Tenants unionize to fight living conditions
They are demanding better from their landlord
Baby Jae’shawn started cooing just days before he stopped breathing in March 2018.
The autopsy for the 3-month-old boy listed pneumonia and bronchitis, conditions complicated by exposure to dampness and mold. His mother, Christina Moore, suspected the fuzzy black patches growing in her apartment on Rosemary Avenue in East Akron.
People say I could sue them,” said Moore, who can’t talk about the loss three years later without crying. “I don’t know how to do that.” Now 24, Moore said her landlord moved her “because my baby passed away” in the apartment. Domeshia Brown, her lifelong friend and Jae’shawn’s godmother, was moved in “because all of us got raped,” Brown said. “They moved me to the next building, which was her apartment.”
Brown watched the mold creep through and over the fresh white spray paint in her friend’s old apartment. “That’s what they do,” she said of shoddy maintenance and abrupt tenant relocations in these 566 low-income apartments managed and owned by the same companies.
The story of these young women — of being “relocated” to new apartments, told to sign new leases or face eviction and the loss of federal assistance, of living with rodents, mold and broken sewer lines, urine leaking through the walls, of not feeling safe behind flimsy doors and busted locks, of unlit stairwells, broken or nonexistent air conditioners, of shattered windows and gunshots in the night — is life at Ericsson Apartments.
So many tenants in these low-income apartments, as well as the nearby Wilbeth Arlington Homes, have complained to Community Legal Aid that John Petit, a managing attorney who runs the nonprofit agency’s Neighborhood Law Project, reached out to the Rev. Ray Greene with Freedombloc for a wholesale solution.
The black-led organizing collaborative helped renters such as Moore organize Akron’s two newest tenant unions — groups the landlord must recognize. On Monday, they stood in the cracked parking lot of Keys Place, surrounded by the dilapidated apartments they call home, and demanded better.
“I’ve complained so many times. No action has been taken,” said Edmikia Minter, who was elected last month to lead the Ericsson Apartments tenants.
The Beacon Journal left messages with the current and former owners of these multi-unit rental properties, as well as the property management company that handles day-to-day operations at these and other Akron rental properties. All the companies are headquartered outside of Ohio. None responded.
Relocated and fed up
Through a process so regular that management employs “relocation coordinators,” Minter was moved in June from a three-bedroom apartment in one building to a smaller two-bedroom apartment in another.
While her old building is being rehabbed, she said the property manager put her new washer and dryer in storage. There’s nowhere to hook them up in her new place. And they won’t tell her where they put the appliances, which she’s still financing.
The working mother of two young children couldn’t cook meals for four weeks in the new apartment until a stove was provided.
And the rent is more than she paid before. Able to charge up to $1,191, she pays part of the increase out of pocket. Federal housing assistance, at the expense of taxpayers, covers the rest.
The property manager processes her federal paperwork, along with the subsidies for every tenant at Wilbeth Arlington Homes or Ericsson Apartments, formerly known as Hillwood II.
‘So hopeless and depressed’
Minter and her children live behind a thin wooden door. A battered steel door, which someone broke through after they moved in, was left leaning against a wall in her dining room.
“I feel so hopeless and depressed after them telling me to stay with a relative until they can relocate me because they didn’t fix my door until three weeks later,” Minter said. “I’ve been having anxiety attacks, nosebleeds, weight [going] up and down, headaches, my babies seeing me cry all the time because I get so mad seeing my kids scared to be somewhere where they should feel the safest.
“My son sleeps with me every night on the couch, scared someone might break in again,” she said, her hands clenching the speech she wrote out by hand on notebook paper. “I barely get any sleep, especially at night, because that’s when I know all the drama starts.”
“I work hard. I keep to myself. I don’t bother anybody. It’s been so hard to have interest in anything anymore because of my living arrangements,” she said.
Tenants state their demands
With poor living conditions on display, the racial and economic inequity of affordable housing is having the worst impact on Black mothers like Minter, said Petit. They’re more likely to be evicted. Because their federal subsidies are tied to the property, tenants jeopardize the roofs over their families’ heads if they try to leave or speak up.
Greene, who led the group Monday in announcing the tenant unions, pinned much of the problem on the city’s “profit-centered” housing development approach, fueled now by tax abatements flowing mostly to high-end apartments downtown and luxury homes in new, isolated housing developments.
“In one section of Akron, we are building $200,000, $250,000 homes to attract new people to the city,” he said. “In other parts of the city, like what you see around here, people are literally living in a Third World country.
“Rodents, pests, mold, collapsed ceilings, flooded floors are some of the issues we have uncovered in these low-income housing developments,” said Greene. “Developers with no ties to the community and management companies with no compassion can no longer control the housing market.”
The situation is so bad that residents say they would prefer the apartments come down.
“I just want them to do their duties, do their jobs,” Minter said following a list of demands authored by residents, mailed on legal letterhead by Petit to the landlord and read aloud by Greene. “Maintenance. Get protection. Cameras. Some type of authority. Stop being disrespectful when I ask what’s going on with my situation, when me and my kids’ livelihood and health is in danger.”
“Most of all,” Minter said, “I just want these apartments torn down.”
The stated demands of the new tenant unions are:
h Immediate end to all harassment and intimidation.
h Thorough inspections for black mold, pests, structural deficiencies and hazards.
h Bigger dumpsters and more frequent trash pickups.
h A healthy place to live while issues are corrected.
h A meeting with management by Nov. 3.
Bullet holes and squirrels in the walls
Neighbors often yell through the wall at Rodney Forshee and Samantha Garvis for making too much noise. But they’ve found no quiet way to fight the squirrel that’s chewed crawlspaces in their kitchen cabinets, feasting on the food stocked up for their family of four.
Garvis is expecting a third child soon. Forshee moved the couple’s other two daughters in with Garvis about a year ago when bullets hit his apartment.
The gunshots were meant for the unit below, he said, and likely fired from another second-floor apartment across the parking lot. As he sat on the living room couch, Forshee traced the path one of the bullets took above his head and into the next apartment.
Two more bullets pierced his daughter Kayleigh’s room. She was 8 months old at the time. No one in the family was hit.
Forshee stays away from his old apartment building. He calls it “one of the top five” scariest places in “The Ericsson,” and not just for the drug activity outside after sundown.
After a grease fire, he said management never replaced the hood over the stove or inspected his fire detectors. Asleep one night in that old apartment, he said he awoke to a “meth head” in his living room. Anyone who turns the front door hard enough can walk right in.
Across the way in another building, Angela Gorman has custody of her grandson. The boy sat on a couch Monday afternoon, looking with a friend for a ball in the yard below. The children squinted through a broken window pane, the jagged edges within their reach.
Something with the force of a sledgehammer has twisted Gorman’s front door so badly that light and cold air spill in through cracks around the sunken deadbolt and gaps around the door frame.
Water damage from four years ago has buckled her bathroom floor, peeling up linoleum tiles. Having waited four years, she’s afraid her grandson will fall through before it gets fixed.
What is a tenant union?
Tenant unions are a rare recourse, but not unheard of around Akron.
The Freedombloc worked with tenants in the Spring Hill Apartments on Sherbondy Hill. Community Legal Aid is actively engaged with new unions in the Commons at Madeline Park and Wesley Towers. Petit works with a tenant union in Youngstown at Lincoln Square and is talking with residents about starting their own associations in Canton.
At Wilbeth Arlington Homes and Ericsson Apartments, organizers such as Dee Mccall with Freedombloc said they asked the front on-site staff for KMG Prestige, which manages the two properties, to use a community room Sept. 8 for their first meeting. Instead, they said they were forced to meet on the lawn outside one of the buildings.
KMG staff tried chasing them away, the organizers said.
Interfering with a tenant association’s is against the law, explained Community Legal Aid. Landlords must provide a meeting space upon request. And the owners, managers and their staff cannot attend unless invited.
Fair housing advocates and lawyers provide ongoing counsel to tenant groups, but law degrees aren’t necessary to start a tenant association. And landlords must recognize and negotiate with these unions, per state and federal fair housing laws.
While the tenants vote on all decisions and elect their neighbors to lead, the community advocates and attorneys provide ongoing support by engaging the property managers, owners and their lawyers — sometimes by filing unfair housing lawsuits representing multiple, or all, units.
Public housing sold to for-profit operators
The properties in question, until recently, were not owned for profit.
Hillwood Homes and Wilbeth Arlington Homes were built in 1943 and 1944 for the wartime effort. Originally segregated, the cramped apartments catered to white families from West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee, including many who, having never lived with indoor plumbing, came to build planes and tires in Akron’s booming defense industry.
Arlington Street runs between the properties in a nexus of subsidized housing.
On the street’s west side, Wilbeth Arlington Homes was built in 1943 but not racially integrated for nearly 20 years. After eight decades of managing and owning the property, AMHA sold these units to Redwood Properties in February for $14 million.
“The properties did need a rehab,” said Deb Barry, interim executive director at AMHA. “They were older taxcredit properties, and we felt that selling the properties would give the residents in the property a better chance for a rehab.”
Some of that work has begun, displacing tenants who say they are threatened with eviction and the loss of their housing subsidies if they don’t move or sign new leases.
Since AMHA is out of the picture, Barry said the private owner now selfinspects the apartments, which should also be inspected by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
The city of Akron said six of the 566 apartments have active housing code violations.
Reach Doug Livingston at dlivingston@thebeaconjournal.com or 330996-3792.