Five days and out: Tough job for tenants
As landlords tell occupants to leave storm-damaged properties, some are fighting back against the short notice
PEG Sauter grew up in a military family and is used to moving around a lot, sometimes with relatively short notice. But she’s never had to do it in five days, which is what the note tacked on her door was ordering.
“I sort of expected they might condemn the building, but I didn’t think they’d give us five days,” Sauter, 78, said this week as she and her husband were packing up their apartment in 2100 Memorial, a building for seniors that has flooded numerous times.
Similar scenarios are playing out elsewhere in Houston, where tenants of flooded apartment buildings have had to find other living arrangements, even if their units did not flood. In some cases, the matters are going to court.
Late last week, attorneys filed suit against the Houston Housing Authority, owner of the Memorial Drive building, on behalf of three tenants seeking to block the authority from canceling their leases. The Sauters are not part of the lawsuit.
Richard Tomlinson, one of the Lone Star Legal Aid attorneys who filed the lawsuit, said the residents should have had been given an opportunity for a so-called pre-deprivation hearing with the owner of the building before the leases were canceled.
“They had due-process obligations, and they didn’t do that,” he said.
The Housing Authority declined to comment on the pending litigation, but said it
made its decisions out of concern for the health and safety of the residents.
Flooding from Hurricane Harvey damaged 14,852 units areawide, according to a survey of individual landlords done by ApartmentData.com. The survey represents 96 percent of all 2,725 properties.
Since the storm, 8,123 units have been leased. Rents now average $1,000 per month, up $16.
Andy Teas, vice president for public affairs at the Houston Apartment Association, said there still seems to be a good supply of available units, but finding a place in the right neighborhood has been challenging.
“It’s not just a matter of finding a unit at the right price range, but in a price range that’s also convenient, so children can stay in the same schools and you can get to work,” he said.
Property owners have been using a state law that says a landlord or tenant can terminate a lease if a unit is uninhabitable. The five-day notice is stipulated on most leases used by local landlords, Teas said.
Some landlords say they are doing what they can to work with residents, whether it’s giving them more time to move, negotiating favorable rates from moving companies or helping with relocation.
Severe flooding made the Grand on Memorial inaccessible for 10 days.
Greystar, which manages the property, said it had to vacate the entire complex in order to start assessing what will ultimately become a major reconstruction effort.
“If a resident couldn’t get out in five days, we just worked with them,” said Mack Armstrong of Greystar, a large Houston landlord that had nine buildings affected by Harvey.
The three-story complex near Memorial Drive and North Eldridge Parkway in the Energy Corridor area took in several feet of water. All residents received notice to vacate the property.
Lone Star Legal Aid last week filed a temporary restraining order on behalf of one of the residents in the 228-unit complex. A Harris County judge signed the order, but the case was later dropped.
“It was a tough decision to terminate all the leases,” Armstrong said, “but at end of day it was the best thing for the residents.”
Beyond the initial disputes over canceling leases, other related issues, including security deposits and rent reductions, could arise, Tomlinson said.
On Friday, a temporary restraining order expires on a case filed for two residents of Forest Creek Apartments in northeast Houston who were told their leases were being terminated and that if their personal items were not removed, they would be disposed of.
The property manager, Greystone, said last week that it was “working with displaced residents at Forest Creek to identify reasonable accommodations during the renovation process as a result of damage sustained by Hurricane Harvey.”
Teas said he sees both sides of such disputes.
Landlords have had to make sure carpet and other soaked items were removed from their buildings quickly to prevent further damage. But residents also needed time to move and decide out what to do with their possessions.
“From a resident’s perspective, that’s their life’s belongings,” Teas said. “You have to be sensitive to abating public health hazards on one hand and, on the other side, these are belongings they’ve had for a lifetime.”
The 2100 Memorial building houses elderly residents, some of whom are low income and pay a reduced amount in rent.
The Housing Authority has said it was not safe for the residents to remain in the building and that they would not have to pay relocation costs to other housing the city has found for them. Floodwaters that got into the first floor and basement damaged the building’s electrical, fire control and water systems, posing a safety threat to residents.
On Sept. 18, the authority issued a five-day notice to residents to vacate the premises. It has since extended that time period.
“When the building is determined to be safe, residents that were displaced will have a preference to return,” the authority said in a statement late last week.
The Housing Authority has been attempting to relocate residents of other affected properties as well. Some of those tenants paid September rent, even though their units were deemed uninhabitable.
A spokeswoman said Tuesday that the authority has started issuing refunds to 130 tenants in public housing units who paid September rent.
Reimbursement checks were given to public housing officials last Friday for tenants in the Irvington Village and Forest Green apartment complexes, spokeswoman Sunita Dharani said in an email.
Checks for tenants of Clayton Homes, which suffered the most damage of the authority’s four flooded properties, were given to officials Monday.
HHA said it also reimbursed tenants for a week’s worth of August rent, as their units became uninhabitable beginning Aug. 26.
Several residents of Clayton Homes said they paid September rent after being told they would otherwise lose their spots at the complex, the Chronicle reported last week.
Dharani said 184 families in affected units need to be relocated. Of those, 112 are waiting for new housing vouchers and 18 have been transferred to other HHA housing projects.
Forty-eight other people have requested transfers, and 23 of them are in the process of moving. HHA said it did not have a number yet of those being transferred to out-of-town properties.
The Sauters, who have lived in the 2100 Memorial building for seven years and pay market-rate rent for their two-bedroom unit, don’t plan to go back.
The building has flooded before, and Sauter is still angry from how the owner chose to deliver the news to vacate.
“In the eviction letter it says ‘hand delivered.’ It was not,” she said. “It was posted to our door, which we didn’t know until the next day around noon.”
The couple has signed a year’s lease for a first-floor unit at a complex in the Oak Forest/Garden Oaks area.
The moving van is scheduled to pick up their furniture Wednesday.