Earlier this year Maryland’s Community Law Center had its first victory under an updated law meant to stop bad behavior by the owners of blighted properties that refuse to clean them up, but late Tuesday night the progress in that effort was halted as the landlord filed for bankruptcy, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday. Last year, using Maryland’s revised community bill of rights law, a number of community associations and the Community Law Center sued Scott Wizig — a landlord who was sued by Eliot Spitzer in New York in the early 2000s and is the subject of a recent investigative report by the Houston Press — and nine LLCs that owned 57 nuisance properties in Baltimore. These properties were uninhabitable, vacant houses that were attracting crime and trash, allegedly posing a health and safety hazard and harming the community. The lawsuit alleged that Wizig was breaking the law at approximately 140 of his Baltimore properties. The bankruptcy filings on tuesday allowed Wizig — who, despite the court’s order, hasn’t brought the properties to code, according to Robin Jacobs of the Community Law Center — to freeze litigation. A request to pull the litigation into the bankruptcy case, rather than allow it to proceed in state court, has already been filed alongside the bankruptcy petitions.
