Marie Joiner has invested a small fortune and a lot of time converting an old house and garage on Magnolia Street in the downtown district into charming cottages surrounded with white picket fencing and flowering hedges. But her tolerance of the growing blight conditions on neighboring properties tarnishing her jewel has reached an end.

After getting nowhere after appealing to property owners to clean up the properties, she’s rattling City Hall to do something. 

“I built this beautiful house, updated everything downtown, I’ve got this beautiful little venue going on and I just feel like I’m in south Modesto,” said Joiner, owner and broker of Bella Casa Realty.

On June 5 she filed a request for the Ceres Code Enforcement Unit to take action to abate debris in neighbor’s yards, an abandoned box truck sitting in front of house, large trailers towering above backyard fences and trucks the size of a moving van parked on residential lots. She also sent emails to the mayor and vice mayor and heard nothing back. On Monday she took her complaints directly to the Ceres City Council. At the same meeting, Shane Parson spoke up and said he’s tired of seeing pop-up sales and illegal vendors all over Ceres competing with businesses which pay for licenses.

Since the city has a complaint driven code enforcement process, Joiner is hoping her complaints will get the city to take action. But she also questions why nobody from the city has flagged the blatant code enforcement problems a stone’s throw from the Ceres Library, the Ceres Community Center where the City Council meets, Ceres Police Department and Ceres City Hall.

Joiner shares offices with her husband’s company, Luxury Limousine, in a former residential home at 2307 Magnolia Street. She also turned a former garage and studio apartment into a gathering venue she calls DeLorenzi Cellar Events center even though no alcohol is served. The backyard also has been an oasis for weddings but the conditions right over the fence is fast becoming a detriment to her renting out her facility for weddings.

“It doesn’t feel safe,” said Joiner. “Their properties bring down the area and personally affect the value of my property. I have taken pride in my property over the years by updating it and making it the best looking house in the downtown area of Ceres.”

The proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back was when the Third Street neighbor to the north began parking a large moving van sized truck in their shared driveway to the rear. At one point she had to put up a sign because neighbors parked and blocked her driveway. Its size disrupts the residential feel, aside from the possible illegal signage with it being emblazoned with large letters in Spanish advertising a website for farm workers to seek compensation for working with dangerous pesticides. Joiner believes that zoning laws don’t permit the parking of large commercial vehicles.

After speaking to at least one owner of the rental homes and getting no results – even offering to buy them to fix up – she fired off a letter last to the city calling attention to the problems.

“My property is surrounded by a junkyard to the left on Magnolia directly next to my property and an ‘industrial park’ directly behind my property on Third Street,” said wrote. “There is a big box truck in the driveway and across the street from them, there are several semi-tractor trailers in their backyard along with a broken down van in their front yard. This is a commercial / residential area not an industrial park or a junkyard.”

The three properties are across the street to the $9 million investment the city made in the Ceres Community Center. It’s an area of downtown where the city should “shine,” she said, but can’t for the dead grass and junk strewn yards.

“These three properties are also bringing down the area and are a fire hazard with dry grass as a front lawn.”

Examples of the blight include:

• A yard with a partially covered abandoned vehicle, car parts and trash strewn about the yard at 2311 Magnolia Street;

• A discarded refrigerator and other discarded items sitting on a porch at 2544 Third Street;

• Dead front lawns at 2712 Fourth Street and 2720 Fourth Street.

• Discarded couches scattered in dead grass at 2504 Fifth Street.

• An abandoned and inoperable box truck, several big-rig trailers and trash cans in full view at 2545 Third Street adjacent to a professional office complex.

“You’ve got this beautiful Community Center right here and then you’ve got (Sarbit) Athwal’s crap across the street with those other three homes with dead grass,” said Joiner. “Why doesn’t the city take and buy all these properties up around here and make it really nice down here?”

Joiner said she has offered to buy Athwal’s properties “but he does nothing.”

Joiner bought her properties in 2008 for her kids to live in and updated it in 2015. Since that time, as renters have changed, the blight seems to increase, she said.

She plans to add brick veneer to the retaining wall on her frontage but thinks the neighborhood has “sucked all the beauty out of it by all the junk around it.”