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“This account is subject to or in foreclosure.” This is the taxpayer information for the dilapidated Park Ave buildings, formally known as Garden Plaza
The deathtrap buildings on Park Avenue may potentially be falling into foreclosure according to the King County Taxpayer website. A foreclosure, whether for tax or lending reasons, would further complicate resolution of the dire safety issues that have gone on much too long with these buildings.
The website also shows that the owners, ION Renton, have been hit-and-miss with tax payments in recent years, although they appear to be caught up now.
The data can be found at the King County website here. When you access the site, the parcel number is 7564600055.
The King County assessor has updated their photo of the building. This can be found on the King County Parcel Viewer by navigating to Park and 6th in Renton.
If this bldg goes into foreclosure or if the LLC files bankruptcy what are the responsibilities of the City of Renton? What happens next?
The City should demand that ION gets a large crew to immediately bring the buildings into compliance with Renton’s safety and health codes– which means finish the demolition process as fast as possible.
A foreclosure or bankruptcy would likely start the city process all over again, and the building will just deteriorate further while this happens. Foreclosure would change the ownership, and during the ownership transition the parties would be even less motivated than they are today to spend any money correcting the public safety hazards. If ION Renton, the current owners, were going to lose the buildings, they’re track record suggests they would do no significant work on the buildings. And while the property goes through the legal process to be reclaimed by a bank or sold at auction, there may not be a new legal owner identified for months or even years.
Without maintenance-minded building owners, The City’s only recourse would be the one I’ve been advocating for for two years, but it has become orders of magnitude harder over time– do the necessary work now to protect the public, and put a lien on the building to recover the cost.
If this was done two years ago (when the damage was a dozen broken windows), the buildings could have been saved for about $25,000-$50,000, and the buildings would currently be worth about $30-$35 million dollars. Today, the buildings will need to be torn down and remediated for about a million dollars, and then the land value will only be about $6- $7 million dollars.
Renton supposedly now has an agreement with ION Renton (building owners) in which the company is going to spend the next ten months preparing the inside of the buildings for demolition, and then apply for permission from the city to demo the outside of the building. I feel the city gave them too long to comply, and the ten months leaves a lot of time for them to go bankrupt or go into foreclosure without doing the promised work. This will require Renton to either finally jump in and do the work, or wait for a new owner to come on board and restart the compliance activities with them.
Even when the demolition is complete, the site will still include a derelict parking garage that can not be legally used since it will lack lighting, fire protection, and ADA access. The site will soon be surrounded with razor wire, and the once-beautiful landscaping will become overrun by weeds and blackberries. The property will likely be a safety hazard and blight on the North Renton neighborhood for another decade at least as a future use gets planned, and probably longer if it goes into a contested foreclosure. This did not have to happen.
They’ve saved themselves about a million in taxes. That could have been used to fund a police officer. Just saying.
That’s a good point. If there had been a full-time officer there, they could have prevented it from being destroyed. Then ION would have had to keep paying property taxes on the whole building at full value.
I wonder why Renton doesn’t have a spare police officer for public safety?
Just brilliant. By creating a mess, they kept the city from getting funding to fix the mess.