‘NOTHING HAS CHANGED’
Millennia’s remodeling plans slow to begin in Kansas City
KANSAS CITY, MO. — Dan Fowler pulled the hood of his gray windbreaker up. A cockroach had already fallen perilously close to his head. He did not want one falling down his back.
It was early fall 2019, and the Kansas City, Mo., councilman was in a vacant unit in Englewood Apartments, one of several Millennia properties in the city. He’d gone on a tour of the complex with the city health department officials as they geared up to pass a new rental properties inspection ordinance. They handed out brochures about cockroaches. The city officials had gathered in the parking lot, comparing notes, when a woman walked up to them and asked what they were doing.
They were from the city, Dan explained. They were here to see how living conditions were.
She asked if they had talked to the woman whose ceiling fell down.
No, Dan said. They hadn’t. Could she introduce them?
A Millennia regional manager, who’d gone around the units with them, jumped in. It was just a little section of the ceiling, she said, maybe 2 feet. She had personally moved the woman out. They were fixing it. The city officials knocked on the door, but the unit was locked. She would go get the key.
While they waited, the tenant who had approached them in the parking lot came back.
“Did you talk to the man downstairs?” she asked. “His apartment’s
been wet for two months.”
They followed her to the unit in question. The man’s carpet was so wet it squished. They looked around the unit and saw what looked like black mold where the A/C unit was. “Did you tell anyone?” Dan asked. The man had, several times. Nothing was fixed.
By the time the Millennia manager got the key to the apartment with the hole in the ceiling, the tenant living there had answered the door for the city officials. The family had not, in fact, moved out, and it was not a 2-foot hole. It was nearly the entire ceiling. The insulation had fallen into the apartment. Dan could see the tips where it had, once, been yellow. Otherwise, it was nearly black.
He had first inspected the units in late July 2018 and been equally horrified. When he had returned to his computer after his first trip to Englewood, Dan fired off an email to other Kansas City officials: “Most farmers have better living quarters for their hogs.”
A month after his first look at the complex, he would receive an email from a former property manager, who was at Englewood up to the day of the inspection. She had been fired for unrelated reasons; when he forwarded the email to city staff, he warned them to be skeptical. She wrote that Millennia’s statement about not knowing the ceiling fell in was untrue; she herself had done an incident report. She had emailed higher-ups “concerning mold, flooding and other issues.”
“Millennia has other properties with issues as well,” she wrote.
Dan had known about Englewood just from growing up in Kansas City. Children who grew up at the property 20 years ago were called “burnt cockroaches” and “Englehood kids” at school. But he didn’t get involved in it as a councilman until Millennia officials contacted him to ask for a meeting to show him their plans for the complex. They set the meeting for Jan. 17, 2018.
To prepare, Dan had called the Kansas City Police Department, asking to speak to an officer focused on crime prevention in apartments. The police sent over officer Christina Ludwig, who brought a log of calls for service about an inch thick. She said, “Dan, this place is a pit.”
Management didn’t cooperate with her, she told him, and when she finally found one who did, that person didn’t get support from the corporate office in Ohio and left quickly.
“It’s been nice knowing you. I hope Englewood turns around. My last day is today,” one of the managers emailed Christina in November 2017. By the January 2018 meeting, Christina had worked with 10 different property managers.
Christina had tried. She sent emails to Millennia’s security director, a former police chief named Tom Strausborger.
“Nothing, and I mean nothing, has changed on this property since our last meeting while you were in town,” she emailed in September 2017. The apartments were “disgusting” and “uninhabitable”; she had heard vendors were not getting paid.
“No one should have to live like this,” she went on. “Someone within this company needs to give this property, and whoever is overseeing it, some much needed attention, preferably without delay. Like I said, these tenants do not deserve to live like this.” Three weeks later, she followed up. She hadn’t heard back.
At the January 2018 meeting, Millennia executives showed Dan the blueprints for remodeled buildings and said that because they had not secured tax credits, they could not start the improvements. At the time, the state had suspended its tax credit program, which gave developers tax breaks for buying and rehabilitating affordable housing. The blueprints looked nice, Dan agreed. But what were they doing about it now?
The councilman had seen enough. City officials went back, going unit by unit. Dan saw a child living in what looked like black mold whose mother said he had to go to the hospital for breathing problems. When he opened the door to another unit’s interior closet, mold lined every shelf. In a vacant unit, where the cockroach fell from the ceiling, he stepped in human feces. He cussed out the manager until Christina stepped in front of him and told him to walk away.
On a rainy Wednesday at the beginning of September 2018, Kansas City and Department of Housing and Urban Development officials met with Millennia reps in a room of the Kansas City Police Department’s North Patrol Headquarters, where Christina was based. Millennia owner Frank Sinito himself came down and apologized. He was embarrassed, he said. They would do better. They were having trouble keeping property managers until the place got cleaned up. They needed the state’s tax credits. He pledged to start rehab the minute they got approved.
Dan walked out into the rain with the city manager. They saw a black Lincoln town car parked next to a black SUV. A chauffeur in a black suit stood next to each. Dan turned to the city manager and said, “Look! They’re making some money off this.”
“Yeah,” the city manager said. “Don’t tell me there isn’t money in section 8 housing. Somebody’s making it, and it ain’t us.”
Later, Dan would find out that the Millennia representatives drove the black cars to Englewood for their own tour, accompanied by their umbrella-holding drivers. Dan was disgusted. To him, management was saying: “We’re rich, you’re poor, let me shove your face in it.”
Frank did not address specific questions about the conditions Dan found in Englewood, or the use of the town cars. He wrote the company acknowledged that Englewood needed “substantial rehabilitation” — one of the reasons Millennia had wanted to purchase it in the first place.
City officials debated what to do. The city could have revoked Millennia’s landlord license, a Kansas City requirement to do business, but that would have put the tenants on the streets. There wasn’t enough affordable housing for them.
Council had just passed a new “Healthy Homes” ordinance meant to ensure quality-of-living standards, but it faced the same dilemma Galveston officials had. Their building code inspection ordinance didn’t include HUD housing. So Dan wrote an amendment to the ordinance allowing the city to inspect HUD properties and hold them to city standards. It passed in 2019.
As he worked on rewriting the code, Dan got an email with a link to an emergency request for tenants’ relocation filed in West Palm Beach, Fla. It was about Stonybrook, and it would be denied by the court. Dan forwarded the email to 12 other Kansas City officials on a Sunday night.
“It seems they have problems there, too,” he wrote. “I’m starting to wonder about their other properties around here.”
The city attorney, Emalea Black, replied the next day. She wrote: “The similarities are striking.”
The HUD official most closely overseeing Englewood was Ed Manning, the director of HUD’s Kansas City Multifamily Division, an Army veteran with four tours in Germany, one tour in Italy