For Cori Modisett, the long fall of 1704 Westover Rd. began 19 years ago when she parked in front of the house and saw a rat in the yard dart across the street in broad daylight.

Modisett, who lives across the street, watched things grow worse over the years. Rats, raccoons and possums flourished at her neighbor’s home. Paint peeled. Wood rotted. Dead tree branches littered the yard.

It took almost two decades and four years of code enforcement action before Austin’s Building and Standards Commission voted at its May meeting to demolish the house. And it’s still not over. It could be six months or longer before the vacant house is torn down.

When a dilapidated building seems unsafe, neighbors expect the city to do something: force the owner to fix it up, condemn it, something. But what residents can encounter instead is bureaucracy full of violation notices and warnings and legal action that amounts to nothing tangible for the people living nearby.

It’s a process that must balance property owner rights, neighborhood complaints and community safety hazards.

More than 1,500 pages of city records show four years of inspections, court actions and sporadic contact with the owner, Polly Nance. Documents indicate she rarely returned calls or texts.

But after an hourlong conversation with Nance in November 2025, city inspector Erica Thompson wrote in the case log that the homeowner “was appalled to know the condition in which this property is currently in.”

Nance told the city she had not been to the 1,890-square-foot house in years.

Thompson later told the Building and Standards Commission that Nance lives six hours away and “stated she’s an elderly, disabled woman and has no way of returning to the property to care for it. She stated she did not want to sell due to sentimental value and doesn’t have the means to clean or repair the property.”

Nance, who spoke to Austin Current, rejects the city’s narrative that she has been unresponsive. She says in four years, she’s received two phone calls and one letter from inspectors. Health problems and finances have kept her from attending to the property the way she wanted, she said.

She insists the city did not communicate well with her.

“They had my email address, my phone number,” Nance said. “I mean, I’m not hiding from anybody. I’m simply not.”

Now her house is slated for demolition. Her neighbors say it’s long overdue.

‘This is an ongoing problem’

Nance’s 1939 house sits on a dead end street. To the west, just a few homes down, stands MoPac Expressway. Not far to the northeast are Central Market and Ascension Seton Medical Center Austin.

This is Bryker Woods, a Central Austin neighborhood where houses — many revamped bungalows originally built in the 1930s and 1940s — typically list for more than $1 million. Even in its current state, Nance’s house is valued at $1.2 million, according to the Travis Central Appraisal District.

Nance said she moved out of the home in 2008 to care for her mother in Pecos. Her son lived in the Westover home for a while, she said, adding that she paid people to care for the property over the years.

But frustrated neighbors have struggled for years with the run-down condition of the home, Modisett said. It was an eyesore, yes, but the real problem was vermin coming from Nance’s property onto theirs.

The problem escalated over the last five years, when neighbors spotted more and more vermin coming from the home, Modisett said. They turned to the city’s Code Compliance team for help.

The first complaint noted in the voluminous case file: Feb. 8, 2022.

The file doesn’t note the specific grievance but says, “Caller (advised) this is an ongoing problem.”

The case landed on the desk of then-city inspector Mitchell Alvarez who arrived at the Westover Road home the next day. The house seemed vacant, he noted in his file. A section of the wooden fence appeared broken. But the home seemed structurally sound.

In March, the inspector did a follow-up inspection and issued Nance a citation for the broken fence and a siding violation.

Monthly follow up inspections continued. The violations remained. The inspector documented that he kept trying to reach Nance, with limited success.

Nance denies that. She agrees she spoke with an inspector who told her she needed to repair the house. But when she asked for photos, she said, the shots were too far away to tell what needed to be done.

“(The inspector) said, ‘Well, just send someone over and we’ll meet him. (We’ll) talk about it,’” she said. “I wrote him back. I said, ‘I don’t know what you need. If you will send me better pictures so I can see, then I will.’ Well, I never got any more pictures and then I forgot about it. For a long time, I didn’t hear from him. I mean, probably over a year.”

When homeowners don’t fix problems, the city has three enforcement avenues, said Stephanie Sánchez, spokeswoman for Austin Development Services They can turn to the Building and Standards Commission, hold an administrative hearing or go to municipal court.

In the months and years after Nance’s first violation, the city made more phone calls, sent certified letters. It held administrative hearings to discuss the case and possible solutions.

Between March 9, 2022 and Feb. 25, 2025 the city conducted 33 followup inspections at the house.

The city took the case to municipal court in 2024. Nance did not show up. A judge issued a warrant for her arrest.

By August 2025, tall trees had grown into the porch area, but the front yard was mowed. Broken tree limbs leaned against the house and power lines. A tree had fallen into the neighbors yard. The electrical box no longer had a meter.

The turning point came in November 2025.

The front door broke.

Behind the broken door

On Nov. 21, 2025, Inspector Erica Thompson obtained a search warrant to inspect the property. When she tried to post the warrant on the front door, it popped open. It would not stay shut.

Standing on the porch, Thompson finally saw through the open door what lay inside the Westover Road home. Piles of boxes. Chemicals. Trash. Furniture. Household goods. Exposed insulation hung from the ceiling.

A city contractor boarded up the front door. Thompson contacted Nance. They talked for an hour.

Nance was appalled to hear about the condition of the property, but she wanted to avoid city intervention, documents state. She just didn’t know how, telling Thompson that she uses a wheelchair bound and had no one to help her.

In January, because the house was a health hazard, the city cleared out the home. The piles of boxes and debris disappeared, exposing animal droppings, mold, dead leaves and dirt. Rotting food remained in the refrigerator. But under all that, something else became clear.

This was once a real home. Paintings of bluebonnets and landscapes hung from the wall. There was a piano, a couch, a table and chairs. Neatly folded towels laid on a bathroom shelf.

A sticker on a filing cabinet read, “Be a good neighbor. Be a designated driver.”

Neighbors make their case

In May, four years after the first complaint was logged in the code compliance file, case number 2026-013540 came before the Building and Standards Commission.

The question before them: Should they demolish the house on 1704 Westover Road?

One by one, neighbors spoke before the commission, urging them to do it.

An 11-year-old girl spoke up.

“I have a tiny Yorkie named Max. I’m worried one of the wild animals is going to attack him and kill him because he’s so small.”

Commissioners considered saving the property. No one with the city had spoken to Nance in months. What if she had died, one commissioner asked? What if a relative stepped forward to claim it?

But ultimately, commissioners voted unanimously to demolish the house. The city will send the bill to Nance.

After the meeting, neighbors were ecstatic, Modisett said. But they’re staying vigilant. They now have to wait for another layer of bureaucracy to play out before the building comes down.

It will take six months, probably longer, to take down the house. The city will need to jump through more legal hoops, budget the money, get permits and schedule the demolition.

“We will stay on top of them,” Modisett said.

A city spokeswoman said Nance has not contested the demolition.

Nance doesn’t accept that. She says she has plans for the property, though she won’t detail them publicly. After all the years, the mountains of city paperwork, the hearings, the neighbor complaints, the emails and phone calls she says she didn’t get, Nance still wants her house standing.

The city plans to demolish it sometime after October.