Oh, Give Me Your Home

The sign on the door is bright pink with black, bold letters: UNFIT FOR HUMAN HABITATION. Jan Simpson sags when she sees it. She moved in just three months ago.

Back then, this house just east of I-635 in Kansas City, Kansas, seemed to provide sanctuary she desperately needed. She'd been fleeing her abusive ex, living in a seedy motel on State Street. But he found her and started paying visits. (For her protection, Pitch Weekly is not reporting her real name.) Then Simpson saw an ad for a house available for "rent or sale." She called the number and got Everett Knapp.

With no money down, he told her, she could live there for a mere $400 a month -- just the right price for a single woman raising two boys on a receptionist's salary.

Now, with the pink sign on her door, she runs to the phone and calls Knapp again. "Well, it's your property," he tells her. "You got to deal with it now."

Because he has Simpson's signature on a contract that "proves" she is a buyer -- not a renter -- Knapp can evade local laws that require landlords to provide liveable housing.

She calls the city and learns it's a false alarm. A rookie rental license inspector who'd been checking up on the place when Knapp was its landlord botched the paperwork. But the sign renews her suspicion of Knapp.

The same suspicion led her a month earlier to the Wyandotte County courthouse, where she looked up the appraised value of the house she'd bought on a $35,000 contract. The real value was a digit shorter: $5,100. And the year before, it was worth a paltry $1,200.

Truth is, the place was on the condemned list until just before she moved in. A big chunk of the roof had disappeared in a 1998 fire. Knapp, who with his wife, Betty, habitually rents out or sells KCK houses, bought a new roof. But there were still lots of problems.

In early April 2000, six months before Simpson signed the purchase agreement, a rental inspector toured the house with a clipboard. On a scorecard that allows only 25 negative points, the Knapps' property scored a whopping 349. The electricity was out, outlet covers were missing, ceiling lights were not secured. The sink leaked, and none of the bathroom fixtures was secured. The front porch sagged -- its rotting wood could barely hold its own weight. The roof drooped, the ceilings were canted, and the wood siding and rafter ends were crumbling away. And the whole house was sliding off its foundation.

Knapp contracted out the major work. The little stuff -- painting, caulking, tightening a fixture here or there -- was up to Simpson. That's how she got the house for no money down.

But now that she's living there, she's having doubts about the quality of the big-ticket repairs. The foundation is secure, but snowmelt still seeps in. "They fixed the problem, but they didn't fix the cause of the problem," she says.

So Simpson's been second-guessing the deal she struck with Knapp. "I even told the kids I'm thinking of buying a new house," she admits.

There is, however, this matter of the contract she and Knapp signed. It's been notarized and filed with the register of deeds. Yet it doesn't look as though she'll have much trouble escaping the arrangement. There's little in it -- or in the property's legal history -- to indicate that Knapp and his wife will ever transfer the house's title to Simpson.

For one, all she has to do is hand in a check three days late and the house will revert to a rental with Knapp as landlord. And on November 1, 2003, if she can't come up with a check for more than $20,000, she'll lose her claim as a buyer as well. On the one-page contract, Knapp penciled in the words "balloon payment," meaning, on this contract, "pay everything you still owe."

"I asked him about that balloon payment part," Simpson says. "But he said I could just take out a real loan then and pay him off."

That won't be easy. Just nine months before they sold her the place, the Knapps took out a mortgage on the house and another tract in Overland Park. So now the house she's buying has a $25,900 lien on it, and Simpson will be hard-pressed to find a bank that'll grant a loan on a place carrying so much debt.

And the Knapps entered another agreement the day they signed their mortgage with Valley View State Bank in Overland Park. Called an assignment of rents, this notarized and filed document seems to belie the Knapps' sale to Simpson. It acknowledges that the house she's buying is a rental, and their bank can demand that she send her "rent checks" directly to the lender.

So it's starting to dawn on Simpson that she's not so much a buyer as a tenant and that her landlord is skirting Wyandotte County's landlord laws. Of her contract, she concedes: "This is his way of keeping rentals without actually keeping them up."

Indeed, the Knapps' business plan is thumb-your-nose retaliation against local government's effort to renovate its slums and improve housing.