The ladder was erected next to the apartment building where a fire broke out in the Bronx, New York City last month, which killed 17 people and injured dozens.
Yuki Iwamura / AP
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The ladder was erected next to the apartment building where a fire broke out in the Bronx, New York City last month, which killed 17 people and injured dozens.
Yuki Iwamura / AP
Kathleen Hernandez, her fiance and his family, moved into what they consider to be their dream rental home in June 2020 in Las Vegas. Their nightmare began a month later.
“The bathroom downstairs overflowed, twice,” Hernandez said. A few weeks later, she added, “I noticed this foul and dirty water coming out of our front yard. It was sewage. You could see toilet paper coming out of the pipes.”
She said her landlord is Progress Civil LLC, but Pretium Partners LLC is also listed on the property’s records as having equity shares. Hernandez didn’t know that. “No wonder I don’t know who to contact,” she said.
She said that the sewage problem is still not fixed. “It comes and goes. We try to avoid using the bathroom downstairs.”
“We’ve never had a rent delay, even though our rent went up last June when we renewed our lease,” she said. “But a lot of things in the house broke – the dishwasher didn’t work, the upstairs shower didn’t work, we didn’t use the waste for fear it would break and we would be held accountable.”
The lease says that the landlord is responsible for fixing the larger items, but Hernandez says the company is not interested in fixing the problems.
NPR contacted Progress Civil’s communications office via email, but received no response.
Hernandez is a member of Rising National Tenant’s Association of Tenantsa union of people living in company-owned properties.
On Tuesday, Hernandez shared her story at a US Senate Committee hearing on banking, housing and urban issues, along with six other tenants. People talk about living in “dangerous conditions”, “flooded basements”, “constantly rising rents”, “threats to evict” and landlords are experts at “exploiting legal loopholes”. .
But Joel Griffith disagrees. He is a research fellow with the Institute of Economic Freedom and Opportunity at The Heritage Foundation, a Washington, DC-based think tank.
He wrote in an email.
“Tenants enjoy thorough legal protections against illegal evictions and unsafe living conditions,” he said. “One of the biggest concerns is that cities make it difficult for landlords to evict tenants that are eroding the quality of life of their neighbors.”
Grifftih will testify at the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs today, Thursday, after Tuesday’s session.
Company owners derive value from their buildings
Ellen Davidson is a housing attorney for the Legal Aid Association in New York City, where 66% of households are renters. Davidson says that LLCs, or limited liability company models, are used by large corporations to protect themselves from liability.
“It is very difficult to complain to landlords about repairs because tenants are retaliated against for essentially demanding safe and decent places for themselves and their children,” she said.
She added, “The government should focus on building, developing, finding safe, decent and affordable housing.”
Davidson said business owners often underestimate the value of a building. “You raise rents, you cut costs as much as possible, which often means delayed maintenance, neglect, no repairs, making buildings more dangerous, breaking the rules, no solve heat problems,” she said.
Last month’s deadly fire in the Bronx in New York that left 17 people dead and dozens injured has highlighted the concerns of housing advocates. Many say that partially government-funded real estate transactions guarantee enrichment for some homeowners, while little attention has been paid to ensuring these housing units are secure.
The Bronx fire was started by a malfunctioning portable space heater in an apartment, and it spread largely due to a broken safety door, according to the Commissioner of New York Fire Department Daniel Nigro, according to New York Fire Commissioner Daniel Nigro. New York Fire Department.
Mamadou Wague, their wife and eight children live in the apartment where the fire started, and like many other residents, they are immigrants from West Africa. Wague said NPR that the family used portable heaters because the apartment was cold and difficult to sleep.
The country is in the midst of a housing shortage, especially affordable housing, both lease and home ownership. According to the National Association of Realtors, one in 65 households has an affordable listing, and a shortage is driving prices up.
The Chairman of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, Senator Sherrod Brown, of Ohio, during a hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington in 2021.
Manuel Balce Ceneta / AP
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The Chairman of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, Senator Sherrod Brown, of Ohio, during a hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington in 2021.
Manuel Balce Ceneta / AP
U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH), chairman of the Senate panel, has held a series of hearings on housing and corporate owners in recent years. In 2020, he called on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the largest government-funded housing donor. In one letter With CEO Hugh Frater, Brown expressed concern about giant private equity firms buying low-priced buildings in bulk for a profit.
“More and more wealthy investors with big pockets are buying homes that underpin families,” he wrote. “They see these buildings as nothing more than an annual return on equity.”
Tenants fight to protect their rights
Joseph Donahue, an attorney with the Donahue Law Firm of Annapolis, is a co-advisor in a class action lawsuit filed in the United States District Court for Maryland last summer against Arbor Realty Trust Inc. and its subsidiaries.
The Arbor Realty Trust owns the Bedford and Victoria Station complex, a multi-family residence in Langley Park, a densely populated residential area in Hyattsville, Md. An edited complaint was submitted last month.
According to the complaint, Arbor controls about 139 multifamily developments with approximately 17,000 units across 12 states.
“If the government is going to lend money to these giant corporations, who are publicly traded in many cases, they need to make sure that the conditions of the assets are safe,” he said. .
Company owners are not accountable, Donahue said.
The Bedford Complex and Victoria Station are managed by Ross company. NPR made several calls and left messages to Ross’ public relations office in Bethesda seeking comment. NPR had no response.
NPR has also contacted Bedford and Victoria Station apartments for comment on Juan Cuellar’s testimony on Tuesday about unsafe living conditions. The company declined to comment.
“The government doesn’t fully understand how bad this industry is taking advantage of people and then increasing their rent year after year,” said Donahue.
The lawsuit alleges violations of the Fair Housing Act, including intentional discrimination on the basis of race and national origin.
During the Great Recession of 2008, more than 3.7 million households lost their homes to foreclosures DSNewsan online group focused on housing.
That’s when these owners and private equity firms, says Donahue, started buying foreclosure properties with the government’s tax breaks.
The Bronx Apartments were devastated a day after a fire swept through the complex, where eight of the 17 people killed were children.
Spencer Platt / Getty Images
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Spencer Platt / Getty Images
Donahue notes: “There are people who live in these properties who are searching for the properties themselves. “They’re buying space heaters like what happened in the Bronx because their heat isn’t working. They’re doing their own maintenance and updating the properties because the owners aren’t doing it.”
Moving is usually not an option
Juan Cuellar is an example. Cuellar works as a house painter and home mechanic and regularly cleans and repairs his apartment. He has lived in the Bedford Victoria Station complex with his wife, 18-year-old son and three grandchildren for a decade. Cuellar is a member of the tenant committee in his building and although not a member of the class action, he supports it.
“We need to win in court, we deserve better housing conditions,” he said.
“The floor is warped, we don’t have heat, there are cockroaches and rats,” he told the senators in his native Spanish through an interpreter, “The AC appliances don’t work, the cabinets don’t work. cold doesn’t work.”
Cuellar says the rent has gone up and he now has to pay for water.
A homeowner recently repainted the bathroom after a lengthy dispute with tenants at the Bedford and Victoria Station complex in Hyattsville, Md.
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Ian Morton / NPR
A homeowner recently repainted the bathroom after a lengthy dispute with tenants at the Bedford and Victoria Station complex in Hyattsville, Md.
Ian Morton / NPR
CASA, a Hyattsville-based nonprofit immigrant advocacy organization, is the plaintiff in the class action and has worked on behalf of tenants to secure rent assistance. Arbor has received approximately one million dollars in rental assistance through Prince George’s Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ERAP) during the pandemic.
Most of the tenants, and those in the area, are immigrants from Central America, Cuellar said.
“I came to the area in 1997,” Cuellar said. “I feel like the area, my wife doesn’t drive and she can walk to Latino shops.”
He said it won’t be easy to move.
“We are low-income people who don’t make enough money to move around,” he said.
