
One month he owed Nashville Electric Service $267. “If that’s what it costs to get the whole house heated, I’d pay it,” Hayes says. “But that doesn’t even heat one room.”
The tenants say that they spent most of the winter huddled in their bedrooms, shivering under electric blankets. Eventually, they called the county housing inspector. A landlord is legally obligated to supply a heat source capable of keeping residential properties at least 65 degrees. When the inspector showed up in early January, the tenants say, it wasn’t even close. A civil warrant was issued for Calderon’s mother—whose name appears as a co-owner of the property—to appear in court and fix the heat problem.
Calderon is aware of the warrant and says that she is trying to fix the problems. While admitting that the project is more difficult than she bargained for, Calderon blames many of the structural problems on the previous owner, who was operating outside of codes.
“We ran out of money to try and build that place out,” she says. “It’s just not habitable. The guy who we bought it from was about to foreclose. He was going broke, and now we understand why. He just hid it from us real well.”
Regardless of the outcome, what is perhaps most telling is the hands-off approach that this would-be real estate mogul has taken with her investments.
Her tenants say that getting in touch with Calderon is impossible. When Shawn was shivering through last December he “tried to call her four times and got no response,” he says. When he did eventually get her on the phone, he says, she yelled at him and directed him to her mother, Elaine Rivas. When the Scene attempted to contact Rivas, her voice mailbox was full.
Late last month, after months of wrangling, letter writing and phone calls, Rivas and the tenants reached an agreement. Both Barrett and Hayes say that all of their demands were met, including reimbursement for both the stratospherically high utility bills and rent for the months when the apartments were less than livable. They also say that the mother-daughter team wants the tenants out of the building at the end of their leases so that they can either try and get 2037 Greenwood up to code, or sell the property and put this headache behind them.
Unfortunately, as of this writing, the tentants have received exactly zero dollars from their landlord, who has yet to put the agreement in writing. The tenants say this is typical of Calderon and her mother.
“She would always say, ‘I’ll get back to you,’ and she wouldn’t,” says Sells. “I wish I could run off to Brazil like her,” the miffed former tenant continues, “but I can’t afford to go anywhere because I owe NES so much money.”
All of which puts Calderon’s plans for East Nashville development into a less promising perspective.