Landlord, Neighbors Hash Out Wall Collapse

After butting heads with neighbors over a collapsed wall and a failed request for zoning relief, a landlord logged onto Zoom in a peace quest.

That quest, featuring a frank exchange, took place Tuesday night at the online monthly meeting of the Downtown Wooster Square Community Management Team.

“Nobody’s perfect, but we do care very much to keep our properties to a high standard,” the landlord, Avi Meer, told neighbors.

“Some things just happen that you can’t predict or take any steps to avoid, but I think I’ve shown in general that I do care, and that I look forward to beautifying the neighborhood for ourselves and everybody around us.”

Meer had faced criticism from neighbors when a wall of one of his apartment buildings — a three-family, red brick rowhouse at 335 St. John Street in Wooster Square — partially crumbled in 2020. One Friday, bricks at the bottom of the wall caved in, exposing part of the wall’s interior. After a tenant called to inform Meer, the building’s residents were evacuated and relocated to other apartments.

Meer received a Notice of Unsafe Structure from the city’s Building Department on May 22, 2020, warning that the building’s exterior right wall had collapsed. A few days later, he had submitted plans for a structural brace in order to mend the wall.

Neighbors took the side wall’s crumbling as a sign that Meer was negligent. They pressed on the matter at CMT meetings for months, where a Livable City Initiative representative said that Meer had been cooperative with the city’s requests for minor aesthetic interventions. The building remained in shambles. Meer said he was fighting for his insurance company to cover the wall’s repairs after his initial request was denied, and said he couldn’t afford to pay for construction otherwise.

Then, nearly a year after the Building Department’s inspection, the exterior side wall fully collapsed this past May, revealing columns of pink insulation and creating a vast pile of debris. The city had to relocate residents of the adjacent building.

In July, Meer came before the Board of Zoning Appeals to request a variance that would allow him to build a small studio apartment in the building’s basement, which he said would help him secure plans to fix the wall. A number of Wooster Square residents argued against Meer’s application, saying that the landlord shouldn’t be rewarded with zoning relief for what they viewed as poor upkeep of his property. Zoning commissioners unanimously voted against Meer.

When Meer came before Tuesday night’s management team meeting, he didn’t bring up the variance request. Instead, he came to ​“clarify” his side of the story, he said, and to patch up community trust in his work as a landlord.

Anstress Farwell, who runs the Urban Design League, questioned Meer’s claim that he couldn’t have prevented the collapse.

“We noticed for years the bowing of the wall,” she said. ​“It was getting worse and worse, and as you mentioned, bricks started falling out. … It’s probably going to cost more now to fix it than had you been able to fix it earlier on.”

Farwell stressed the high stakes of the building’s precarious state before the wall collapse. ​“It was clearly a dangerous situation for the people that were in it that were still there,” she said. ​“We didn’t know which way the wall would fall.”

The wall could have knocked down a telephone pole, she added. ​“Those things are clear dangers. If someone were trespassing on the lot when it fell, or if a homeless person were in the building — it was a dangerous situation.”

Management team Chair Ian Dunn, echoed Farwell’s concern: ​“It’s hard to square what you’re saying — that it was hard to know what would happen.”

Meer replied that he had been continuously working to figure out a solution for repairing the wall. Even after submitting designs for a wall brace, which was meant to hold the structure together while individual bricks at the base of the wall were removed and replaced, Meer said the actual construction process proved to be more complicated.

“The condition of taking down that wall was a big challenge to begin with, even with the bracing,” Meer said. Since the wall was collapsing from the bottom, the entire side of the building was unstable; builders were concerned that construction workers could be placed at risk if anything went wrong, he explained.

“It wasn’t a situation of being ignored and neglected,” he said. ​“From my perspective, I was trying to figure out how to address it best.”

Meer said that the structural engineer he worked with did not expect the wall to collapse. ​“He was very shocked,” Meer said.

Dunn pressed Meer on why he hadn’t first made the necessary repairs and then requested insurance coverage.

“If it was a repair that would have cost $20,000, we’d probably be able to get that done. Over here we were talking about a renovation of $250,000. We were just not prepared for that,” Meer responded. ​“It’s very hard to borrow money for such a complicated situation, even from private lenders, which was something we looked into a few times. People were very uncomfortable to get involved,” he added.

Meer said he is still fighting with insurance to get coverage for the needed repairs.

By the conversation’s end, neighbors shared empathy for Meer’s situation — while urging him to open up clearer lines of communication.

“No one wants to buy a building and have the wall fall off a few years later,” Dunn said.

Farwell suggested that Meer send over his contact information.

“I think one solution in the future is that we can reach out directly to you when there’s something that’s going on,” she said. ​“That might be a big step forward. That way, we all can really help each other out.”