Birmingham City Attorney’s Office sets sight on ‘nuisance’ properties in innovative approach to revitalize neighborhoods
When I was elected as Birmingham’s mayor, one of my first decisions was selecting Nicole King as the new City Attorney. She had worked for the City Attorney’s office for more than a decade by then — in fact, she had trained me when I worked in the city’s legal department.
I knew she would be a highly skilled leader. But even I didn’t anticipate how much impact she would have in this role.
Ms. King and her team have put together an innovative strategy to attack “problem properties” that is not only making a difference in Birmingham but is also catching the attention of other cities and local governments that want to achieve the same results.
This is the story of Birmingham’s Drug Nuisance Abatement Team and how it is making life better for the people who call Birmingham home.
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By Edward Bowser
It’s become known as the “blue house.” Aside from its paint job, the bungalow didn’t stand out too much from its surroundings in Arlington West End. That is, until new tenants moved in.
The two teenagers brought no adult supervision to the blue house. Instead, they brought gang affiliations. Suddenly, people who’d made their home in the neighborhood for decades found themselves living with random gunfire and drive-by shootings.
Women in their 70s and 80s talked of having to “hit the deck” when shots rang out, said Joseph Abrams, Chief of the Litigation Division in the Office of City Attorney. A veteran said his neighborhood had become such a warzone he felt like he was back in Vietnam.
One resident, who has lived in the neighborhood more than 30 years, found herself unwittingly on the war’s front lines one morning as she set out to deliver pandemic-era masks and hand sanitizer to neighbors in the community.
The resident saw an approaching car and then heard the gunfire. She began driving wildly away, reeling from one side of the street to another before coming to an abrupt stop near a neighbor’s home. He ran out to check on her, thinking she’d been shot. The resident wasn’t sure he was wrong.
“I thought I had got hit,” she said. “My knee was just uncontrollably shaking, and I just, you know, started crying and everything because I was so upset because I knew my life was gone.”
In the aftermath, officers found more than 60 shell casings up and down the street.
Soon afterward, the Office of City Attorney filed a nuisance action against the owner of the blue house. The city prevailed, and courts ordered the trouble-prone tenants removed.
More important, the neighborhood prevailed, and a sense of peace returned to their streets.
“No more gunshots,” said Birmingham City Attorney Nicole King. “No more scared neighbors.”
It’s a good example of the kind of work that is being done routinely by Ms. King’s Drug Nuisance Abatement Team. Her office works in partnership with communities across Birmingham to identify problem properties, and then uses legal processes to make the problem go away.
“We want the community to know we’re here to keep them safe,” Ms. King said. “We can’t solve everything. But we can and do make a difference. Creating this has been the most rewarding thing I’ve done, just seeing the way the citizens’ lives are improved.”
The Drug Nuisance Abatement Team has investigated citizen complaints about properties that seem to be a hub of drug activity as well as sites that raise different criminal concerns, are poorly maintained or create other kinds of issues for the community. These complaints have focused on apartment complexes and hotels as well as single-family homes.
If complaints are justified, the City Attorney’s office takes steps to not only address the immediate problem but also keep those problems from happening again.
Through court actions and settlements, property owners have been required to install security cameras, lighting and license plate readers to improve safety. They’ve been required to evict tenants and to implement resident screening and other procedures to manage their properties in a more responsible way. And they’ve had to submit to court oversight as long as 18 months to make sure they uphold their end of the deal.
Fines are sometimes imposed as well, and that has resulted in tens of thousands of dollars going back to stabilize neighborhoods. “This is not going to my office,” Ms. King said. “It’s going into a neighborhood revitalization fund.”
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Since the team’s formation in 2020, more than 400 complaints have been received from a wide range of sources, including neighbors, police officers, City Council members, and other city officials. In 17 cases, the city filed lawsuits that got results. In many other cases, the city legal department got results without having to go to court.
The hope is that the city’s investment in what it calls “impact litigation” will ultimately prevent many neighborhood nuisances from arising in the first place.
For now, five of Ms. King’s team of more than 40 lawyers devote themselves at least part of the time to nuisance abatement cases, and for the first time ever, the city’s legal department has a full-time investigator who works on nothing else.
“These cases take time,” Ms. King said. “It’s a lot of man-hours, and a lot of collaboration between city departments and the community. It’s definitely a lot of work.”
Ms. King expressed gratitude to the mayor and his team for their strong support and investment in the law department’s efforts. She believes the efforts pay off for people who have often invested years of their lives into Birmingham’s neighborhoods and who deserve to live in safety and peace.
“They’ve decided to stay in the city, and we want them to stay in the city,” said Salera Perkins, the investigator for the Drug Nuisance Abatement Team.
Perkins is gratified by the community response — the relief and excitement when progress is made, as well as the increasing confidence that is evidenced by a growing number of complaints.
Residents can report issues to the Drug Nuisance Abatement Team by emailing problemproperty@birminghamal.gov, calling 205–254–2369 or dropping off an anonymous letter to the first-floor security desk at City Hall to the attention to the Office of the City Attorney.
However the complaints come forward, Perkins uses her background as a paralegal to delve into them, checking the history of calls to the site by police and fire officials, looking up property ownership records and even checking social media to verify details. In addition, more than 90 search warrants have been executed in the course of nuisance abatement work.
The Drug Nuisance Abatement Team, Perkins said, is empowering residents to do what the city always encourages citizens to do about crime.
“Like we always say, if you see something, say something,” Perkins said. “This gives them an avenue to say something. It’s been rewarding to see that.”
The cases are not always easy. Just as out-of-state property owners or messy titles can hinder other neighborhood revitalization efforts, they can make it harder for the city to find someone to hold accountable for community nuisances.
But once owners are identified, they are put on notice and the city immediately begins trying to rectify the problems. If it’s a matter of drug activity, the city has a few more legal tools at its disposal. If it’s not, there are still remedies the city can pursue, as it did with the blue house.
In many cases, though, property owners cooperate immediately — whether that means cleaning up overflowing trash bins, or scrubbing out foul odors, or tackling other issues that are creating problems for their neighbors.
But if necessary, the city will absolutely go to court to get results for a neighborhood, Ms. King said.
The first case filed by her team targeted an apartment complex at 700 Graymont Avenue that was notorious in the community for drug activity, weapons, and gunfire. Landowners ultimately agreed to clean up the property and pay a fine, with the threat of additional fines if future lapses occurred.
The city also has taken action against the Southern Comfort hotel on the western side of town, the Valley Brook apartments on the eastern side of town, and many points in between.
“It’s something we are trying to do to make the city safer for everyone,” Ms. King said.
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Ms. King makes the nuisance team a priority even though the Office of City Attorney has its hands full with many other duties. The office provides legal advice not only to the mayor’s office but also to the City Council and all city departments. It represents the city in a variety of legal cases, prosecuting criminal matters and defending the city in lawsuits. It handles personnel matters, reviews and executes contracts and real estate transactions, resolves claims against the city and collects when the city is owed damages. The work is nonstop.
But when Ms. King learned the new administration deemed neighborhood revitalization as its top priority, she knew she wanted her team involved. She saw working on nuisance properties as a way for her office to help stabilize neighborhoods and to build a real connection with Birmingham residents.
She began by creating a task force to look at nuisance properties. The task force — which included the police chief, the county district attorney, criminal defense lawyers, city departments, and community representatives — collectively came up with a way to tackle properties that often account for an outsized number of problems in neighborhoods and for city departments as well.
The Drug Nuisance Abatement Team was born in the shadow of a map that highlights high crime areas of the city. The map still hangs on Ms. King’s wall, she said, as a reminder of what she is fighting for.
“This is new; it’s never been done before,” Ms. King said. “We’re using legal processes to eliminate crime, clean up communities and give citizens hope that the city’s there to protect them.”
A former attorney for the city had tried a similar approach years ago to address problem properties, also relying on the state of Alabama’s Drug Nuisance Abatement Act of 1996.
But Ms. King decided to pick up where he left off and pursue even more innovative legal strategies to target nuisances and bring about the long-term solutions that neighborhoods deserve. The results, she said, speak for themselves.
“My team has an impact,” she said.
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Birmingham’s success has captured the attention of other cities and local governments struggling with similar issues. Ms. King has fielded calls from other Alabama cities as well as places like Atlanta and Toledo, and she’s made presentations to the League of Municipalities and the Alabama State Bar.
Her hope is to see other cities, counties and even states following the lead of Birmingham. By working in partnership with communities and property owners, Ms. King believes they can make a big difference for their residents — and help create a stronger culture of accountability and responsibility within communities.
Abrams, the city’s litigation chief, points out that the impact of a single nuisance case goes far beyond one problem property, as shown by the “blue house” case in Arlington West End.
“If one house can terrorize a community, getting rid of one property can normalize a community,” he said.
And in the end, he said, normalizing a community has even larger implications for a community. Since home values affect everything from individual wealth to school funding, the administration’s investment in attacking nuisance properties can address far more stubborn problems.
“I believe this is really how we attack systemic issues,” Abrams said. “How do you attack disparities in wealth and education? It’s really about where you live. We want people to be able to live anywhere in Birmingham in security and peace. But we’re also forging an opportunity for people to have their best shot for the future.”
Edward Bowser is the Deputy Director of Communications for the City of Birmingham.
