HOUSTON – Monique Jones has lived at her northeast Houston home most of her life. She grew up here and returned to take care of her 82-year-old father. In the last few months, she relocated him to another family member’s home for his safety. The issue – rats.
Jones said rats are making their way into their home because of the abandoned home next door.
The home has an overgrown lawn, boarded-up windows, and an old violation notice sign near the front door.
“It’s embarrassing to say that you have rats running through,” Jones said. “It’s embarrassing to say but it has to be said. It needs to be known. Something needs to be done.”
Jones said she’s made several attempts to reach city officials and ask them to address the issue. It reached a boiling point when her bedridden father screamed for her at the sight of rats.
“He’s screaming my name just, ‘Monique! Monique! Monique!’ Hearing his voice like something was scaring him. It made me jump and all I kept saying is ‘lord I hope my daddy didn’t fall out the bed,’ that was my main concern.” When I get back in the area that he’s in I’m like daddy’ what’s wrong,” Jones recalls. “‘Monique, its rats crawling up the walls,’ her dad said. ‘I said, ‘Oh my God!’ That was my concern. That was my other concern because he’s not been able to move and seeing him yell my name like that, it just startled me because I didn’t know if they were biting him. I didn’t know. I didn’t know what was going on for him to scream like that. It hurt me.”
This month makes a year since Jones’ mother died in a fatal car crash. As she spent the year grieving, she’s taken on one of her mother’s battles – getting the next-door home cleared.
“It’s hurtful,” she said. “I can hear my mom’s voice all the time, hear her saying, calling me, ‘Call somebody about that house! Momma, I can’t do nothing. But she’s gone now. It’s not so much her, it’s my dad.”
Jones lives in council district B represented by Council Member Tarsha Jackson. KPRC 2′s Rilwan Balogun reached out to their office trying to assist Jones.
The Director of Constituent Service, PJ Jones, was blunt.
“This is slumlord behavior,” PJ Jones said of the nuisance property owner, Richard L. Pfirman. “He owns approximately 202 homes across the Houston area.”
Pfirman was the center of KPRC 2 Investigates’ months-long report in 2018.
In 2016, Richard L. Pfirman agreed to keep 51 of his 340 Harris County properties, in compliance with city code in regards to appearance and safe building standards.
“I am familiar with Mr. Pfirman’s reputation with 200-300 properties with violations,” said TaKasha Francis, then-director of Houston’s Department of Neighborhoods told Joel Eisenbaum in 2018.
KPRC 2′s Balogun reached out to the Department of Neighborhoods. They told him their inspectors were looking into the matter.
“This is so unfortunate that this guy, this owner, continues to do this,” said PJ Jones with Council member Jackson’s office. “It’s so unfortunate.”
PJ Jones said their office is willing to come out and cut the yard, free of charge, to assist Monique Jones.
“We will do anything to make the neighborhood safe,” he said.
A spokesperson for the Department of Neighborhoods said the city tried getting involved last year during an October meeting. They were seeking the rights to the property or to having Pfirman demolish it. However, Pfirman nor his attorneys showed up. In the meantime, the code enforcement officers will visit the home and clean the overgrown grass.
DEPARTMENT OF NEIGHBORHOODS STATEMENT:
“The Department of Neighborhoods holds private property owners responsible for maintaining their property under state law and city codes. We are working an open case for 7947 Locksley Road and held a hearing in October 2023 to seek the right to secure or demolish the building. The property owner and his legal representative failed to appear at the hearing when notified. We will continue to work through the legal process in order to bring this property in compliance and are scheduled to make a determination to secure or demolish the property within the next 30 days.
In the meantime, we will send a code enforcement officer out to respond to the concern about overgrown grass. We encourage all residents to report code violations like overgrown grass and dangerous, vacant buildings to 3-1-1. Their request will be referred to all appropriate departments and requests will be processed in the order received.”
Here’s how you can file a complaint with the city:
- You can call 311 and report it.
- Head to the Department of Neighborhood website, visit ‘Inspections and Public Services’ scroll down a bit, then click ‘neighborhood toolbox.’