Article
Courtesy of The Orlando Weekly
By Erin
Sullivan
Published November 8, 2015
It's strangely quiet as the morning sun climbs over the
weedy palm trees and tall oaks behind the buildings of Tymber Skan on the
Lake condominiums.
Right around the corner, other apartment complexes and condo communities are
waking up. Kids walk to school and adults wait in bus shelters for the Lynx
to whisk them off to work. Impatient drivers race down Texas Avenue on their
way to wherever.
The streets of Tymber Skan, though, are dead. Nobody is outside. There are
no kids in sight. Most of the buildings look abandoned. Some seem like
they're about to collapse. Holes have rotted through the decayed gray siding
in one. The wood framing on the second story of another is visible from the
street, because the siding and drywall has somehow gone missing. The windows
have been smashed out of many of the buildings, but most are simply boarded
up. A lot of the ones that aren't have burglar bars – or, in one case, the
metal frame from a toddler's bed – nailed over them to keep intruders out.
Most people who hear about Tymber
Skan, the troubled condominium complex located just a couple
of miles from the tony Mall at Millenia, think nobody really
lives here anymore – nobody who doesn't deserve to, anyway.
Over the years, the place has been associated with nothing
but trouble – crime, drugs, squatters, fires, shootings,
delinquent utility bills. Last year, when Orange County
Sheriff Jerry Demings held a press conference to draw
attention to the troubled complex and call for changes,
shots rang out in the background while he talked to the
press. It was the middle of the afternoon on a Monday. |
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Earlier this year, a man who bought 15 ramshackle units
in Tymber Skan to rehab them and rent them out was shot and robbed while
working on the buildings. In September, Bright House said it would cut cable
and phone service to customers there after a technician was robbed at
gunpoint.
So, for the most part, the public has written this place
off as some kind of ghost town, inhabited only by the zombies who ran it
into the ground.
But then, what's that little pink
bicycle propped up against the wall next to the entrance of
that condo unit over there? The one that looks a little less
decrepit than some of the others around it? Where did it
come from? Does a little girl live there? Who does she live
with? Her mother? Her grandma? Does she have brothers and
sisters? A cat? Is she allowed to play outside? Does she
ever feel scared about where she lives?
Around the corner, there's a building
missing all of its windows. Through the busted-out frames,
the interior full of burned trash, rotted-out mattresses and
charred wood is exposed. Across the street from this
burned-out shell, there's a car parked in front of one of
the units. A little brown pit bull tied to a porch with a
rope eats breakfast out of a bucket. Clearly, somebody lives
here. And even though they live in a place as hopeless as
Tymber Skan, they care enough to make sure their dog is fed
in the morning. |
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In just a few days, the Orlando Utilities Commission will turn water off to
two-thirds of Tymber Skan because the homeowners associations governing two
portions of the complex have failed to make payments on its utility bills.
When that happens, people living in the affected units, which include the
units where the little girl with the pink bike and the brown pit bull live,
will be forced to make some tough decisions: They can try to stay and live
without utilities until the county deems their homes unfit for human
habitation, or they can voluntarily relocate with financial assistance from
the county.
According to Dianne Arnold, administrator for Orange County Family Services,
approximately 70 families will lose service when OUC turns the water off.
The county has put door hangers and fliers around the community offering
them relocation assistance, and 20 of them had contacted the county for help
within a week. Arnold says she expects to hear from many more as the turnoff
date creeps closer.
According to Bob Spivey, manager of the county's code enforcement division,
which has levied more than $20 million worth of liens and fines against
property owners here, the county doesn't face anything else quite like
Tymber Skan. It is, he says, the worst of the worst.
Orange County is moving forward (slowly) with its plans to demolish as many
of the buildings as it can. Over the years, he says, the county has invested
money and resources to help Tymber Skan recover, but now its goal is to get
people to move out.
"We have condemned the buildings," he says. "The association that's
responsible for maintaining them is the party in violation. Now we have to
go back and cite each of the individual unit owners. We've gone through that
entire process for eight buildings, and those buildings have been torn down.
By the end of this calendar year, we anticipate three more should come down,
and then for next year, we're hoping to get as many as 10 or 11."
There's still one section of the community, though – Tymber Skan on the Lake
Section Two – that has kept up with its bills and isn't affected by the OUC
turnoff notice. The people who live in that section are trying hard to hang
on. They say that despite the community's deteriorating condition and its
horrific reputation, they've invested in it and have nowhere else to go.
Tymber Skan is home, and they don't want to leave.
"Everybody out here is not bad," says Malinda McIntosh, who lives in the
neighborhood with her kids and is one of two board members who run Tymber
Skan Home Owners Association Section Two. "I understand getting rid of
squatters, but legitimate people who are paying their rent and bills, you
want to get rid of them, too? I don't understand that. And homeowners – what
are you going to do? You can't just take people's land."
The story that's always told about Tymber Skan is that it started out as a
pristine lakefront community when it was built in the early 1970s. It had a
boathouse on Lake Catherine, tennis courts and a pool. According to a 1973
story in the Lakeland Ledger, the project was developed by a company called
Diversified Communities, which built similar Tymber Skan communities in
Lakeland and Ohio. The wood-sided buildings were styled after "contemporary
California" architecture, the story says, with an emphasis on a "natural"
look.
The community was organized into three separate sections, each of which had
its own governing board – Tymber Skan on the Lake Homeowners Association
sections one, two and three – as well as a master organization for all three
to tend to common areas and amenities.
When the units were brand-new, Orange County Property Appraiser records
indicate, they sold for about $20,000. An Orange County court records search
shows that in the early 1980s, people started to foreclose on their units
and some were subject to construction liens. Investors scooped them up and
converted them to rentals. Foreclosure problems persisted through the 1990s,
and as the number of owners to pay into the association declined, so did the
services it could provide to residents. The pool turned green. Crime
increased. Tymber Skan developed a reputation as a troubled community with
an inefficient homeowners association and crime problems.
As Tymber Skan lore has it, hurricanes that hit central Florida in the
mid-2000s were the first real nail in the community's coffin. Damaged units
weren't repaired, and the shoddy construction of the condos meant that when
one unit was damaged, the rot and mold and seepage infected the adjacent
ones. According to a blog and Twitter feed that was kept up very briefly by
a Tymber Skan resident named Joanne Porter, the clubhouse and pool were
destroyed. Some people simply walked away from their units, leaving them to
foreclose or simply crumble.
Then the economy took a dive, and it took Tymber Skan with it.
According to Frank Paul Barber, a court-appointed receiver who assumed the
management of sections one and three in 2013 when the homeowners association
for those sections could no longer keep up with the problems, things were
dire when he took over. The unpaid utility bills were astronomical, he says,
and there wasn't enough money coming into the association to keep things up.
He says it was like "Beirut East" with all of its vacant structures.
"All the money went into just keeping things under control," he says. "There
was never enough money to repair any buildings or do any common-area
improvements. There were basically so many people in foreclosure, or who
weren't paying or who abandoned their units, that there was just not
enough."
Barber put together a plan for community revitalization that he submitted to
the Orange County Board of County Commissioners, and it laid out a budget
and rough framework to keep the lights on at Tymber Skan – at least
temporarily.
He worked out a payment plan that allowed the community to gradually pay
down its debt to OUC and keep up on new bills. Since so many units had
squatters, he says, there was a lot of water usage. But squatters don't pay
bills. And, unfortunately, he says, a lot of Tymber Skan's legitimate
residents didn't pay them either.
"So all of the money went to pay for OUC," he says. "That water bill has
been the villain ever since they stopped providing individual metered
service. In all fairness to them, they didn't want their meter readers
assaulted, [but] whatever I did with any money coming in was to pay the
water bill."
Last year, a group of Tymber Skan property owners led by a man named Lorenzo
Pinkston II, of a Poinciana-based real estate investing company called
Pinkston Diversified, reorganized the Tymber Skan on the Lake Homeowners
Association, as well as the associations for sections one and three of the
Tymber Skan community. They petitioned the court to discharge Barber and
turn the operations back over to the homeowners associations.
According to the court documents, Pinkston claimed that Barber had failed to
keep up with his financial filings, mismanaged funds and fallen behind on
paying OUC. "Pinkston requests this receivership be dismissed immediately
following the filing of such reports," the court documents read. The request
was granted, and on July 16, Barber filed his final report on the Tymber
Skan situation:
"The properties began as one of the premier properties in the Orlando area
and now may be considered one of the worst," Barber wrote. "The neglect of
the buildings, the abandonment of units by owners, the investors who do not
pay assessments, the decline of the economy at a critical time, the change
in the Orlando Utilities Commission billing system, past boards of
administration, and the continuing efforts by the County to demolish
buildings and more items more numerous to mention have contributed to the
state of the properties today. Going forward, without a major special
assessment to make building repairs and legal expenses to gain ownership by
the association of vacant lots for potential redevelopment, the property
cannot be sustained."
Since Pinkston has taken over, he hasn't kept up with the agreed-upon OUC
payments for sections one and three, either. So on Oct. 26, OUC cut the
electric to the common areas of Tymber Skan. On Nov. 9, it'll cut the water,
too. For public safety's sake, streetlights and fire hydrants will remain
functional, but that's about it.
"The mounting bills in those two sections are in excess of $100,000," OUC
spokesman Tim Trudell says. "We have an entire ratepayer system to worry
about, too, and at some point, we have to do something to protect everybody
in that system. ... We can't lose so much that it affects everybody else's
rates."
Pinkston, who doesn't live at Tymber Skan but owns one rental unit there
that he purchased in 2013, seems oddly at peace with OUC's decision.
"We've talked to the people on site and let them know if you don't pay rent
or pay anything there's no way for the bills to be taken care of," he says.
"And we're not receiving any income in from any owners in Section Two, so
that has put us in a position where there's really nothing we can do as far
as the water being turned off and the electricity."
He says that of 60 occupied units in sections one and three, 14 are
owner-occupied. The rest are rentals, and he says there's only one tenant he
can think of that pays rent regularly. (Although it's worth noting that
several people in the community say Pinkston stopped accepting rent from
tenants because he wants everyone to leave.) When the power and the water go
out, he says, the delinquent tenants will go, too.
"We have an objective," he says. "The water being turned off will kind of
purge Tymber Skan. Meaning, the people that refuse to pay, or who can't pay
because they don't work, they won't be able to stay here anymore, and the
association can move forward with its plans to restore Tymber Skan."
By "restore," though, Pinkston means tear it down and start over.
"We want a whole new development," he says. "We can't redevelop what's there
because it's out of code, it's old. We'd end up spending more money
rehabbing everything versus just building from the ground up. We're trying
to work with some of the owners in good standing on this objective."
Pinkston even has a name for the new development: "In our business plan,
we're calling it the Preserve at Lake Catherine," he says.
McIntosh says she has heard rumors of development plans, and that Pinkston
has mentioned it to her in the past, but she says she doesn't really know
what's going on, or how he plans to make his vision reality.
"He refuses to tell us, and he will not tell the lawyers anything he wants
to do with the neighborhood," she says. "The homeowners have a right to
know."
James Hurley of Apopka, who has been an investor in Tymber Skan for years
(and who has been accused by tenants over the years of not making repairs to
his rental units), says he has no idea what's going on, either.
"I'm not sure how useful I can be, because I'm having a hard time getting
any meaningful answers," Hurley says when contacted for his thoughts on the
community's future. "The person you really need to speak to is Mr. Pinkston.
Have you spoken to him?" When told that we were waiting for Pinkston to
return our call, Hurley responded: "Welcome to my world."
One part of Pinkston's plan is to get the Section Two homeowners association
under the same umbrella as sections one and three. He says the only way to
make any progress in Tymber Skan is if everyone's contributing to one
organization, and right now, Section Two's independence – which may be the
only thing keeping it afloat – makes that impossible.
"The original developer intended the development to function having all
sections under one management party, the HOA," he says. "But what happened
in Tymber Skan is for years prior to us coming on board the sections
operated independently of one another, so if one section had problems, the
others would watch that section fail, instead of combining efforts.
"In order to move forward, we need to have all the sections under one
entity, so we can go to outside parties and say, 'Hey, this is what we
have,'" he says. "We're going to need about $10 million to $20 million to
redevelop this place."
But therein lies the problem: While everyone who's invested in this place
wants improvement, not everyone wants to hand their property over so it can
be leveled and redeveloped. McIntosh points out that there are some elderly
people who own their units and some people who are still paying off
mortgages. She says that Section Two has spent a lot of its time and money
buying up units and fixing up the ones that aren't too far gone so they can
be rented to people who need affordable housing – an increasingly rare
commodity in Orange County.
"We are trying to do a program where people can do homeownership, rent to
own, so they'd have the ability to own so they wouldn't have to worry about
anything but water and electric and they could call it home," McIntosh says.
"A lot of people in Orange County don't have a place to stay. And this is
better than staying in a hotel."
Pinkston, though, has filed a motion in court to stop McIntosh and her
fellow Section Two board member Joanne Ham from pursuing these activities.
His filing says that in order for their homeowners association to be
legitimate, it would need at least three board members – Ham and McIntosh
are the only ones on the board in Section Two. He also says that neither of
them is doing their due diligence when it comes to background checks on
tenants, and that they are running an apartment-rental business rather than
a legitimate HOA. He's asked the court to hand over control of Tymber Skan
on the Lake Homeowners Association Section Two to the master organization
he's in charge of "to manage its day-to-day activities." That case is still
working its way through the court.
McIntosh's lawyer, Robert Anthony, who's been following the Tymber Skan saga
for the past two decades, says Pinkston has no legal standing.
"His claims are without merit," Anthony says. "Section Two is a valid
association and it's been a valid association for decades. It's totally
independent from Section One and Section Three and Mr. Pinkston doesn't have
any lawful rights to do anything about it. This is a highly unusual case,
and what makes it very unusual is that Section One was an independent
association, and Section Three was an independent association and Section
Two is an independent association. Mr. Pinkston was somehow able to get
himself appointed as the president of sections one and three, and he's been
designated by himself as the president of this other association, which that
I refer to as the so-called master association."
Whether his efforts to take control are successful or not, they may create
enough chaos and confusion, especially amid the impending water shutoff to
most of the homes in the community, that more people jump ship. Pinkston
isn't shy about admitting that's what needs to happen. In the media over the
past year, he's been the one urging people to get out, and having the water
turned off will finally force the issue for many of the people who've
stubbornly held on even as things grow more desperate. "Even though it's a
bad situation," he says, "it's almost a situation that has to happen."
Orange County Code Enforcement says things have gone from bad to worse
lately. The trash doesn't even get picked up anymore because the HOA doesn't
pay the bill, and on a recent ride-along with code enforcement's chief
inspector, Kurt Fasnacht, he points out that somebody has put big black
tarps over full-to-the-brim Dumpsters so people can't add more trash to
them. Sometimes, Fasnacht says, people light the overflowing Dumpsters on
fire.
When asked what he thinks will happen to the people who've lived here as a
place of last resort – the only place they can afford, even if it's too
dangerous to go outside at night and the walls are crumbling down around
them – Pinkston doesn't have an answer.
"I don't know," he says. "Like I tell them, it's never personal. It's
business. I don't know what you do with people who don't make an income but
need to live somewhere. I just don't."
Really, it almost seems impossible that the lights at Tymber Skan weren't
shut off long ago. Units that aren't boarded up are ransacked. Everything
from window frames to light fixtures to appliances to wiring has been
stripped from them, and they sit wide open. Several of them have been set on
fire, and their scorched hulls are a distressing reminder that these old
wooden structures are highly flammable.
The common areas are piled with old furniture and broken glass. The grass
hasn't been cut in forever, so every open space is choked with weeds and
vines. Fasnacht says prostitutes work out of some of the units.
And yet there are also some single moms, families and old ladies here, too.
"When you drive through there and see kids peering through broken glass, it
just almost brings you to your knees," code enforcement's Bob Spivey says.
"It's something none of us should have to see, and people shouldn't have to
live in those conditions."
And in a perverse turn of logic, some county officials hope that turning off
the water might be the best thing that could happen to some of the people
stuck here.
"I think there are probably people here who are looking for a way out," says
Orange County Family Services' Dianne Arnold. She says the county is
offering to pay first month's rent and a security deposit for Tymber Skan
residents who need relocation assistance. "Sometimes out of bad things come
things that are maybe good results. There might be people there who need
opportunity. They might need the upfront money to get into better [housing]
or better schools for their children."
But for the homeowners who actually own their units and who want to stay,
there just aren't very many acceptable options. Do they stay and hope that
things don't get even worse when the water gets turned off? Do they wait to
see what Pinkston brings to the table? Do they just walk away?
"We would like to stay," McIntosh says. "This is what we call home. What if
somebody came to your home and set up shop and just took hold and didn't
even ask our opinion about anything and says that's just the way it is? You
can't do people like this. People need to take heed. If this happens to this
neighborhood, it can happen to the next."
For now, everyone's waiting to see what happens when the water is shut off
to sections one and three. Spivey says he worries for the homeowners – the
legitimate ones who've stuck it out all this time – but the county has
little standing to intervene any more than it already has.
"That is one of the worst aspects," Spivey says. "People that put their life
savings into a place to live – people that have lived there since the 1970s
– will be without water, without power. What's going to happen to them?"
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