Hi
In May this year, I entered into a commercial lease for a house I
own. The
tenant is a non-profit orginization that works with local doctors
and law
enforcement agencies to help abused children. Their main source
of funding
is the county government.
Like I said the lease was signed in May, now I recieve a letter
from the
county's attorney saying that the city code officer has found
things with
the house that have to be corrected because we are changing the
premises
from a residence to a commercial building. The worst of these is
handicapp
access to the 2nd floor.
This is generally an ADA problem. Our local downtown district
(small town -- 36,000 people) has dozens of relatively small
two-story commercial buildings in which the second story must now go
unused because of the cost of installing an elevator for each of
them. Instead of providing benefit to the disabled, ADA
requirements have simply resulted in several hundred thousand square
feet of prime commercial property going to waste. (It ain't just
WalMart that's killing small town businesses...)
A few years ago, I assisted a friend of mine -- a psychologist -- in
remodeling a house to serve as an office. Despite the fact that in
28 years of practice he's never had a client who was disabled, he
had to install ramps, extra-wide doors, and remodel the bathroom for
wheelchair accessibility.
Since I'm assuming that you aren't particularly interested in
spending a hundred thousand or so for an elevator, can you lease
just the downstairs portion of the house to them? That would reduce
your upgrade expenses to the five-figure range for installing ramps,
widening doors and remodeling the bathrooms.
Eliyahu
