Federally subsidized housing is falling apart
Government keeps paying rent for homes that fail inspections
In this city known for pre-Civil War mansions, a young mother shared a government-funded apartment with her three small children and a legion of cockroaches. The bugs lurked in the medicine cabinet, under the refrigerator, behind a picture on the wall. The mother nudged a bedroom dresser and more roaches skittered away as her 2-year-old son stomped on them.
It was home, sweet home for Destiny Johnson and her kids — until she got fed up and moved out last month. Inspectors had cited the apartment complex with urgent health and safety violations for the past three years. Yet the federal government continued to pay Johnson’s rent at a property where a threebedroom unit like hers can run $900 a month.
“I’m not asking for the best,” she told a reporter weeks before leaving, “but something better than this, especially for these kids.”
Scores on health and safety inspections at taxpayer-funded apartments assigned to lowincome tenants have been declining for years, typically with no serious consequences for landlords, an Associated Press analysis of federal housing data shows.
Johnson’s former apartment is one of nearly 160,000 at private properties with federal contracts that have failed at least one inspection since 1999. Nationwide data shows the vast majority of failing inspections involved urgent violations. They can range from electrical hazards to rampant vermin to piles of garbage.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development subsidizes rents for tenants assigned to privately owned apartments and public housing run by state or local authorities. Many in these 2.1 million households are disabled, elderly or single parents. As the nation’s biggest affordable housing provider, the federal government will spend about $18 billion this year for these two programs.
Yet tenants curse heaters that don’t heat, emergency exits that don’t open, windows that don’t close. They complain of rats, rust, holes and mold.
In 2015 alone, families living in subsidized housing reported at least 155,000 more cases of childhood asthma than expected if the rate were the same as for renters in other households, according to AP’s analysis of a national tenant
survey. Medical studies tie asthma to mold.
Federal authorities acknowledge the long slide in inspection scores, which started a decade ago in the privately owned housing. They said in recent years they have been protecting tenants by reinspecting sites with surprisingly high scores and closely monitoring repairs. “These older properties, the private owners may not have the means to do needed repairs,” Housing and Urban Development spokesman Brian Sullivan said Conditions have deteriorated so badly in many subsidized buildings that by the government’s own estimate it would take tens of billions of dollars to rehabilitate them.
Destiny Johnson lived with her children — ages 1, 2, and 5 — at Cedarhurst Homes on a dead-end street in Natchez, where Mississippi River trading and wealth built on slave plantations have yielded to inveterate poverty among a largely black population.
The heater in Johnson’s apartment didn’t work, so she was using the oven to keep warm until a stovetop fire last year. Johnson, 21, said she tried to use her fire extinguisher, but that didn’t work either, so she rushed to borrow one from a neighbor.
The oven still hadn’t been replaced several months later. Its door was tied closed with a bright pink cord. In late March, she said, management finally provided a letter that let her move to a nearby subsidized complex with a better inspection record. “I couldn’t take it anymore,” Johnson said.
A former neighbor who still lives at the 30-unit Cedarhurst Homes, Whitley Williams, wanted to show a reporter and photographer her leaking water heater. The door to its closet was damp and swollen. She tried to heave it open, but the bottom scraped the floor and broke apart. Her three children prefer to stay elsewhere, with her father.
Federal records list the site owner as The Columbia Property Group, which has managed or owned at least 66 federally contracted properties in Georgia, Florida and its home state of Mississippi. Company President Melanie Moe referred questions to Bryan King, an officer at Mississippi-based Triangle Development. In an emailed statement, King said his development company was acquiring Cedarhurst Homes and planned to pursue federal tax credits for a “large renovation.”
The property earned inspection scores of 46, 53 and 54 out of a possible 100 from 201618, federal data shows. Any score below 60 is now considered failing. At least three other Columbia Property Group sites have failed inspections since 2011, federal records show.