Talk about rubbish neighbors.
A home buried under mountains of garbage has enraged residents of an affluent Los Angeles community.
“It’s a fire hazard. It’s filthy,” Miriam Kosberg, whose family owns the property directly behind the Fairfax dumping ground since 1955, told the Los Angeles Times.
The median price range for the Fairfax section of LA is $3.42 million, according to Realtor.com.
“There’s garbage all the way up to the back fence. It’s been like that for years,” Kosberg added.
The lawn is barely visible under the sea of white trash bags, newspapers, clothing and cartons of cigarettes, residents complained.
Meanwhile, a putrid odor has been emanating from the home, leaving neighbors concerned about what may lurk beneath the overgrown vegetation and accumulated debris.
“It’s unsanitary,” a woman who has lived in the neighborhood for more than two decades, told the publication anonymously.
The woman revealed that she’d complained about the property since the early 2000s.
And since July, the Department of Building and Safety has fielded dozens of complaints that remain under investigation, city records revealed. An order to comply was also issued in November.
“We are fed up, but we’re compassionate. In a perfect world, he gets help and someone helps make his environment nicer for him,” she said of the property’s owner.
On Wednesday, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, joined by Councilwoman Katy Yaroslavsky, who represents Fairfax, traveled to the home declaring it a “public health emergency.”
“Both of us, as you know, are new. I am tracking this from last night to find out where complaints were lodged and what happened in the process,” Bass added.
Raymond Gaon has owned the property since mid-1990, according to public records.
He was ordered to remove the garbage in 2014 and three years later, the city filed two misdemeanor criminal charges for noncompliance before the case was dismissed in 2019.