Renters and activists from across Georgia rallied at a downtown federal building last Wednesday to shake fists over what they consider lackluster efforts by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) to ensure its low-income apartment complexes are habitable.
Between chants of “Fight, fight, fight! Housing is a human right!,” about 20 protesters — many of them Section 8 tenants — described units plagued by rodents, roaches, mold, and fire hazards. They criticized HUD and other public agencies for failing to adequately oversee landlords of HUD-subsidized complexes.
“Do you know how many Hudson Monroe tenants have told me they’ve been bitten by rats?” Housing Justice League organizer Matthew Nursey bellowed through a megaphone, referring to a HUD-subsidized complex in Albany. “Too damn many.”
Diana Brown, a Hudson Malone tenant, said she’s living with unabated mold and mildew at her apartment, adding that she had no idea how bad it was there until she moved in herself. “We got a blind man — his pipe busted,” she said. “He didn’t even know raw sewage was running into his unit.”
The chorus of voices at the Sept. 4 protest added to years of criticism by tenants and housing activists alleging that HUD is not properly inspecting the apartment complexes it subsidizes and enforcing habitability standards.
“It’s crazy that Atlanta Housing is allowing this to persist,” said Leslie Reagan, a resident of Atlanta’s GE Tower, at 490 Glenn St., just south of Castleberry Hill. Atlanta Housing is the city agency that disburses HUD housing-voucher funding locally.
Reagan and other protesters told Atlanta Civic Circle that Atlanta Housing that local governments and nonprofits need to do more to hold HUD and negligent landlords accountable.
“If any leaders are serious,” activist and Atlanta City Council candidate Devin Barrington-Ward said, they need to pressure HUD to better oversee the properties it subsidizes with Section 8 contracts.
Other tenants of HUD-funded Section 8 complexes report the same problems, but can’t afford to take time off to rally for tenant rights. Jamious Moss, a single mother living at Woodland Heights on the Westside, said she’s almost become accustomed to grabbing her kids and hitting the floor when gunshots ring out at night — but she’s not sure where she’d go if she couldn’t live there.
“It’s really unacceptable,” she told Atlanta Civic Circle during a tour of her unit last month, pointing out mold eating away at her children’s toys and water damage creeping up her walls. “This is not a good environment for children, because of the mold, but also because of crime,” she said.
HUD response
HUD said it’s aware of tenants’ concerns and is working to remediate problems, noting that officials have met with organizers to try to identify solutions.
“HUD prioritizes the safety and security of the residents we serve, ensuring that they have the safe, affordable, and quality housing they deserve,” the agency told Atlanta Civic Circle in a statement. “We are in close contact with the local housing authority and owners of the impacted properties to ensure their residents’ concerns are being addressed.”
Housing Justice League’s Nursey, however, claimed that the federal government has too often sought to divert the blame onto its local partners. “It’s like that Spider-Man meme, where everyone is just pointing at each other,” he said.
He urged advocates and renters to call their congressional representatives to pressure HUD to tighten up and ensure that landlords are providing safe, stable housing: “This is not radical stuff,” Nursery said. “Ossoff and Warnock know this is a landlord-friendly state,” he added, referring to Georgia’s Democratic U.S. senators, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock.
The city of Atlanta, Atlanta Housing, and Ossoff and Warnock’s offices did not respond by publication.
Last week’s demonstration outside HUD’s Atlanta regional office, at 77 Forsyth Street, was the latest effort by local activists and tenants to push HUD to properly oversee the Section 8 apartment complexes it funds.
Last year, residents of Thomasville Heights’ Forest Cove Apartments — the infamous southside complex that was finally demolished recently, after years of complaints — convened outside another downtown HUD office to urge the agency to hold corporate landlord Millennia Housing Management accountable for allowing the site to fall into dangerous disrepair.
“These landlords, these companies, these corporations, these people are continuing to choose profit over people,” Annette Aguilar, a Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights organizer, said during the protest. HUD has enabled them to do so, she said.
The Georgia legislature this year passed House Bill 404, known as the Safe at Home Act, which for the first time requires landlords to provide housing units “fit for human habitation.”
But the newly adopted law doesn’t actually define habitability, which makes it difficult to enforce. “It took us that long, and it’s the bare minimum,” Gabriel Sanches of the Democratic Socialists of America lamented at the protest.
Yes I am dealing with landlord land developers Satellite Affordable Homes Associates here in California that has parasitic infestation going on in the designment of their structure where parasites are leaching out of their Implied warranty Drains 24-7 that left untreated can be deadly where this said Developer believes that after being Funded by HUD in some 30 Buildings are above the law. Nevertheless, it’s a lesson on not being Affordable but away to kill legally by failing to maintain habitability.
No one in America the richest nation should be homeless or starving..Someone Please Can We Make America Great Again.
This should not be. Georgia Do Better !