(Radio Iowa) – Sioux City officials have given a California company six months to either make repairs to a Sioux City apartment building or sell the property. There are 91 units in the Luma Heights apartment building, but only a dozen were still occupied this week when Sioux City Building Inspectors declared the building unsafe.

The remaining tenants were told to move out by noon today (Friday). Darrel Bullock is the Code Enforcement Manager for the City of Sioux City. He says there were significant concerns about emergency exits if there was a fire in the building.

“The fire suppression systems are not even in place in a lot of areas, fire notification systems are not operable,” he says. Bullock says tenants have filed several complaints about the building over the past few years.

“Probably a little less than a year ago I would imagine they actually closed the upper floors. There’s been problems with the heat system in that for a number of years. The upper floors last year were not able to get heat last year,” Bullock says. “…Going into this heating season, there’s no good source for heat in the building.”

Bullock says some windows in the building are broken and haven’t been replaced, the building’s owner failed to get permits for dismantling some of the apartments — and some of the people working on the building were not licensed.

“So we have a whole litany of issues and unfortunately if comes to a point where we just have to look at the safety the community, the safety of people that live there or are visiting people that are in that building and make sure that they have somewhere safe to go,” Bullock says.

The apartment complex was built in 1920 and was sold in May of last year for three-point-two MILLION dollars.