Ronnie Polaneczky: Business as usual for Main Line landlord

WHEN ROY Parker died in a freezing, decrepit and illegal rooming house in Roxborough, the feds and the district attorney promised to see if charges should be brought against the home's owner, Main Line millionaire Rosalind Lavin.

More than three months later, a decision has yet to be made on whether Lavin broke any laws when she stored 10 people in that stone carriage house.

What's more, code violations that prompted the city's Department of Licenses & Inspections to declare the house at 5627 Ridge Ave. as "dangerous to human life and/or the public welfare" remain uncorrected.

When I visited the death house yesterday, it was still a hazardous and trashy eyesore. The lock on its glass front door was broken, allowing me easy access to a filthy inner room that contained a Port-o-John and, at one time, Roy Parker himself.

"That's where they made him stay," because Parker "acted kind of strange," says Benjamin Nixson, who was living at the house when Parker, 46, died there Dec. 22. "The room was away from the rest of the house. It didn't have any heat."

According to the Medical Examiner's Office, hypothermia contributed to Parker's death from heart disease. The outside temperature that day ranged from 15 to 27 degrees.

L&I shut down the property on Dec. 23, leaving the rest of the tenants suddenly homeless.

Nixson has yet to recover from the financial blow he suffered as a result. He says his $450 monthly rent was paid through mid-January, and a representative of Lavin's had collected his $225 security deposit as well.

He wants his money back.

"I could really use that $675," says Nixson, who was let go from his truck-driving job last year and has been searching for work ever since.

For now, his dwindling unemployment checks pay for little more than the cell phone he relies upon for job networking and for the room he rents in a private home. For meals, he relies more than he cares to on family and members of a Christian fellowship he belongs to.

The $675 "might not be a lot," he says, "but it's a lot to me."

I think $675 would be a lot to anyone. Unless you're a Villanova millionaire with a heart of stone.

Before Parker's death, Lavin was in the news when feds shut down four personal-care homes she owned - places where the physically and mentally disabled, the elderly and sick were supposed to receive competent, humane care in a clean setting.

Part of her salary and expenses were paid with the government checks her residents received, including veterans and disability benefits.

But conditions at Lavin's homes were so deplorable, the feds brought a civil case against her, which she settled last June for $700,000 and an agreement never to run another personal-care home again.

The illegal boarding home she soon opened, in a carriage house behind her shuttered Ivy Ridge Personal Care Center, gave her a new opportunity to exploit the vulnerable.

And exploit them she did, says Nixson. The rent they paid was supposed to include heat, electricity and food, he says.

But the meals were rare and inedible. And when the furnace ran out of oil, "Andres wouldn't refill it for days," says Nixson, referring to a man who lived at the house and said he worked for Lavin (his name appears on Nixson's rent receipts).

Rainwater poured through a hole in the roof over the bathroom. The electricity worked in some rooms but not in others, so extension cords coiled through the rooms like snakes. And the place crawled with bugs.

Still, for the desperate - and all his housemates were desperate, says Nixson - a roof is a roof.

"We had no options," he says. "They took advantage."

Nixson is glad to be out of that hellhole. But he'd be happier still if he had the $675 he's owed.

His many calls to Andres' cell phone were not returned; my own calls to Andres were met with a message saying the number was no longer in service.

Yesterday, I finally got hold of Lavin herself. She seemed flustered when I reached her by phone at her Villanova home on Aronimink Road, where I doubt water pours over the toilet during rainstorms, the way it did at her Ridge Avenue rooming house.

When I asked Lavin if she planned to return Nixson's money, the pause was so long I thought the line went dead.

"Hello?" I asked.

"Well, first of all, I have no comment about anything, OK?" Lavin said.

She hung up before sharing what "second of all" might have been. *

E-mail polaner@phillynews.com or call 215-854-2217. For recent columns:

http://go.philly.com/polaneczky. Read Ronnie's blog at http://go.philly.com/ronnieblog.