The landlord of a vacant apartment on Dartmouth Street complied with a court order to immediately fix code and fire safety problems, according to the city.
A building codes inspector and an official from the Planning & Urban Development department spent about 15 minutes on Tuesday morning inside the apartment owned by Gregory Nisbet, whose management of the two-unit apartment building on Dartmouth Street has been under scrutiny since an apartment building he owned on Noyes Street burned in a fire that killed six people in November.
The inspectors found that Nisbet met a court-ordered deadline to fix certain violations by the end of the day Monday.
City officials will return for another inspection next week to check on repairs to the electrical systems that the judge ordered him to have completed by next Monday.
The city got a restraining order from the court a month ago to keep tenants out of the apartment at 188 Dartmouth St., which was deemed uninhabitable. On Monday, a judge approved an agreement between the city and Nisbet that called for him to correct some problems at the building by the end of the business day.
The agreement required Nisbet to remove locks placed on individual rooms, clean up garbage and other debris, ensure smoke detectors are working, install a sprinkler head and provide a list of current tenants to the city by 5 p.m. that same day.
Locks on individual bedroom doors can be an indication that an apartment building is being operated as a rooming house, which requires a special city license and additional fire protections.
Tenants continue to live in the adjacent apartment at 186 Dartmouth St. The agreement requires all tenants to be screened and to sign written leases that are provided to the city.
While Nisbet faces a city crackdown on the Dartmouth Street building, he also is facing at least four wrongful death lawsuits and is under investigation for possible criminal charges because of the fire and allegations that the Noyes Street building lacked working smoke detectors and had an exit blocked by debris.
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