‘SO OUR REPORTS LOOK GOOD’
Tenants, an employee try to press for changes at Florida complex
Fourth in a series
RIVIERA BEACH, FLA. — On the day of the Christmas event that Stonybrook management put on for tenants, a new employee of the subsidized housing complex heard something that felt wrong.
It felt so wrong that she would raise it with The Millennia Companies’ human resources department. And she would provide a sworn statement detailing what she heard, recorded while she was still employed by the company. Her statement would accuse Millennia employees at Stonybrook of the same abuses raised by tenants and city officials around the country for years.
It was a Saturday in December 2019. The employee had worked at the Riviera Beach complex for just over a month. She was still getting to know all of the tenants. She chatted with Edna House. Edna had once been the vice president of the tenants’ union, but she had spoken out against the union at last month’s City Council meeting and praised the improvements she saw at Stonybrook.
What Edna said next might have explained why she had changed her statements about Millennia. It was a flip-flop no one in the tenants’ union had been able to figure out. When they found out, they were livid.
At the Christmas event, Edna told the employee that she was close with Stonybrook’s property manager, Amanda Delmont. Amanda had done
her a few favors, Edna said.
“Amanda was having her make statements basically for gifts, in return for gifts, in return for a job, clothing, babysitting, you name it,” the then-employee said in her statement. She has asked to remain anonymous because she has a domestic violence restraining order against a man who may soon be released from prison.
A month later, the employee was working in the food pantry and spoke to Edna again. Edna said Amanda would give her gifts and favors to help the company with its pending evictions against Crystal Lewis and others, according to the statement. (Neither Amanda nor Edna responded to interview requests.)
At 6 p.m. Feb. 6, 2020, the then-employee gave her sworn statement before a court reporter at her apartment. She had spread the documents out on her bed; the court reporter sat in a chair. A cat paced the hot room.
The statement concluded two hours and 10 minutes later. Her allegations ranged from Stonybrook staff backdating official HUD documents to putting tenants in unsafe units. She alleged she’d had a tenant call who had moved out and called to make sure she wasn’t being charged. The Stonybrook ledger, she said, showed the tenant was active.
“They’re also closing work orders without doing them so our reports look good so it reflects well on the company,” the employee said in her sworn statement. “I was told that when we see missing smoke detectors, just to write it on a notepad and not write it on the inspection sheets and also not to create a work order so it doesn’t show that we’re not providing smoke detectors.”
She went into one first-floor unit, she said, with a man from a mold remediation company who told her to “be careful because it’s a dangerous unit.”
“We’re actually moving somebody in tomorrow morning with four children, and we’ve never remediated the problems,” she said. “The lady has, I think, four children under the age of 10 and she doesn’t know — she’s not aware what’s going on.”
The problem was never fixed, she alleged. The family moved into the unit.
The former Stonybrook employee, still working for Millennia at the time , printed out emails, rent rolls allegedly for tenants who had moved out, and work orders that allegedly had not been done. She sent emails to HR, alleging harassment from the property manager and detailing what she had explained in her statement. On the Thursday morning she gave her sworn statement, she said, she brought the documents to the FBI field office in Miami.
The FBI declined to comment, and Millennia CEO Frank Sinito did not respond directly to questions about the then-employee’s accusations. He could not, he wrote, comment on personnel matters or litigation.
The former Stonybrook employee’s documents and her statement were filed with Crystal’s lawsuit against Millennia over the complex’s conditions. Millennia argued the documents were illegally obtained and successfully moved to have them sealed. Crystal’s lawyer, Malik Leigh, was sanctioned by the court for improperly contacting the former employee and using the documents she had printed out. The judge had imposed a gag order — meaning that no one could talk about the case. Crystal was sanctioned for breaking it.
The case dragged, looking more and more hopeless until its eventual dismissal by the court, which said the plaintiffs had with limited exception failed to meet the requirements to bring a claim. As her case fell apart, Crystal and her family spent the first months of 2020 living weekto-week in motels. She had an eviction on her record now on top of the criminal history, making it difficult to get approved for an apartment. She started looking for shelters, just in case, as the coronavirus pandemic raged. Money would run out, another donor would step in and they would be safe for seven more days. As the week wound down, her frantic search would begin again.
In May, the family got approved for an apartment. They moved in on the 14th. Crystal hung seashell-patterned shower curtains and shimmery silver beads between the kitchen and the living room. She and her husband drive for Uber. Her oldest daughter, the one who had first sat her down and told her she could not abide life in Stonybrook all those years ago, helped her wave signs for Biden ahead of the election. She kept up her work with Palm Beach County Tenants Union.
On Saturday, Dec. 5, Crystal logged on to a Zoom call. She would be joined by 25 people in over a dozen cities. All of them lived in or organized in Millennia properties. They compared notes (feeling “jerked around,” squalid conditions, properties placed in primarily Black and brown areas, the difficulties of organizing, the extra difficulties of organizing in a pandemic). They reconvened in February.
The rehab of Stonybrook — to be rebranded Azure Estates — had begun with a renovation price tag of $17 million. The local NBC affiliate posted a segment in November on Azure Estates “wiping away the negative history” of Stonybrook. The anchors took viewers into a newly rehabbed apartment, outfitted with gleaming white cabinets, a new microwave and freshly painted walls. The renderings show a shiny new community center. The project is over 50 percent complete.
Amy Pettway, the attorney with the Legal Aid Society of Palm Beach County, looked at the renderings progress and felt hopeful that maybe, finally, there would be change. Crystal wondered why it had taken so long, with such a high cost to her family.
“Amanda was having her make statements … in return for gifts, in return for a job, clothing, babysitting, you name it.”