Tenants’ campaign spurs city inspections
Complaints linger over Milwaukee properties
For decades, city building inspectors didn’t investigate complaints about one of Milwaukee’s largest landlords.
Now, after a year-long campaign by tenants and organizers, they’re taking a look inside.
Last week, two building inspectors began monitoring the Housing Authority of the City of Milwaukee, which operates about 5,200 rental homes across the city.
Dangerous conditions inside those properties — including mold, water damage from leaking pipes and broken heating systems — made headlines and prompted outcry from tenants, activists and elected officials.
But longstanding confusion about who was responsible for policing the agency meant tenants struggled to get help when the housing authority wasn’t addressing health or safety risks quickly enough.
City building inspectors, who normally handle tenant complaints, mistakenly believed they lacked the authority to enforce building code inside housing authority properties.
Only now, after a months-long campaign by tenants and activists, are city building inspectors beginning to address the housing authority’s massive maintenance and repair backlog.
‘Told to complain about your landlord to your landlord’
Black mold and water leaks, broken locks and elevators, unreliable heat — the list of hazards alarmed members of the Milwaukee Common Council, including its president, José Pérez.
After maintenance requests sat unfilled for months, many housing authority tenants had grown fed up with their property managers. With the
backing of the local nonprofit Common Ground, they tried calling in backup.
But the city’s building inspection office, which investigates reports of code violations, said it couldn’t help.
Per department policy, anyone calling with a complaint about the housing authority was told to contact a housing authority property manager “to file a request for service.”
That didn’t make sense to Kevin Solomon, an organizer with Common Ground.
“Residents were being told to complain about their landlord to their landlord,” he said.
That policy, it turned out, stemmed from a misunderstanding: City officials didn’t understand what the housing authority was, exactly — or who was in charge of holding it accountable.
The federal audit reports “made clear how dysfunctional the (Housing Authority of the City of Milwaukee)’s operations have become.”
Milwaukee Common Council president
Reports of dangerous conditions fell through the cracks
Worried about the safety of their constituents, three aldermen wrote a letter to the head of Milwaukee’s building inspection department, asking for an inspection of housing authority properties in their districts.
In response, then-Commissioner Erica Roberts said the department “does not traditionally respond to complaints in city owned buildings.”
Despite what its name might suggest, the Housing Authority of the City of Milwaukee is not part of the city.
The city appoints the agency’s board of commissioners, but the housing authority is not a city agency. It’s not a state agency, either, although it was founded by a state charter, and it’s not a federal agency even though the federal government provides most of its funding and monitors its operations.
When Common Ground raised concerns about health and safety hazards, “every agency was pointing fingers at the other,” Solomon said.
That left housing authority residents, many of whom are elderly and disabled, unsure of where to turn.
Last fall, city officials were growing exasperated with the housing authority and its leadership.
In September, the Journal Sentinel uncovered federal audit reports warning of “risk for serious fraud, waste and abuse” in the housing authority’s rental assistance office.
Those warnings had gone out to the housing authority leaders and Mayor Cavalier Johnson months earlier, but came as a surprise to members of the Common Council.
Pérez called for the city to take action by ending the policy that allowed the housing authority to “be treated differently from every other landlord.”
The federal audit reports, he said in a statement, “made clear how dysfunctional the authority’s operations have become.”
In October, the council agreed unanimously to send building inspectors into housing authority properties, but they ordered inspectors to wait until the department could staff up.
The housing authority’s backlog of maintenance complaints was “significantly higher” than the city initially expected.
Common Ground plans ‘massive education and outreach campaign’
Common Ground said tenants are still learning their rights.
Right now, Solomon said, Common Ground is planning a “massive education and outreach campaign,” to help tenants understand what the building inspection office does, what issues to call in and how to do it.
If their property managers aren’t responsive to complaints, tenants can reach city building inspectors by calling (414) 286-CITY or submitting a complaint online at city.milwaukee.gov/ucc/action.com.