Neighbors frustrated with ‘massive hole’ in southeast Charlotte, owner working to fix issue

“The main issue is there’s a 12-foot drop off, and it’s totally unprotected,” said John Willis about a massive hole in the backyard of a Cliffside Drive home. He lives near it and has to drive by the property every day. 

He says it’s something he and other neighbors have been working to get the city to fix for over a year. 

“The other issue is that there’s a foot-and-a-half of standing water down there,” Willis said. “I’ve contacted code enforcement, and they came out rather quickly, and they are saying that there’s not a whole lot of code violations. And in fact, with this 12-foot drop off in the pond, there is no code violation.”

Willis says health department officials also told him the standing water wasn’t a code violation, but they treated the water and emptied other buckets that could be breeding grounds for mosquitoes.

Willis says it’s frustrating that the city and code enforcement won’t do anything else.

“I don’t understand why they cannot pass some type of rule or regulation. The permits code enforcement to do something about this situation,” Willis continued. 

We called the homeowner, Eric Navarrette. He claims a shady contractor left the property in its current condition before asking for more money, then disappeared.

“This has cost us so much. And believe me, this is not something that we want. We’re not these types of people. If there was something we could have done this ourselves, we would have. But we had to finance the money, and we had to rely on somebody else to do the job,” Navarrette said. 

Navarrette says, last month, Charlotte code enforcement officials gave them a 90-day notice to get the property under control or the house would come down.

He says he comes out three days a week to work on the property.

“We don’t want to just bring it up to code. We were wanting to have a neighborhood that they could all be proud of that brings everybody else’s property values up and that where we can start to rebuild the friendships,” Navarrette said. 

Olde Heritage neighbors say their city councilman, Ed Driggs, told them the city would discuss the housing situation during a July city council meeting. 

Queen City News emailed Driggs and code enforcement for comment; we did not receive a response back.