Out-of-state owner upset that Belleville tore down building and may demolish a second

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Owners of an out-of-state limited liability company are upset that the city of Belleville tore down one of the more than 100 houses they own in St. Clair County and could soon demolish a second one, according to the LLC’s registered agent.

The company, Topstone, is based 250 miles from Belleville in Blue Springs, Missouri. Kent Mak, a company executive and the registered agent, said the owners weren’t even aware the buildings were condemned as unsafe. He questioned the need to demolish them.

“None of these buildings need to be torn down,” Mak said.

City officials reject the company’s argument that they didn’t know about the condemnations. They described Topstone as impossible to reach about code violations at its houses.

Belleville demolished a Topstone building at 520 N. Illinois St. in April after warning that the structure would be condemned if the company didn’t get it up to code; requesting it board up the windows and doors to prevent homeless people from entering; marking the physical building with a condemnation sticker; and filing a petition in court to get permission for the demolition from a judge after receiving no response from the company.

The city has sent another warning, marked another building as condemned and filed another petition in court to demolish a second Topstone property: a house at 217 N. Jackson St. that was built in 1847.

Mak said that Topstone hasn’t been receiving notices from the city about condemnations or demolitions and that the company entrusts a local property management team to maintain its houses in St. Clair County. When asked if the BND could interview someone from the team, Mak said the staff had turned over since Belleville’s earliest communications about those properties.

“Moving forward we are going to have a new team of people deployed in the area to closely monitor and also work on the properties,” Mak stated in a follow-up email.

Why Missouri company invested in St. Clair County real estate

Mak said Topstone is a small company that buys inexpensive, foreclosed properties at county auctions, some of them in poor condition. The company’s goal is to turn them into government-subsidized rentals for low-income families along with its real estate brokerage extension Roof4All Realty. Mak is Topstone’s director of business development and Roof4All’s chief marketing officer.

“We just swept up what we could at auctions,” Mak said. “... Some were rent-ready. Some were probably ready to be torn down.”

He said Topstone came into St. Clair County starting in 2016 with “the best intentions” but paused its plans when it couldn’t find tenants, and people broke in to strip the copper while renovated homes sat empty.

Topstone owns 112 houses in St. Clair County. Most are vacant. It also owns 23 vacant lots in the county. The majority of its property is in Cahokia Heights and East St. Louis.

“It wasn’t like we were just going to abandon the area or sit on these properties forever; it had to make economic sense,” Mak said. “We’re paying the property taxes and we’re just waiting.

“It was never going to be a permanent pause,” he added.

The company has invested over half a million dollars buying properties in St. Clair County, according to the county’s foreclosed property auction results and real estate sales records.

It spent over $150,000 to pay the taxes for all those properties last year alone.

Topstone is supported by private money, including some people who invest in the real estate purchases and renovations through their retirement accounts. The investors are guaranteed a return for their money because rent checks come from the federal government as opposed to an individual, Mak noted.

The company recently restarted seeking investors to give Section 8 rentals another shot in St. Clair County with renovations at about five of its properties, according to Mak. In July, he reported that a new tenant was moving into one of its St. Clair County properties. He said the timing coincides with stepped up efforts to renovate Topstone properties in St. Louis.

In Belleville, the company has six properties: five houses and a now-empty lot at 520 N. Illinois St. since the city demolished the two-story brick building there. The city has a lien on that property for the cost of the demolition , $27,200, which Mak said Topstone plans to pay to retain ownership of the land.

Only one of the houses Topstone owns in Belleville is occupied. The rest are condemned.

“These properties are in bad shape,” said Scott Tyler, Belleville’s director of health, housing and building.

While the city of Belleville has taken Topstone to court twice to get structures demolished, neither Cahokia Heights nor East St. Louis has filed a petition for demolition of a Topstone property, according to a BND review of St. Clair County Circuit Court records.

Belleville Mayor Patty Gregory said her administration has stepped up demolition efforts of homes that are no longer viable to live in. Local historians, meanwhile, lament the loss of sometimes historically and architecturally significant buildings, like the two Topstone properties.

City tries to reach Topstone about vacant property maintenance

In response to a public records request, the city provided documentation to the BND showing it tried to reach Topstone four times about issues at 520 N. Illinois St. and three times about issues at 217 N. Jackson St. before taking the company to court over the properties.

217 N. Jackson St.:

• The building commissioner sent a July 19, 2021, letter warning the house would be condemned if code violations weren’t corrected within 30 days.

• The housing director sent a Dec. 14, 2023, letter asking Topstone to secure the house’s front and back doors.

• In internal housing department communications, a city building inspector stated on April 16, 2024, that he emailed “management service” to start yard maintenance and that they replied the following day saying they would have someone out within a week. On May 15, 2024, the building inspector reported “no improvements.”

520 N. Illinois St.:

• The building commissioner sent a June 22, 2022, letter warning the house would be condemned if code violations weren’t corrected within 30 days.

• In internal housing department communications, the housing director told a receptionist on Jan. 13, 2023, to send a letter asking Topstone to secure the property. The receptionist reported it was sent Jan. 17, 2023.

• The housing director sent a June 21, 2023, letter asking Topstone to cut the grass.

• The housing director sent a July 18, 2023, letter asking Topstone to clean up the property and board up the windows and doors to prevent homeless people from entering.

Tyler, the housing director, and Building Commissioner Steve Thouvenot said until recently they had only spoken to a Topstone property manager one time each, and it was about other properties the company owns in the city.

“Until about maybe about a month and half, two months ago, I had never talked to Topstone one time ever,” Tyler said in a July interview. “For them to say we haven’t contacted them... we’ve tried numerous times.”

The city didn’t issue citations for code violations at either property before moving onto demolition proceedings, public records show. Tyler said it’s not feasible with out-of-state property owners.

A Belleville police officer has to write that ticket because it’s a local ordinance violation. Tyler can’t send them to Topstone’s Missouri headquarters near the border with Kansas, he said. It would take more than seven and a half hours to drive there and back.

“We have that problem with a lot of LLCs,” Tyler said. “They’re all over the country.”

Building demolition moves forward without owner’s input

Assistant city attorney Lloyd Cueto said the city faces challenges reaching out-of-state property owners, including sometimes limited contact information.

In the case of 520 N. Illinois St., Belleville used the P.O. box Topstone provided to the county as its address to send the condemnation warning and other notices. It put a sticker on the building declaring the property “condemned as unfit for human occupancy or use.”

Then it tried to serve a court summons in person through a Jackson County sheriff’s deputy at Topstone’s office in Blue Springs, which was unsuccessful. Mak said the employees mostly work remotely since the COVID-19 pandemic, so it’s likely no one was there to receive the summons the day they came.

St. Clair County Associate Judge Julie Katz granted the city’s motion to ultimately serve the summons by putting a public notice in the print edition of the BND on Aug. 25, 2023. The case ended in a default judgment against Topstone when company representatives failed to appear because, according to Mak, they never saw it.

Belleville demolished the building seven months later, on April 3.

Mak said Topstone didn’t find out that the city wanted to tear 520 N. Illinois St. down until it was too late to save it.

Cueto described the city’s efforts as fair.

“I think kind of the policy and the thinking behind it is if you’re going to be a property owner, there’s going to be diligence in checking in on your property,” Cueto said. “… If it becomes apparent that no one’s responding, you haven’t come to your physical property for all these months, the next reasonable step is we’ll come to your office. You’re not at your office. It’s not unreasonable to think you’ll check the newspaper with the largest circulation in the city where you own a property.”

The company hasn’t received the city’s summons yet to make its case in court for the latest demolition request involving 217 N. Jackson St., but Mak said Topstone wants to bring it back from condemnation and turn it into a government-subsidized rental.

Mak suspects the city’s demolition of 520 N. Illinois St. was motivated by squatters rather than structural problems with the late 1800s building. It housed a Kirby vacuum cleaner store with tenants living upstairs until 1991.

City officials say they have seen vacant buildings rapidly deteriorate after squatters move in, ripping out fixtures, breaking doors and windows and starting fires.

“They destroy these properties from the inside out,” Tyler said.

The building commissioner’s 2022 letter warning it would be condemned stated “a vacant structure that is not secured against entry shall be deemed unsafe.”

City employees repeatedly boarded up windows and doors at 520 N. Illinois St. because people returned to rip them off to get inside, according to Tyler.

Trent Tuttle, 41, who was homeless and known to sleep in the condemned building, died in the garage when it was gutted by fire on Jan. 9. At that point, the city had permission from a judge to demolish the building, and officials sawed off the exterior staircase to try to prevent people from going inside through a balcony.

Topstone’s records show property managers had been working at 520 N. Illinois St. every few months in 2023, even if just to secure the building, according to Mak. He said the last time a property manager set eyes on the building was in January.

“We can go back and reboard up a home multiple times, but if people want to go back all we can do is keep going back there and getting them to leave,” Mak said.

Topstone is working to be more responsive with Belleville after its experience with the 520 N. Illinois St. demolition, according to Mak.

“Since that incident, I’ve pushed my team to have an even better handle and relationship with city officials because the fact is we have all these properties. We’re not going to give them back to the city. We’re not going to let them go back to tax auction again. We’re going to own them,” Mak said.