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Under the big oaks at Heritage House Apartments, the aging, run-down complex that has posed an eyesore for decades at the intersection of Summit and East Cone, it's 92 in the shade.

Still, hell is freezing over.

Irene Agapion-Palamaris, 38, heir apparent to father Bill Agapion's low-rent empire, has arrived. To the surprise of immigrant tenants who say they complained fruitlessly for years about these units, their landlord is here to check on repairs.

In a pinch-me-if-I'm-dreaming moment for Greensboro, the worm has turned. Ironically, however, it's not entirely because of the new powers granted to city housing inspectors.

In fact, as of the end of June, five years into what supporters touted as a proactive new ordinance, inspectors had no plan for one of the city's most conspicuous examples of blight. Officials were meanwhile unaware that a majority of the units still had rotting floors and electrical problems.

No, the end of a 45-year game of cat and mouse over this property has been forced, the owner concedes, by a more competitive market. Not to mention a different view of public relations.

"My father never cared about what other people said," Agapion-Palamaris said, "but I so do. I don't want to be the poster for 'The New Slumlord.'"

Observers who have watched Bill Agapion's legal jousting with the city - and gradual domination of the low-end rental market - were skeptical in the fall when his daughter and son accepted a "Most Improved Landlord" award from Agapion's former adversary, the private nonprofit Greensboro Housing Coalition.

In some ways, the numbers justify the laurel. Agapion-Palamaris, oldest of the Arco founder's four children, was among the first landlords to seek the city's certificate of occupancy. The five-year permit denotes a higher standard of maintenance before a unit can be rented out and is designed to close the hit-or-miss loopholes of housing code enforcement.

The family's Arco Realty (formerly AAA Realty), with a tax value of $30 million in real estate holdings in Guilford County alone, has now passed 275 of the comprehensive inspections and, in the past year, brought 16 substandard homes in the city up to code, 10 of them single-family rentals.

'It slipped through the cracks'

But there remains the other side of the coin: the shoddy legacy of Heritage House Apartments. The 42-unit complex, which since 1992 has mostly housed Montagnard refugees from Vietnam, has a history of hundreds of major code violations that have continued unabated since Bill Agapion bought the complex in 1963.

And with only five months remaining before the deadline for every rental property in the city to be inspected under the new law, it was business as usual at the three dilapidated buildings in plain sight of one of the city's busiest intersections.

"It slipped through the cracks," inspection supervisor Lori Loosemore said in late June during a visit to Heritage House requested by the News & Record. "This would be a good candidate to take before the Housing Commission and get whole buildings under inspection."

Although both Agapion-Palamaris and the city inspector responsible for that neighborhood cited poor communication on the part of immigrant tenants as an obstacle, four units had been condemned in June in direct response to individual tenant complaints that had dragged on for three years.

Moreover, when inspector Rodney Covington met with the News & Record at the complex, other tenants eagerly invited him into apartment after apartment, showing him crumbling bath tiles, broken front doors, stoves and overhead fixtures that didn't work, eaves set to collapse.

"It's a piece of work," Covington said, scribbling a list of violations on his clipboard after leaving a unit where a family with two children resides, the living room decorated for a 10th birthday party.

"This is the most cooperation I've had. I'll be here till 6:30 tonight."

Likewise, when Agapion-Palamaris agreed to meet at the complex, tenants had no trouble complaining, albeit in sparse English.

"We're calling Arco, and they say, 'Yes, yes, yes, we will fix next time,'" said Y Bhung Hmok, 68, a Montagnard who has lived in his Heritage apartment for 14 years.

"They never fix."

Deteriorating conditions at the complex are highly visible, even to the casual passerby. Broken windows, abandoned cars and doors hanging off hinges are a common sight; so is spray-paint graffiti, quickly painted over by Arco work crews.

In June, no fewer than nine of the units were boarded up - on the advice, Agapion-Palamaris said, of police warning of vandalism. In one case, recalled Arco property manager Johnny Stovall, a tenant was taking a bath when the water stopped running. The reason: Thieves stole the copper pipes.

'They happened to be last'

Yet the overall picture is hardly of recent vintage. In 1970 - the year Agapion-Palamaris was born - a group of tenants marched past Agapion's South Elm office holding a sign: "When does this city plan to do something?"

The answer, presumably, was 2004, when the clock began ticking on the comprehensive citywide inspections. Why then, as of this summer, hadn't the efforts reached Summit and Cone, the glaring bull's-eye of the target?

The city's engineering chief and a key proponent of the new occupancy permit law, Butch Simmons, said the order of the inspections was random.

"They happened to be last," Simmons said of Agapion's Heritage House. "They could have been first."

When pressed on the question, however, Simmons said the city was wary of focusing on specific landlords, even those who were the very impetus for the new law.

"We didn't want to start the process singling out certain people," Simmons said.

So during the delay, tenants continued to live in unsanitary and unsafe conditions. For example, the elderly Hmok's rotten bathroom floor threatened to give way into his kitchen, which he tries to keep clean but which is infested with roaches.

Across the courtyard, when not at her job at Southern Foods, Hmuin Rcom tends a vegetable garden out back, as do her fellow Montagnard neighbors. Rcom's 3-year-old daughter plays in the garden, riding her scooter and using a toy watering can.

The problem? In late June, a field test requested by the News & Record of peeling paint directly over the garden revealed the presence of lead in a previous layer of paint. But according to the Health Department, unless a blood test shows a child to have high lead levels, the agency cannot act.

When crews scraped off the paint and redid the exterior wall in July, Agapion-Palamaris said, workers used special fabric to catch paint chips, then borrowed the Housing Coalition's special vacuum cleaner to remove possible lead dust.

But the lead paint specialist for the Housing Coalition, Willena Cannon, said Arco never borrowed the "hypervac" for that job and requested it only weeks later.

Meanwhile, on a return visit in mid-July to the vegetable patch where Rcom grows tomatoes and melon squash, the dirt between the plants was speckled with paint chips of different colors and layers. Spot tests on the chips did not show lead. At adjoining buildings, drop cloths full of paint chips had been left strewn on the grass, and paint chips littered the yard.

Predating the 1978 residential ban on lead paint, Heritage House is among Arco's last remaining apartment complexes in the city. With a tax value of $1 million, the property is deeded to Bill Agapion, though his children have largely taken over day-to-day operations.

Arco's Cedar Street apartments, which partly burned in 2005, were the subject of a 2006 out-of-court settlement by Agapion with a Montagnard tenant whose daughter had lead poisoning and potential brain damage. That same year, a judge upheld the demolition of the infamous cinder block homes Agapion owned on Guerrant Street.

Agapion-Palamaris maintains that her father did not deliberately create blight, but became overextended. That gave rise, she argues, to slipshod repairs by dishonest contractors.

"Anytime you have a contractor who says, 'Don't worry,' you should worry," Agapion-Palamaris said. "He had taken on so much property and so much responsibility, it was virtually impossible."

A changing rental market

Bill Agapion, an attorney who married the daughter of a Greek Orthodox priest, set up business with his brother and sister in the 1950s.

During urban renewal and white flight, Agapion bought up hundreds of properties. According to tax records, these are now divided between his children, who found themselves landlords of record before they even graduated from college.

Agapion-Palamaris said the rental market has changed - less because of regulation than competition. At the same time that there was a glut of apartments, investors abandoned the stock market for real estate. Tenants could shop around.

Arco's current formula for rehabbing aging, modestly priced single-family homes as investments is simple: Redo the yard, put in replacement doors, floors and plumbing, then find a reliable tenant who won't damage the property.

"They didn't call me for awhile. They checked my references," said tenant Linda Owen, a nurse tech who rents an old refurbished Arco house near Washington Elementary. "For $650 a month, you can't beat it."

But what happens to the $400-a-month tenant who rents the run-down unit in the high-crime area at Summit and Cone? Can Arco fix it up and keep the rent low?

"It's not impossible," Agapion-Palamaris said. "It's just difficult."

In early July, after repeated inquiries by the News & Record, inspections supervisors informed Arco that they would ask a city rental advisory board to withhold any occupancy permits on Heritage House until the entire complex was repaired.

A week later, Rcom had a new front door. Her neighbor Sui Yem's ceiling was fixed, and the family had a new stove that works - though not in time for the 10-year-old's birthday party.

In the last building, where the elderly Hmok has lived since coming to the U.S. 14 years ago, the bathroom was fixed last week. Kitchen repairs are under way.

"This time, they fixed it," the former prisoner of war said Friday.

"It's good. I'm happy."

Contact Lorraine Ahearn at 373-7334 or lorraine.ahearn@news-record.com