Andreatta: Living next door to Ibero's crack house

My phone rang Monday morning. A frantic Jerry Ingram was on the other end.

“Didn’t I tell you somebody was gonna die next door?” he asked.

He’d been telling me for weeks, inviting me to sit in the backyard of his Hoeltzer Street home to observe the addicts shooting up in the yard of the abandoned house next door that neighbors call the “crack house.”

“It’s all day, every day,” Ingram would say. “I’m telling you, it’s like a treadmill and nobody does anything about it.”

He wanted someone held accountable, namely the house’s owner, Ibero-American Development Corp., the real estate arm of Ibero-American Action League, the nonprofit that has championed the progress of the city’s Latino population since 1968.

Now, 20 Hoeltzer St. was crawling with cops investigating a stabbing. The victim, 49-year-old Alexander Baez, had just been taken to the hospital, where he would die.  

“I told you somebody was gonna die,” Ingram reminded me.

Feeling humbled, I visited the neighborhood that afternoon. Hoeltzer Street is in the North Clinton Avenue corridor, ground zero of the region’s heroin epidemic.

At the house, police officers were milling about, doing cop-like things, writing in notepads, talking on phones, wrapping up.

Linda Alston was taking it all in from her backyard. She lives on the other side of the crack house in a home with a tidy garden. Over the fence, the ground was littered with hundreds of used syringes and the cylindrical orange tip caps that covered them when new. Trash, clothes, and countless items left behind by junkies were strewn about.

“I look out my bedroom window and see them with that rubber thing, wrapping it around themselves, shooting themselves in the arm, in the neck, in the foot, anywhere they can find a vein,” Alston said.

She’s lived in her home for 30 years and knows the neighborhood’s reputation as “Heroin Alley.” But she said the house next door wasn’t a problem until Ibero took ownership in January 2017 and removed the tenant, whose presence had deterred junkies.

Since then, Rochester Police Department records show, cops have responded to calls for service at the crack house 34 times. Alston figured she’s responsible for at least 20 of them.

“I just tell ‘em it’s Linda Alston again calling about that freakin’ house,” Alston said. “I know they get sick of me calling. But I tell ‘em, ‘I’m 69 years old and I can’t be living next to all these crackheads and all these people shooting up. It’s not safe.’”

Ibero bought the house at a tax foreclosure auction to complement its elaborate plan for a massive development project aimed at revitalizing the neighborhood.

The project, dubbed Pueblo Nuevo, or New Town, calls for revamping some 33 acres of mostly vacant lots with a mix of single- and multi-family houses. Its centerpiece is to be La Marketa, a retail renaissance in an expansive vacant parcel behind Hoeltzer Street.  

More:Ibero project could transform neglected North Clinton area in Rochester

The plan is very appealing to Ingram and Alston. But they wonder how Ibero can manage it if it can’t manage to keep a single house from becoming a shooting gallery.

“Why would you buy a property and not take care of it?” Alston asked. “They’re going around talking about how they want to build up the neighborhood and asking us if we approve. I don’t care who lives next door, but take care of the property, you know?”

Miguel Melendez, the special projects director at Ibero, said he empathized with neighbors and explained that the tenant was removed because the house was in disrepair.

“When you have a vacant house in the area of North Clinton Avenue, unfortunately it’s a target for this type of activity,” Melendez said. “We don’t make excuses about this. We understand the severity of the problem with this property and we’re going to continue to work with the city and others to address it.”

He said Ibero has asked police to arrest trespassers and has plans to build a sturdy fence to keep people out. He also cited the agency’s ongoing “Project Clean,” which aims to address the heroin epidemic.

More:Heroin: Rochester makes headway on Clinton Ave. hotspot

The strategies are commendable and optimistic, if not entirely realistic. No more than 20 minutes after the police left, a pair of addicts were at the crack house doing their thing.

The next morning, I returned to chat more with Ingram. An addict followed a few minutes later and shot up, just as we were peering over the fence. It was 11 a.m.

“This is how we live,” Ingram said. “Ibero’s brought a problem into our community.… These are the people we have to trust, who are going to bring all our new neighbors, but they can’t even take care of one little property.”

Ibero didn’t bring heroin to the neighborhood. But it invited a problem to 20 Hoeltzer St. when it bought the house, got rid of the tenant, and did nothing with the place.

Who does Ibero think it is buying a house and letting it go to pot? Assemblyman David Gantt?

Melendez said the house would either be rehabbed or razed to its foundation and rebuilt as part of the Pueblo Nuevo project, which Ibero officials hope will break ground in spring 2019.

The trouble with that outlook for neighbors of the crack house is last year Ibero officials hoped to break ground in spring 2018.

Pueblo Nuevo has been in the works for years and is in a holding pattern because Ibero doesn’t have the money or the land to build it.

The project is estimated to cost $28.5 million and financing is expected to come mainly from state and local governments. Virtually all the vacant parcels Ibero wants to develop are currently owned by the city, which is reviewing Ibero’s proposal.

The only parcel Ibero owns outright is the Hoeltzer Street crack house.

Ibero’s plans are laudable and ambitious, and like every journey of a thousand miles, this one begins with the first step. A good one for Ibero would be to fix the problem it already owns.

David Andreatta is a Democrat and Chronicle columnist. He can be reached at dandreatta@gannett.com.