Wichita Airbnb where killing occurred to face shutdown order; city may tighten rules
A Crown Heights house where a man was shot to death at a party early Sunday morning was an unlicensed bed and breakfast, operated in violation of city code and will be ordered shut down, city officials said.
The incident could lead to tighter rules on vacation-style online rentals across Wichita.
City Manager Robert Layton said Tuesday that once the current situation is dealt with, he plans to put together a multi-departmental task force to consider rewriting regulations for temporary rental of rooms or homes as B&Bs.
“We do not want to discourage shared-economy initiatives in the area, but at the same time we need to keep neighborhoods safe (and) to prevent these rentals from becoming party houses,” Layton said.
The shooting at 254 N. Battin was literally a rude awakening for neighbors who had no idea that the house was a rental lodging advertised at the online site Airbnb and open to whoever wanted to pay to stay.
“At 2:45 in the morning . . . I just heard this bang, bang, bang, bang,” said Kent Mix, who lives in a home where he grew up across the street. “I slid right off the bed and hit the floor. I grabbed my old grandfather’s pistol and ran to the front door, cracked the door just a little bit, and it was bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, more shots and so I closed the door immediately.
“Then I opened the door again a couple inches and I could hear running and I could hear people yelling and I heard voices saying ‘We gotta get out of here!’ Then I heard cars driving off real fast.”
By the time police arrived, the only person left at the property was a man killed in the shooting, said police homicide Sgt. Dan Harty. Three others “showed up at the hospital with gunshot wounds” shortly thereafter.
On Monday, Harty, a detective and a state trooper with a police dog searched the yard for clues. There is evidence of gang involvement and witnesses have been difficult to locate and/or uncooperative, Harty said.
Police spokesman Charley Davidson on Tuesday identified the man who was shot to death as Elijah Davis, 20, of Wichita.
Since the shooting, someone has placed a makeshift memorial of flowers and large devotional candles at the corner of the yard.
City Hall spokeswoman Megan Lovely said the B&B operation was run in violation of the city’s zoning code, which requires a hotel/motel license for any rentals offered to the public for less than seven days at a time.
Another section of the zoning code identifies B&Bs as an allowed use in single-family residential zones, but only with a conditional use permit.
The owners of the house, Catharine “Cat” Lonc and her brother Edward Soptic, will be served with a violation notice ordering them to cease and desist operating a B&B at the site. If they don’t comply, the case could be referred to Municipal Court where they could face a $500 fine, six months in jail, or both, Lovely said.
Lonc did not return two messages seeking comment left at her primary business, The Teahouse at Clifton Square.
County property records show Lonc and Soptic purchased the home, valued at $261,510, in late September. The tax bills are mailed to Lonc’s home on Peckham Court in an upscale area of northeast Wichita.
Neighbors noticed substantial renovations taking place at the Battin house and said Lonc implied she planned to move into it with her daughter when it was finished. Among the visible improvements were fresh paint on the house and fence, along with decorative spiral topiaries on the front porch.
“We were excited and still are that (Lonc) had remodeled that house and it looks so nice,” Mix said. “It looks like the original house when I was a boy” in the 1960s.
But “Unbeknownst to me and probably a lot of people here on this street, she was turning it into an Airbnb house,” he said.
Neighbor Chuck Petersen said he was also delighted with the improvements to the house and got to know Lonc well enough to notify her when the pipes froze in the winter. She gave him the door code and he shut the water off.
He said the house couldn’t have been rented on Airbnb before March because the interior wasn’t finished and the water had done damage when he was inside in mid February.
Like Mix, he said Lonc never told him she planned to use it as a B&B.
“If we had known about it, we would have been a little more vigilant of things,” he said.
He said he’s since learned that Lonc has another B&B house a few blocks away. County and state records show the other house, on Parkwood, belongs to Crown Heights Holdings LLC, a company Lonc formed in February 2020.
Mix, retired after 33 years in the hotel business with Residence Inn and Best Western, said he’s troubled by having transient guests staying across the street.
Online B&B rentals can take several forms. Some are rented rooms in owner-occupied houses, some are rented out while residents are away and some are full-time rental properties.
In Wichita, about 50 properties a day are offered on Airbnb, with more available through other web sites.
Airbnb advertises that it runs limited background checks on renters when it has sufficient information to do so.
However, that doesn’t always happen and the checks only cover the person renting the B&B, not any guests they may invite, according to the company’s web site.
This story was originally published April 14, 2021 at 5:01 AM.
