From Pines to The Arbor Place: Auburn apartments undergo makeover

Published 6:42 pm Wednesday, October 19, 2011

It was, Daniel Stoner recalled, “like a bomb went off in here.”

A bomb that left its revolting residue of graffiti on the walls, moldering lumps of leftover food, rodents, lice … and things too fierce to mention at the Auburn Pines Apartment at 505 N. Division Street.

“The place was so full of mold and garbage, it was incredible,” Mayor Pete Lewis said of his first look. “I was invited into every single unit because they kept saying, ‘Come over here, come over here.’ It was awful.

“In Apartment 13, the windows were broken out and they had boards in there,” Lewis said. “The kitchen was saturated with grease. We opened up the dishwasher, and there were white lice hopping all over us.”

Lewis and Stoner, the new owner of the dilapidated apartment complex, had seen enough.

The City closed the four-building apartment complex in the summer of 2010 and helped residents find new and better places to stay while the repairs it had ordered the owners to do went on.

What a difference two years, energetic new owners, and $800,000 worth of improvements have made.

Today everything, from the paint to the carpet, from the cupboards and appliances, is new, looks new, smells new.

“Completely awesome,” Nancy Wyatt, president and COO of the Auburn Area Chamber of Commerce, said on a recent tour.

The turning point in the complex’s fortunes arrived when Stoner’s company – Parkstone Properties – bought the Pines in bankruptcy proceedings. One of the first things Stoner did — change the name from the infamous “Pines” to The Arbor Place.

“We did a lot of due diligence, went through all four buildings, inside and out to determine the scope of the problems,” Stoner said. “And we determined that the vast majority of it was cosmetic issues that we were able to remediate easily, and we spent the summer repairing and renovating. There were no structural issues. We had to replace one roof, but nothing other than that.

“We found all sorts of problems that my construction workers enjoyed cleaning up,” Stoner added with a wry smile.

Parkstone made considerable upgrades to energy efficiency, leading to a much more affordable electrical bill of $20 a month, Stoner said.

“We want to provide good quality workforce housing for the Auburn area,” Stoner said. “This is close to the downtown, provides people access to the Sounder, and community college students access to the college. We provide affordable, nice, quality housing.”

Forty apartments are distributed among the three buildings, including 20 in the first phase at the south end. Work will soon begin in earnest on the two buildings in phase 2.

It’s an emotional issue for Lewis.

“I took it very personally. When my wife and I started out, we were poor, meaning we didn’t have a lot of money, but we never lived any place where we weren’t safe. And the idea that we would have it here just ticks me off,” Lewis said.