It would appear that Maria Calderon is still living the good life. Her MySpace page still showcases the 25-year-old swilling martinis at swanky bars, posing in a bra and panties while in the arms of friends, trotting the globe to visit pals in California and Rio. And of course there’s her purse-sized dog, Cisco. The biggest change on Calderon’s MySpace page since the Scene chronicled her incompetence as a landlord (“Slumlord Sophisticate,” April 5) was changing the name to match the headline of our story—a “joke” that probably offers little comfort to her tenants, who spent a good chunk of last winter without heat or water.
Jokes aside, there has been a development in Calderon’s life that could affect one of East Nashville’s most beloved institutions. Calderon and her mother, Elena Rivas, have bought the building that houses The Family Wash for a cool $413,900, according to the Davidson County Property Assessor.
The Wash, which serves up the best shepherd’s pie in town with a side of local music seven nights a week, is now the epicenter of a neighborhood just northeast of Five Points that has blossomed in recent years. Jamie Rubin, who helped found the business and is now its sole owner, is pleasantly surprised by its success as a restaurant and says he isn’t worried about his relationship with the property’s new owners. “I have a lease for six more years, so I’m not expecting anything to change,” Rubin says.
Perhaps, but the same can’t be said of other properties that Calderon and her mother have purchased. Though neither mother nor daughter returned calls for comment on this story, in our last conversation with Calderon she said that she envisioned a revitalized area around the properties that she and her mother owned. “We just want to bring [the neighborhood] up and make our buildings and these businesses pretty.”
Unfortunately for some of the would-be real estate moguls’ tenants, Calderon and Rivas’s reach may exceed their competence as landlords.
In the past year, Calderon (who lives at least some of the time in Nashville) and her mother (who lives outside of San Francisco) have acquired properties on each of the four corners of the intersection at Greenwood Avenue and Porter Road. These include The Family Wash, a convenience store, a small building at 1115 Porter Road with space for at least three businesses, and a two-story house at 2037 Greenwood which is divided into rental apartments. All told, the pair have sunk over $1.2 million into the East Nashville corner since June of 2006, according to the property assessor. This is in addition to two other properties that they own in the Nashville area.
As chronicled here, the tenants of 2037 Greenwood endured a frigid and water-deprived fall and winter because they say that Calderon and her mother failed to make necessary repairs to the building. County housing inspectors agreed and slapped the owners with a civil warrant to appear in court and fix the heat.
While the 2037 Greenwood tenants thawed out and tried to wrangle settlement money out of Calderon and her mother, the problems were just starting for Kelly McCartney, president of Circle Back Music.
Last May, McCartney was looking for a space from which to launch a record label that she’d been planning for years. She saw an ad for the space at 1115 Porter Road, located in the same building as the then-unopened Niko’s Bar.
The space “had been a machine shop,” McCartney says. “There were oil stains on the floor and grease on the walls. It was, you know, a dump.” McCartney says that Calderon told her that for every dollar that Circle Back spent repairing the place, they would get a dollar off the rent.
In theory, McCartney says, “it sounded fair.” In practice, McCartney says that the deal quickly soured.
First of all, McCartney says that Calderon told her that she wasn’t the property owner. “I asked her point blank several times, ‘Who are the owners?’ and she’d just say, ‘Oh, it’s a group of investors…. I’m really a musician, and I’m just managing the property for them.’ ”
In fact, Calderon’s name was on the property title.
Regardless, when McCartney submitted receipts for repairs she’d already made to the office space, she says that Calderon would say that the owners wouldn’t pay for those changes. “She’d come back and say, ‘No, they aren’t going to credit that,’ ” McCartney says.
Not much later, an inspection revealed the property had black mold, whose toxicity can cause permanent lung and respiratory damage. McCartney and her entire staff had to vacate the premises while a remediation team cleaned up the place. Unfortunately, according to McCartney, while cleaning out the mold, the workmen destroyed thousands of dollars of repairs that she’d paid for.
Further inspection found that the roof was also damaged and that leaks would cause even more mold to grow. At around that time, one of her employees also spotted a new online ad for the very space that Circle Back was occupying. “They tried to rent it out from under us,” McCartney says.
Circle Back has since fled 1115 Porter Road for less hazardous environs, and McCartney’s now trying to recoup over $20,000 that she says Calderon and her mother cost her in “renovations, lost payroll wages.”
To that end, McCartney’s hired a lawyer and threatened to take the mother-daughter team to court if they don’t help defer some of the costs she’s incurred. As for Calderon, she says, “I don’t trust [her]. I think she doesn’t know what she’s doing, and I think she’s a liar.”
