Last month, the City of St. Louis filed suit against a woman who’d been running a series of illegal rooming houses — with 39 houses in the city limits alone. Dara Daugherty and her associates operated in plain sight for years, racking up countless code violations as their properties played host to stabbings, overdoses and even deaths.
While Daugherty may be the most egregious, she is not alone in violating the city’s building codes for years on end. And the suit against her may be the beginning of the end for a number of problematic landlords’ illicit operations — not just hers.
“There are a handful of landlords in the city of St. Louis who know how to make money off this process, make so much money that they don’t care what happens as far as enforcement goes,” says John McLaughlin, a former police officer who is now a program manager with the Nuisance and Problem Properties Unit of the city’s Building Division
Among the things these landlords don’t seem to care too much about is having warrants out for their arrest. For some, the heat is just the cost of doing business.