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Are Our Neighborhoods Making Us Sick? Spring 2012 Shelterforce

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The Spring edition of Shelterforce Magazine (published by the National Housing Institute) focused on Healthy Homes and Environmental Justice.  Check out the below articles to learn more about how housing, community development and your health are closely related.

“Better Together” – The community development and health sectors can and should work together to reduce health disparities and improve everyone’s health.  By David Erickson and Nancy O. Andrews

“Housing First” – The conventional approach to homelessness starts with services. But starting with permanent housing instead costs less and works better.  By Nan Roman and Lisa Stand

“Foreclosing on Our Health?” – In a dangerous cycle, medical bills are a common cause of foreclosure—and the stress and financial crisis of foreclosure causes an increase in serious health problems.  By Rachel Blake

“Breathing Easier” – A Massachusetts-based program provides home environment assessments, education, and home remediation services—often resulting in the improved health and lives of families.  By Emily W. Rosenbaum

“Taking Health Into Account” – By systematically assessing the health risks of development decisions upfront, health impact assessments can prevent costly and harmful mistakes.  By Aaron Wernham

“California’s New Environmental Movement” – How communities of color, using health and jobs as rallying cries, took on Big Oil — and won!  By Catherine Lerza

“Healthy Yards with Youth in Charge” – The Worcester, Mass., Toxic Soil Busters co-op shows improving a neighborhood’s health doesn’t have to be limited to experts and outsiders.  By Asa Needle, Jonathan Rodrigues and Matt Feinstein

“The Intersection of Health Philanthropy and Housing” – Health philanthropy and community development have historically worked on separate tracks. That’s changing.  By Marjorie Paloma

“Prescription for a New Neighborhood” – Housing mobility can complement community revitalization for children with serious health challenges.  By Philip Tegeler and Salimah Hankins

“Unsorting Our Cities” – To improve the health of residents of disadvantaged neighborhoods, we have to address inequality, not medical care.   By Mindy Fullilove

“Health and Community Development Resources” – If you want to explore the intersection of health and community development further, here are some places to start.

Shelterforce #169/Spring 2012 – http://www.shelterforce.org/archive/issues/169/

Celebrating the Tenants’ Bill of Rights…

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More than twenty five years ago, few laws protected renters from disrepair, illegal eviction and retaliation.  That all changed thanks to a dedicated group of tenants who campaigned for five years and had passed the Residential Landlord and Tenant Ordinance (RLTO).  Mayor Harold Washington enacted the RLTO in 1986.  Also known as the “Tenants’ Bill of Rights” it set forth the rights and responsibilities of both landlords and tenants, which led to the founding of the Metropolitan Tenants Organization.  Everyday the RLTO protects renters’ basic human right to safe, decent and affordable housing throughout the City of Chicago.

In its honor, the Metropolitan Tenants Organization is celebrating 25 years of renters’ rights on June 19, 2012 at Revolution Brewing – 2323 N. Milwaukee from 6-8 p.m.  Join MTO and over 100 leaders from across the city for a night of food, drinks, live music and fun!!!  Special event hosts include Cook County Clerk David Orr and Cook County Commissioner Jesus “Chuy” Garcia.

Tickets are just $50.  You also have the option to showcase your organization with an ad space in the sponsorship booklet to tell others about your great work.  Please contact Kathy at 773-292-4980 ext 230 by June 15 to RSVP or visit us here to make your donation and enter “CRLTO” in the dedication or gift form field.

See you on the June 19th!

Bedbugs: not dead yet. Chicago Reader feature article

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Bedbugs: not dead yet

Bedbug infestations are on the rise in Chicago—and the number of complaints barely scratches the surface

By: Julia Thiel – Chicago Reader 

Taina Rodriguez was at the dog beach with her husband and two mini schnauzers one afternoon last June when she got a disturbing phone call from her neighbor. There’s been an explosion in your apartment, the neighbor said. You should hurry home.

As Rodriguez and her husband, Hernan Velarde, both 31, made their way back to their Albany Park two-flat, other neighbors and her landlord were calling too. By the time they got there, the fire had been put out and their street and two others were blocked off by fire trucks and police. The landlord asked her not to talk to the officers, saying he’d handle everything, Rodriguez says. She didn’t argue: “I was in a complete state of shock.”

The cause of the fire, according to Rodriguez: bedbugs.

In late April, Rodriguez had started waking up with itchy welts on the right side of her body. After identifying bedbugs as the cause, she called a pest control company out to her place for a quote. They told her it would cost around $1,200 and they’d need permission from her landlord, Greg Puchalski, to do the treatment. But Rodriguez claims that Puchalski refused—even though she said she’d pay for it. “He goes, ‘No, Taina, I fix it, I fix it,'” she says. “‘I’ll do it my way.'” (Puchalski denies that the conversation took place.)

Puchalski’s fix, according to Rodriguez, was to gas the place. “He came in and put propane tanks in our apartment,” she says. “He thought he could heat up the apartment and the bedbugs would die. One of his brothers, who was also co-owner of our apartment building, had seen a segment about bedbugs on TV.”

Rodriguez says Puchalski had been using propane tanks in her bedroom to treat the bedbugs for a couple months—often when she and her husband were home—before the explosion occurred. The day of the fire, she and Velarde had been out of the house in the morning; when they stopped at home to pick up the dogs and take them to the beach, she noticed that their bedroom door was closed. Neighbors saw the explosion in their bedroom, and one claims to have seen Puchalski go in after the fire to remove the tank, according to Rodriguez.

Puchalski says he never used propane tanks in the apartment. When I called he told me that his brother Jack was Rodriguez’s landlord and I should talk to him, but eventually admitted that he was usually the one Rodriguez would call when she was having problems with her apartment. (Jack Puchalski never returned my calls.) Greg at first avoided my questions, but finally said that Rodriguez “probably” had called him about a bedbug problem, and “probably I sprayed.” He was adamant that he had never put propane tanks in the apartment, though, and said that the fire was caused not by an explosion but by an electrical problem.

Rodriguez argues that their bathroom fixtures—sink, toilet, bathtub—ended up on the second floor of her building as a result of the explosion. She doesn’t think that would happen from an electrical fire.

Greg Puchalski’s insurance company is currently investigating the case, but Rodriguez says it’s complicated by the fact that many of the neighbors who saw what happened live in buildings owned by the Puchalskis. “The community where I lived, it’s all undocumented folks. They don’t want to talk because they don’t want to get in trouble,” she says. “My brother-in-law doesn’t even want to talk because he feels that he will lose his apartment.” (Rodriguez is a U.S. citizen; her husband is not.)

Rodriguez says the fire destroyed 95 percent of their possessions, including her wheelchair and medications (she and her husband are both disabled: she has Marfan syndrome; he suffered a work-related injury that left his lower back fused). The Red Cross helped them replace their medications, and they were able to stay with Velarde’s brother, who lived across the street, while they looked for a new place. Rodriguez went back to work after taking a couple days off—she’s a constituent advocate for Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky—and Velarde went back to repairing home appliances (he’s self-employed). They found another place to live and moved in. Looking back on the incident, Rodriguez says: “Let me put it to you this way: [the bedbugs] all burned.”

Bedbugs have been feeding on humans since we first lived in caves, and humans have been going to extremes to get rid of them for just about as long. In 1777 The Compleat Vermin-Killer advised people to fill cracks in the bed with gunpowder and light it on fire; another remedy, recommended by Good Housekeeping in 1889, was composed of a mix of alcohol, turpentine, and highly toxic mercury chloride. Fumigation was also popular, first with brimstone (sulfur) and then in the 1900s with the toxic gas hydrogen cyanide.

It’s easy to see why bedbugs can inspire such extreme reactions: the apple-seed-sized bloodsuckers feed on humans at night, usually leaving red, itchy welts behind (about a third of the population has no reaction to bedbug bites). They reproduce quickly, like to hide in small crevices, and can live up to a year between feedings, which makes them very difficult to eradicate. They also travel well: the bugs can crawl through cracks in the walls to an adjacent unit in an apartment building, stow away on used bedding or clothing, or climb onto a bag or coat set down in an infested area.

Home remedies notwithstanding, bedbugs flourished in the U.S. up until the 1940s. The introduction of DDT and other pesticides in the ’40s eliminated them almost entirely, and they remained extremely rare for about another 50 years, when reports of them started to multiply exponentially. The 2011 Bugs Without Borders Survey by the National Pest Management Association and the University of Kentucky, which polled close to 1,000 pest control companies, found that 99 percent of them had encountered bedbug infestations in the past year, up from 11 percent ten years ago. No one knows for sure what has caused the uptick, though leading theories include an increase in international travel (bedbugs are more common in developing countries than developed ones), the banning of DDT, and genetic mutations in bedbugs that have made them resistant to insecticides.

Few laymen know how to handle an infestation. Most bug bombs and foggers, for example, are not only ineffective against bedbugs but can spread the problem by driving bedbugs into other rooms. Dini Miller, an associate professor at Virginia Tech and one of the few researchers in the country who specializes in bedbugs, says she once talked to a guy who had set off ten bug bombs in his apartment, and when that didn’t work, he followed up with 30 more. “I’m surprised he did not blow his windows out,” she says. “The walls were so sticky with the residue, and yet live bedbugs that had fed the night before are crawling around while we’re standing there talking.”

Getting funding for bedbug research is difficult, though, because bedbugs aren’t known to carry any diseases and most funding agencies are interested in disease vectors. Additionally, Miller says, there aren’t likely to be any new insecticides on the market soon: the approval process takes about ten years. “It could not be better for bedbugs in the United States,” Miller says.

There’s very little official tracking of bedbug complaints in Chicago, which makes it difficult to get a sense of just how big the problem is locally. A list released last year by Terminix, a large pest-control company, declares Chicago the fourth most bedbug-infested city in the U.S.,behind New York, Cincinnati, and Detroit; another company, Orkin, says it’s the second most infested city, behind only Cincinnati. But neither company revealed the data behind its claims, and both are for-profit organizations that may do more business in some cities than others.

Neither the Cook County nor the Chicago health departments keep records of bedbug complaints; both agencies say it’s because bedbugs don’t spread disease and therefore aren’t considered a public health threat. The Illinois Department of Public Health doesn’t keep up with them either, but Curt Colwell, an entomologist who fields bedbug-related complaints to the department, has been unofficially tracking the number of calls he’s gotten for the past eight years. “I have seen the number of bedbug calls trending upward and relatively unchecked through 2011,” he says. Before 2004 he had no complaints of bedbugs. He got two calls that year, four the next, and ten the year after that; the number has more or less doubled each year through 2010. In 2011 he got 253 complaints, about a third of his total calls. That includes all of Illinois, though Colwell says that Chicago accounts for the majority of his calls.

The City of Chicago’s Department of Buildings tracks the number of bedbug infestations reported through 311 calls, and reports a trend similar to the one Colwell has seen. The department started keeping a record in 2006; there were 25 calls that year, 50 the next, and 103 in 2008. Since then the number of calls has increased by roughly 100 each year, totaling 376 in 2011. But that only includes the people who already suspect they have bedbugs when they call, says department spokesperson Caroline Weisser. Calls are tracked by keyword, so if someone says that they’re having an insect problem it won’t be recorded as a bedbug call, even if the city later determines that bedbugs were the issue. And, of course, not everyone who has bedbugs calls the city. The stigma associated with bedbugs means that homeowners are likely to get them exterminated quietly rather than reporting it to anyone. Even renters can be reluctant to come forward.

The Metropolitan Tenants Organization started keeping track of bedbug cases in 2009, when it got 215 calls about them; in 2010 they got 307 calls, and 372 in 2011. Those numbers are similar to the ones reported by Chicago’s buildings department, but Sara Mathers, who investigates bedbug complaints for the MTO, believes they’re artificially low.

“People are nervous about it, or they don’t know exactly what they have,” Mathers says. Or they’re afraid of being evicted, which isn’t legal but happens anyway. “So when you’re looking at the percentage of what is reported to 311 and us, it’s a small percentage.”

Mathers says infestations are often isolated—just one unit in a building with dozens or hundreds units, for example—but left untreated, bedbugs multiply quickly and can spread to other units.

She also says bed bugs are more widespread than people think: “I would venture to say that basically every single high-rise in the city is infested. Eighty to 100 percent have at least one case of bedbugs.”

Brittany Barton, 25, was living in a 60-unit building in Edgewater last August when she realized she had bedbugs. She reported it to her management company, and they sent an exterminator to spray her apartment. Barton also threw out her bed and most of her other furniture, along with some of her clothes. About a month later, she noticed more bedbugs, and the exterminators sprayed again. She wrote letters to the other tenants in her building to find out if they were having problems, and the man who lived below her immediately came upstairs to say he had them too but had been too embarrassed to say anything. They suspected but never confirmed that the bugs were coming up from two units below Barton’s, where a hoarder who collected used furniture lived. Barton says the management was trying to get the woman evicted, but in the meantime, no matter how many times her own apartment was sprayed the bedbugs came back.

This went on for three or four months, until finally Barton decided she had to get out because it was affecting her graduate studies at Loyola. “I couldn’t sleep. I started having really bad anxiety, and I felt like I was becoming obsessive-compulsive because I would walk around my apartment with a pair of tweezers and pick up every single bedbug that I found. And then I started walking in my hallway area, up and down my steps, looking for bedbugs. It took over my life.”

Barton went to her management company and asked to be let out of her lease, which they eventually agreed to—though a manager also told her, “You can leave your apartment, but anywhere you go, you’re going to bring the infestation with you.” Barton says she was very careful when she moved and hasn’t had any problems in her new place.

If residents are hesitant to report bedbug infestations, sometimes it’s with good reason. Rosine Mensah, a 72-year-old retired substance abuse counselor, first heard about bedbugs in her building in early 2009. She lives in the Beth Ann Residences, Section 8 subsidized housing for seniors in Austin. “When I first found out about it,” Mensah says, “there was a lady standing downstairs by the security office, and she was crying because they had thrown out her furniture. It was gorgeous furniture, beautiful! And they had put it out in the Dumpsters. That was before they learned anything themselves about the bedbugs.”

Mensah had never heard of bedbugs before either, but did some online research and read that discarding furniture was unnecessary. “We had people sleeping in wheelchairs, sleeping on the floor. They threw out everything. The beds, the couches, the chairs. They didn’t really have the right to throw our furniture out. They didn’t ask; they just demanded that we throw it out.”

With the help of the MTO, Mensah and a few other residents were able to organize and get the management to implement better practices for eradicating the bedbugs, like investing in a heat treatment machine (bedbugs can’t survive temperatures above 113 degrees Fahrenheit). In addition, they worked with the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which manages Section 8 programs, to get funds to replace the furniture that had been thrown away.

The bedbugs haven’t been eradicated from the building completely, though. Mensah herself got them last year (she thinks that workers who were winterizing the building tracked them in from an infested unit). Her extermination process went pretty smoothly, but there are others in the building who still won’t report bedbugs when they’re having a problem. “They will not tell anyone until they are just crawling all over the walls everywhere,” Mensah says. “They’re afraid that they’re going to throw their stuff out, or they’re embarrassed, or they’re afraid they’re going to have to move.”

Mathers says that as bad as conditions were in Mensah’s building, they’ve improved significantly in the last couple years. In some ways, things are easier now for tenants in subsidized housing than in market-rate buildings because HUD has a list of best practices and can hold management companies accountable. “We did see a lot [of bedbugs] in low-income areas, subsidized buildings,” Mathers says. “Now we’re getting more of the market rate. I’m getting a lot of calls for two-flats and three-flats and that’s what scares me. That’s where I see the problem growing.”

Ann Hinterman, housing specialist for 49th Ward alderman Joe Moore, deals with the bedbug calls that come to Moore’s office. “One of the challenges is that although there are ordinances in the municipal code that tell landlords and tenants how pest infestations need to be handled, they aren’t specific to bedbugs,” she says. Landlords are required to exterminate if two or more units of a multiunit building are infested, or if the infestation of a single unit is due to landlord negligence. Getting landlords to follow through and pay for the extermination, though, is a different matter.

Robert Shumate, 29, who works in management at a hotel downtown and lives in a 176-unit building at Sheridan and Foster, realized he had bedbugs last July when he kept getting bitten. “When I discovered I had them, I went crazy,” he says. He went to Google to find all the information he could, then reported the problem to his building’s management company. He was told that they’d call an exterminator, and also that they wouldn’t pay for it. “I was like, whatever, I need for them to be gone,” Shumate says.

The exterminator came out and sprayed, then sprayed again a month later after Shumate started getting bitten again. Meanwhile, he had been in touch with his alderman, the MTO, and the City of Chicago, and learned that paying for the exterminator shouldn’t be his responsibility since his unit wasn’t the only one in the building affected: a neighbor told him that there were several other units that had bedbugs. The management company, however, said otherwise, claiming Shumate’s infestation was an isolated one and blaming him for the bedbugs because he worked in a hotel.

“The exterminator himself, because I asked him, said you couldn’t tell,” Shumate says. “It could have been a clothing store, it could have been a theater. Maybe they came in on your maintenance man who did maintenance in an infested unit and then brought them to my unit. They don’t carry passports with them; they don’t have little GPSes.”

Since the second treatment, Shumate says, he’s been bedbug free, but he’s still battling the management company over who will foot the $300 bill. He says it’s not so much the money at this point as the principle. He doesn’t think he should have to pay for it, and says that knuckling under will just make it worse for others. “There’s a lot of shame in it. You think, oh my god, bedbugs, that’s disgusting. And it is. I’m sleeping with bugs, and they’re eating me while I’m sleeping! I think there’s a big taboo with it, and by not talking about it, it just perpetuates the problem.”

Mathers would like to see stronger legislation around bedbugs, stating that it’s a landlord’s responsibility to pay for extermination—with specific consequences if a landlord doesn’t follow through. In fact, most states don’t have laws specific to bedbugs, especially ones that dictate what a landlord’s responsibilities are. Both New York and Maine have passed bedbug legislation in the last couple years, and Florida and Texas mention bedbugs in their pest control laws—but that’s about it. Illinois, in fact, does mention bedbugs in one law, but it’s not exactly recent: it requires railroad cars to be bedbug free.

48th Ward alderman Harry Osterman is working on bedbug legislation that he plans to present to the City Council within the next few months. His office is in the process of coming up with a list of best practices, using cities like New York as a model. He’d like to see better coordination between the buildings and health departments, more public education, and a defined system of landlord/tenant responsibilities. “Chicago has a huge bedbug issue,” Osterman says. “I think the magnitude of it isn’t something people have quite come to grips with yet. Unless we’re able to deal with it, it’s going to continue to be a problem.”

Currently when a Chicago resident calls 311, an inspector is sent out to the building and if bedbugs are found, the owner is given a citation and ordered to appear in administrative court, says buildings department spokeswoman Weisser. The court works with the owner to bring him or her into compliance, and may issue fines for noncompliance. “A lot of management companies build that into their budget,” Mathers says. “Like, ‘Sure, we’re going to get a couple fines and then we’re going to keep doing what we do.'”

State laws about who pays for extermination are even less clear, says Colwell. Last year the Illinois Department of Public Health’s Structural Pest Control Advisory Council formed a bedbug subcommittee, which produced a report of recommendations to curb the bedbug problem in Illinois; the report will be presented to the legislature in the next month or so. Among the recommendations: define landlord/tenant responsibilities (tenants must report bedbugs and facilitate their removal; landlords are responsible for getting them exterminated), improve public awareness, and enable local health departments to respond to bedbug complaints.

What the legislature will do with those recommendations remains to be seen, Colwell says, but in the meantime the bedbug problem tends to be particularly severe in low-income buildings where landlords refuse to deal with the critters and tenants can’t afford to pay for professional pest control themselves.

Mathers has seen plenty of buildings that fit Colwell’s description, and says that one in Rogers Park is especially bad: some residents have been living with bedbugs for years because the landlords refuse to effectively treat the infestation. Arbie Bowman, 43, lives there with her seven-year-old daughter, Rosie, and no longer has bedbugs—no thanks to the building management, she says. After her daughter started getting bitten a little over a year ago, Bowman told the maintenance man about the problem and says that he laughed at her. “Like it was a joke,” she says. “This ain’t no joke.”

Maintenance came to her apartment a few times over the next few months to spray alcohol and put down powder to get rid of the bugs, but it didn’t help. Meanwhile, Rosie was sleeping on the coffee table because she got bitten every time she tried to sleep in her bed. “I slept in a chair, right there by my daughter watching her,” Bowman says. “I’m lucky if I got two hours of sleep at nighttime.”

Bowman started attacking the bedbugs herself, spraying the entire place with alcohol every day after her daughter left for school, even standing the mattresses on end to get all parts of them. It’s an extremely difficult way to eradicate bedbugs, which are good at hiding in tiny crevices, but she eventually managed it.

Bowman says Rosie still wakes up in the night thinking that there are bugs crawling on her. And knowing that many other units in the building are infested with bedbugs, Bowman doesn’t let anyone except her immediate family into her apartment. “I can’t take that chance,” she says. “With my daughter still having them nightmares . . . God forbid if I get them again.”

The management doesn’t tell people who are moving in that there are bedbugs and mice in the building, Bowman says, and now that they know she’s working with the Metropolitan Tenants Organization to help organize other residents, they’re trying to kick her out. Despite everything, Bowman doesn’t want to move: rent is cheap, and if she moves she’s likely to lose her job in home health care, which is in the same building where she lives.

She’s still hoping that the organizing she’s been doing with MTO will eventually make a difference. “I just want them people to get rid of the mices and get rid of the bedbugs and start helping these tenants out,” she says. “What me and my child went through for three months, I wish on nobody.”

“Subsidized Money Pit” – Chicago Reporter investigates

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By: Angela Caputo / January 02, 2012
From the January/February 2012 issue of the Chicago Reporter, Subsidized Housing
Subsidizing failure

 

Mary Smith was living on a quiet Woodlawn block in 1978 when she got the news that she landed an apartment in one of the neighborhood’s first federally subsidized buildings. At the time, the golden-brick courtyard building at 6134 S. Kimbark Ave. was a bright spot in the neighborhood, which was struggling to regain its footing a decade after a spate of rioting that followed Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968. Smith was just shy of 30 but already knew something about rebuilding herself. After moving from Tennessee, she was adjusting to life as a single mother and a widow in Chicago.

Smith has a round face spotted with freckles and speaks with a lisp. Her voice rises when she talks about her family’s early days on Kimbark. “We were 100 units strong,” she said of her neighbors, some of whom still live on the block. “We were taking care of the place. We were gardening. We were thriving.”

But more than three decades later, the building on the corner of 62nd Street and Kimbark Avenue has become more a symbol of failure than hope.

The heat is chronically cut off in the building. In most units, radiator covers hang half-cocked from the walls so tenants have pulled couches and beds in front of the hot pipes to avoid getting scorched. Some have taken in cats to catch the mice. One elderly woman keeps a cooler in her den to catch the rainwater that pours through gaps in the ceiling that the building’s maintenance crew tried to patch up with a piece of plywood and duct tape.

After barely passing federal inspection standards in recent years, the Kimbark building, along with a handful of other neighboring, federally subsidized buildings owned by the same company, earned a failing score of 43 out of 100 points last year. That was 17 points shy of just scraping by. One more failed inspection, and the government could step in to foreclose on the property. It is also plausible that the property could be sold off and the subsidies lost.

For tenants and housing activists, the problems at Kimbark go deeper than brick and mortar. The decaying building is a symbol of how public officials have looked the other way as landlords throughout Chicago received more than a billion in federal housing subsidies during the past decade while running some of their properties into the ground and, in some cases, using the buildings as their own personal ATMs.

A Chicago Reporter review of federal and local housing records found that 27 out of 194 properties containing more than 24,000 nonsenior federally subsidized housing units in Chicago failed at least one inspection between 2008 and 2010. Of 93 landlords overseeing these properties, 22 have been hauled into housing court by city attorneys who are suing them for at least $304,000 worth of violations since 2005. Two landlords, in particular, were taken to housing court on 22 separate occasions and amassed one-third, or $102,000, of the fines levied against property owners during that period.

Few people have worked with as many troubled Section 8 buildings as Shirley Johnson, the organizing director of the Chicago-based Metropolitan Tenants Organization. In her eyes, federal and local housing officials are doing too little to hit landlords where it hurts: the pocketbook. “They slap ’em on the hand, and they’re right back in the game,” Johnson said.

Johnson added that tenants should have a seat at the negotiating table. “Safe and decent housing—that’s all the tenants want,” she said. “They don’t care who is the owner or the manager. They just want them to be accountable.”

But officials said that, with affordable housing in increasingly short supply, a hard-nosed approach isn’t always the best way to fix troubled buildings. “We really do look at preservation as our main focus,” said Ed Hinsberger, director of the Chicago multifamily hub at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, who oversees subsidized multifamily buildings in Chicago.

Preserving the subsidies, Hinsberger said, means striking a delicate balance between holding building owners and managers accountable in the short term without leaning so hard that they decide to opt out of the program and sell the properties on the private market. “We try and figure out how to save a project, but it’s hard,” he said. “We don’t own it. We don’t control it. We can’t decide who it will go to. That’s beyond our authority.”

Still, critics said, the status quo that is tolerating too many substandard housing units must not be an option for HUD. That’s especially true, they said, considering that, with the widespread demolition of traditional public housing, the subsidized apartments represent the last bastion of stable housing for low-income families. More nonsenior apartments now exist in the 194 subsidized properties than those operated by the Chicago Housing Authority.

Jim Grow, an attorney with the National Housing Law Project, said poor performing owners and managers will have little incentive to improve until HUD takes a “more nuisanced approach” to dealing with troubled buildings. “You have to have a monitoring system that’s up for the task,” Grow said. “It’s a failure of the regulatory system to provide the money and not the quality.”

*     *     *

When Congress struck a deal in the early 1970s to begin pouring billions of dollars each year into subsidized housing, a group of young Chicago developers with an eye on rebuilding troubled neighborhoods began snapping up investments. Under the Section 8 agreements, they were guaranteed market-rate rents for up to 30 years. In exchange, they had to provide decent, safe housing for cash-strapped households.

The units are rented out on a first-come, first-served basis. To remain compliant, the landlords are required to submit annual financial reports and pass federal inspections, assessed on the safety and cleanliness of each property.

Experts point out that inspection scores are weighted, and common areas—like lobbies and grounds—can artificially boost scores or unfairly drag them down. Despite the limits, the inspections are one of the few benchmarks for measuring success. Until this fall, if landlords scored below 60 two years in a row, HUD had the power to push them into foreclosure. Under the new guideline, scoring between 30 and 59 puts the owners under increased scrutiny.

The Reporter analysis of federal data found that 30 of the 199 inspections recorded between 2008 and 2010 found failing conditions in Chicago, and 43 led to a score that was within five points of failing. This marked a nearly threefold increase in failing scores compared with the three prior years, when slightly more inspections were logged. While those scores should have raised red flags, HUD’s response has been lax. In 2009, for example, only two of the nine properties due for reinspection because of initial failing scores were scored that year.

HUD’s Hinsberger said he isn’t convinced that the failed inspections are the most accurate way of determining trends or even the overall health of Chicago’s portfolio. Some years, there are few inspections, he said, because budgets are tight. “Those inspections cost money,” he said. “Sometimes we don’t have the funds.”

Still, Grow said, officials could do more to bring troubled properties in line. HUD officials rarely put a financial squeeze on owners by gradually reducing subsidies to low-performing buildings, he said. And the agency should have a better policy for reviewing which owners are borrowing against their buildings. “Why should somebody be able to refinance and take out money without at least 70 [on their scores]?” Grow said.

Indeed, five out of 15 Chicago properties that have failed at least one federal inspection since 2008 were remortgaged within six years prior to failed inspection, a Reporter review of real estate records found.

“The system is set up so that the property is seen as a commodity, and the living conditions for residents are seen as secondary,” said Matt Ginsberg-Jaeckle, a community organizer with Southside Together Organizing for Power, a nonprofit that has been working with tenants for years to improve conditions in a series of Section 8 buildings on the city’s South Side.

With many of the contracts coming to an end, the properties have become much more susceptible to forces in the private real estate market. Roughly a decade ago, Kevin Jackson, executive director at the Chicago Rehab Network, began sounding the alarm that Chicago was facing an “invisible crisis” as the subsidies tied to roughly 21,000 units were scheduled to expire between 2000 and 2005. When the real estate market took a nose dive, Jackson said, landlords began rethinking the value of the guaranteed subsidies and have shown “a heightened interest” in extending their contracts.

As far as Johnson of the Metropolitan Tenants Organization is concerned, if landlords want the guarantees that come along with extensions—including up to nearly $290 million in rents for 2011 alone—federal officials should be pushing harder for building improvements. “HUD has a lot of leverage,” she said. “That’s where these landlords are getting their rent.”

City attorneys, meanwhile, have stepped up enforcement on troubled Section 8 buildings in recent years, citing the owners for violations by hauling some of them into housing court.

The bottom line, said former Chicago Department of Housing Commissioner Jack Markowski, who is now president of the Community Investment Corporation, which controls a fund that helps stabilize troubled buildings including Section 8 properties, is that “the city often has used code enforcement as a way to go after bad management.”

At least 31 properties have been sued by the city in housing court since 2005. A vast majority, or 75 percent, of the cases were filed between 2008 and 2011. Some of the cases involve fairly minor violations, such as doing construction without a permit and painting over electrical switches. Others are more serious. They include structurally unsound porches, missing smoke detectors and no heat or hot water in winter.

More than one-third of the housing court cases involve just two companies—East Lake Management and Development Corporation and the Woodlawn Redevelopment Corp. No. 2—which have racked up a combined $102,000 in fines. The number of fines attributed to East Lake, which is run by Elzie Higginbottom, is in part because the company oversees more Section 8 units—3,094 apartments in all—than any other entity. The company also manages a wide portfolio, which, like the Woodlawn Redevelopment Corp. No. 2’s parent company, includes Chicago Housing Authority properties.

Eileen Rhodes, vice president at East Lake, pointed out that the management company’s buildings have been given few failing scores on federal inspections—three in 78 inspections—in the past decade. “I think that the [federal inspections] are an indicator that the properties are in good shape,” she said.

Ironically, some of those troubled buildings surpassed expectations when it came to federal inspections. The Woodlawn Redevelopment Corp. No. 2, for example, was given a passing grade in 2009 at the same time it was being sued by the city for building code violations that included rodent infestation, mold and standing sewage.

*     *     *

The three-story building at 6134 S. Kimbark Ave. doesn’t look like much from the curb. Its golden-brick facade is dulled by the fine lines of age. A black wrought-iron fence rings a lawn that’s spotted with ashy patches of dirt.

The initial federal investment in the property—HUD had agreed to lock into 30 years of rent subsidies in 1974—was a sign that redevelopment was possible in the struggling Woodlawn community. For a young community organizer, Leon Finney Jr., the federal money was like a down payment on a local development initiative he called “The Dream Plan.”

Finney grew up in the neighborhood and was a rising star in the scrappy nonprofit, The Woodlawn Organization. With the community organizing skills imparted on him by the famed Saul Alinsky, his goal was to channel his neighbors’ desires—for decent housing and jobs—into action. That was The Dream Plan. And housing was key.

More than 30 years after the Section 8 program began, no section of the city was eligible for more rent subsidies last year than 60637, the ZIP code that includes Woodlawn and neighboring Washington Park. More than one in every $10 committed to Section 8 rents went to the 3,126 apartments in the area roughly bounded by State Street, Lake Shore Drive, and 51st and 73rd streets.

No Section 8 property has faced more recent scrutiny for how it has been managed than the Kimbark buildings, which are owned by the Woodlawn Redevelopment Corp. No. 2, an entity set up by Finney, and managed by the Woodlawn Community Development Corp., which oversees 902 Section 8 units throughout the city.

In late November, the city filed two fresh lawsuits against the nonprofit because the heat wasn’t working consistently for three weeks. Since 2008, the city has initiated eight additional legal cases concerning the cluster of buildings, which is anchored by the Kimbark building. All told, the city has sued the Woodlawn Redevelopment Corp. No. 2 for $57,755 in fines related to the Kimbark portfolio since 2008. The nonprofit faces another $140,685 in housing court fines for a string of unrelated, but troubled, rental buildings that are in foreclosure.

In December, city officials signaled that they were fed up with the ongoing disrepair at Kimbark. The Woodlawn Redevelopment Corp. No. 2 was added to a list of “building code scofflaws” who have failed to address scores of code violations in the past year. Finney has pledged to get his organization’s name removed from the list to avoid losing city contracts.

“In most other jurisdictions, HUD would have said, ‘You’re done,’” said Kate Walz, housing justice director at the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law. Walz has represented the Kimbark Tenants Association, which is co-chaired by Smith, in court in the past couple of years. “Chicago’s HUD office is looking at preservation. Otherwise, only tenants will suffer.”

A Reporter review of the management company’s financial records found that the building’s poor conditions have only been exacerbated by the nonprofit’s financial practices. In 2006, the property was refinanced, but few needed repairs were made with the money. Then, in 2009, more than $163,000 was transferred out of the property to cover unrelated expenses including payroll and bank overdrafts, the records show. The next year, federal inspectors found the buildings in such disrepair that they were given a failing score.

Finney rejected that the conditions at Kimbark are a reflection on his nonprofit’s property management skills. “Are you going to define me by that one property?” he said. “I have been there and done whatever needed to be done to make life well and function for not only them but for literally thousands of other people. So I just reject the idea of that.”

HUD has “some financial concerns” about how Kimbark and some other Section 8 properties are being managed by the Woodlawn Community Development Corp., according to Hinsberger. The agency has chided Finney in recent years for dipping into restricted housing subsidies to cover payroll and other expenses—some of which are tied to its sister agency, The Woodlawn Organization, independent audit reports show.

But it’s translated into little change for tenants who have learned to live with the substandard conditions.

For the second time in four years, Finney is attempting to sell the property, and he’s close to sealing the deal. If this deal goes through, the federal subsidy will be extended until 2029. Cullen Davis, whose company, Urban Property Investments, manages a series of other Section 8 properties, along with a partner, is expected to take the property over in January. The Illinois Housing Development Authority has approved $10 million in tax credits to begin rehabbing the Kimbark building. That’s money that the Woodlawn Redevelopment Corp. was not eligible for because of its poor property management track record.

The hope is that the new owners will do a better job at managing the federal subsidies, which should pump up to nearly $1.3 million in rents into the 100-unit development next year. Poor conditions have led to vacancies, though. About one-third of the 100 units sit empty.

The way Smith sees it, she’s faced with two bad choices: Stay at Kimbark and hope conditions improve under the new ownership or live with the chaos.

“I don’t want to leave this community,” said Smith, now 62 and retired. “I want to have a place where my kids can come back to and say, ‘I grew up here,’ so they feel like they have some roots.”

Emily Gowing and Sachiko Yoshitsugu helped research this article.  

Original article

Photo: Mary Smith flips through her datebook, recalling a three-week period in the fall when the heat in her Woodlawn apartment building wasn’t working because of a broken boiler. Photo by Marc Monaghan.

Princeton Park Homes: Tenants suffer, Owners prosper

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For Marietta Murphy, the pastoral setting of Princeton Park seemed like the perfect place to raise her five daughters.  They could have the freedom to ride their bikes, and she could have a garden.  And rents at the South Side housing complex were affordable.

But nine years later, each of her girls suffers from respiratory problems, including asthma and recurring bronchitis, requiring constant treatment.  Murphy blames pervasive mold in her townhome – and a landlord who has done nothing about repeated flooding.

Standing water pools in the basement and mold permeates the air in her home.  Walls bubble from water damage, and lead chips falls from windows and door frames onto porches and into gardens.  Tenants are living in unsanitary and hazardous conditions while Preston Higgins Jr, the development’s owner, rakes in millions.

Princeton Park tenants are organizing to improve conditions, and they’ve filed a class-action lawsuit against Higgins over mold and lead issues – and violations of Chicago’s landlord tenant ordinance.

Built in the 1940s, the Princeton Park Homes complex occupies a six-square block stretch of land west of the Dan Ryan between 91st and 95th Streets.  A century ago, this was a rural area populated by Dutch settlers who cultivated the land for farming.  As African Americans migrated north and Chicago grew, the racial fabric of the neighborhood changed, and the new residents needed affordable housing options.

Princeton Park Homes were built to house black middle-class railroad workers and their families.  Today the complex is still almost entirely African American, filled with working families that pay market-rate rent.

The development maintains much of its original appeal.  Inside Princeton Park the city’s grid system is abandoned for curving streets and cul-de-sacs, and front lawns of townhomes are well manicured.  Princeton Park’s website boasts of the impressive gardens and fosters a healthy competition among residents vying for an annual garden and lawn award.

Princeton Park residents take pride in their yards, but their sense of well-being stops at the front door.  Residents report widespread problems with basement flooding and leaky windows and walls that cause mold to grow and ruin their belongings.  Children test positive for lead poisoning.  Rodents and insect infestations are plentiful.

Lakisha Jones, a single mother of two who’s lived in Princeton Park for two years, suffered six floods in just over a year.  A two-foot-high water line marks the height of the most recent flood in her basement.  Jones lost baby books and winter clothes, and she’s had to replace a washer – and then purchase a new $400 motor for the new washer after yet another flood.

And after her home was flooded with water contaminated by feces and decaying animals, she and her 9-year old son contracted bacterial infections that sent them to the hospital with oozing sores and fevers.

Today she doesn’t take any chances – industrial-strength bleach is a regular purchase and is used to combat the mold that creeps up walls and drips from her ceiling.  Each time it rains, Jones is nervous and checks each wall and window for signs of flooding.

“I feel like a hurricane victim, having water run down my walls,” she said.  She’s complained to the management office numerous times, but “Princeton Park has failed to fix any of the safe and unsanitary conditions inside the property.”

In their lawsuit, tenants charge that Princeton Park owners pass the cost of maintenance and repairs on to tenants in violation of Chicago’s Residential Landlord-Tenant Ordinance.

Under the ordinance, landlords are responsible for maintenance unless damage is caused by tenants; charges for general wear and tear should not be passed on the tenants.  But the lease at Princeton Park states that “Lessee must make his own repairs… at Lessee’s expense.”

It’s not for lack of money, with rents for nearly a thousand two- and three- bedroom units ranging from $650 to $800 a month, the owner takes in as much as $750,000 each month.  According to Dun & Bradstreet, Preston Higgins & Co. nets $1.9 million in profits each year.

Tenants charge that Princeton Park has turned the development’s hazardous conditions into money-making opportunities while allowing the buildings to slowly deteriorate.  In addition to their monthly rent, Princeton Park tenants pay for all repair and maintenance visits and all outside contractors.  Additional fees range from $5 to unstop a toilet to $45 to clean grease traps, and even more for security doors, wiring, or piping.  Tenants end up bearing the lion’s share of the financial burden for apartment condition and repair requests.

A year or so into her residency, Marietta Murphy’s kitchen sink needed repairs.  The aging plumbing system was overburdened and regularly flooded.  Princeton Park charged her for each maintenance visit.

“I have no idea how much extra they have charged me because its tacked onto the rent each month, and with additional fees and yearly rent increases, it’s hard to keep track of,” she said.

In addition to paying maintenance visits each time flooding occurred, Murphy has lost three washers and dryers and a deep freezer in her nine years at Princeton Park.  The owners don’t really care, she said.  ”The office told me there was nothing they could do and that I shouldn’t put anything of value in the basement,” she said.  ”They told me I should get renters insurance.”

Murphy points out several vacant homes where tenants voiced complaints to the management office and to Higgins to no avail.  ”You better believe Higgins is not living like we are living out here,” she said.  ”And if he were to come out here and live one month in the summer with the floods, he’d move out of here.”

The city has fined Preston Higgins LLC and Princeton Park LLC several times for code violations regarding flooding as well as noncompliance with lead abatement.  But for Higgins, as for many landlords, such fines seem to be considered a cost of doing business.

Tenants want the city to do more.  They’re meeting regularly with the Metropolitan Tenant Organizations and pressing city officials to help deal with the basement flooding proactively.

At a recent tenant meeting, several residents expressed concern about steps management has taken toward lead abatement.  When door frames in a majority of the townhomes were found to contain lead, maintenance workers tacked aluminum strips to cover the lead paint.  But tenants say the strips are flimsy and often fall off.

Tenants say they wish Higgins would work with them to improve their living situation.  They love Princeton park for what it could be – a safe, pleasant and affordable neighborhood that fosters community.  But they feel like they are investing in Preston Higgins rather than their community.

“I strongly believe that if Mr. Higgins would meet with this tenants once a month that this could be a much better place,” said Murphy.  ”Our rent is helping him go to Hawaii, buy luxury cars, and go to those five-star restaurants.  Without us, he would be having White Castle and McDonald’s like we do.”

Written by Sara Mathers and John Bartlett

Special Thanks to Princeton Park Homes Tenants, Cecilia Nemeth, Paul Bernstein, and MTO Staff.

Photo:  Mold in a second floor bedroom caused by flooding


Building Inspection Details Now Available Online!

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The City of Chicago has launched a new web tool that we support and encourage residents to utilize.  All building inspections, detailed with the inspector’s notes, are organized by case and available for the public to view by entering the address of the building.  Code violations date back to 1999 and are updated regularly.

To find out the history of building code violations at any address, click here.  You can also find the link on the right-hand side of our website by clicking on the official Chicago seal.

Learn more: Chicago Municipal Code

Call our hotline at 773-292-4988 1-5 pm Monday-Friday to speak with a counselor about your rights when building codes are violated.

National Lead Poisoning Prevention Week is October 23-29th

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National Lead Poisoning Prevention Week is October 23-29th, 2011.  Children under age 6 are most at risk for lead poisoning.  You can prevent lead poisoning by getting your home tested, getting your child tested and getting the facts.

  • Lead is a metal that is found in many places.  You can’t always see lead, even when it is present in substances like paint, dust, or dirt.
  • Lead in the body is not safe at any level.  It only takes a very small amount to cause damage.
  • Childhood lead poisoning can lead to life-long health problems, including learning disabilities, increased need for special education and higher crime rates.  Lead harms the brain, making it harder for children to learn and can cause behavioral problems.
  • Most children do not have any physical symptoms.  Warning signs include:  stomach pains, constipation, poor appetite, sleep problems, irritability, headaches, weakness, or loss of a recently learned skill.
  • Children are most often exposed to lead in their home and at places they visit.
  • Lead was added to paint until 1978.
  • In housing built before 1978, assume that the paint has led unless tests show otherwise.
  • Children eat lead by getting lead on their hands and then putting their hands in their mouth.
  • Make sure your child does not have access to peeling paint or chew-able surfaces painted with lead-based paint by creating barriers between living/play areas and lead sources.  You can temporarily apply contact paper or duct tape to cover spaces with sources of lead.
  • Regularly wash your children’s hands and toys.  Both can become contaminated from household dust or exterior soil.
  • Regularly wet-mop floors and wet-wipe windows–dry-dust, sweeping or vacuuming will spread lead dust.
  • Wipe dirt off shoes before coming inside your home.
  • Whenever new exposures to lead may have occurred, have your child tested.
  • DO NOT disturb paint without protecting your family from the dust that occurs during abatement.
  • Feed your child 3 healthy meals a day–a diet high in iron, calcium and Vitamin C will help fight any lead in a child’s body.
  • Do not use pottery for cooking or serving until you are sure of its glaze.  Pottery can be contaminated with lead.
  • Draw drinking water and cooking water only from the cold tap.  Let it run for a few minutes first.
  • Teach your child to wash their hands before eating.

The City of Chicago provides FREE lead inspections to homes with children under 6 years old and/or with children under 6 who frequently visit, call 311 and ask for lead inspection TODAY.

For information about tenants’ rights: call Megan Borneman, MTO Healthy Homes Organizer… 773-292-4980 ext. 231

For resources available to Chicago residents:  call the Chicago Department of Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention… 312-747-LEAD (5323)

For resources available to non-Chicago residents in Cook County:  call the Cook County Lead Prevention Program… 708-492-2076

Harvey Tenants Say “We Won’t Go” – City of Harvey Orders Landlord to Make Repairs

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The cease and desist order issued by the City of Harvey was a huge wake-up call to tenants on 154th street that they were about to lose their homes.  The tenants with the help of MTO began to organize. Their efforts led, not only to the order being rescinded, but to a meeting with city officials and a campaign to preserve their housing and improve their living conditions.

With the evictions stopped, the tenants association focused on the gross building code violations and problematic housing conditions affecting all of them. The building was in bad condition.  Tenants complained about bedbugs, roaches, mice, systemic plumbing issues, an uneven porch and stairs, evidence of mold on walls and ceilings and wide-ranging apartment repair issues. After a month of meetings in the parking lot, MTO and tenant leaders engaged the City of Harvey public officials to find innovative ways to address this housing situation. After several strategy sessions between tenants and public officials – the group determined that it was time to meet with the owner and property manager to discuss solutions.

The meeting took place in late August. Prior to this meeting, building maintenance had become nonexistent. Conditions had deteriorated to such a degree the building was becoming dangerous and uninhabitable leaving it vulnerable to being condemned. During several hours of negotiations between MTO, tenants, City of Harvey public officials and the landlord; an agreement was reached.  The agreement includes bringing out certified contractors to make an assessment and conduct inspections of units to gain a better idea of the overall repair and pest issues. The owner also agreed to waive all past due rent tenants had withheld for poor conditions. A timeline and a signed agreement were developed as a means to hold each side accountable. This represents a significant win for these renters and has been a strong first step into working in the county for MTO.

The tenants understand that the fight is not over.  Now the tenants know they have power and understand the importance of organizing and building collaborations to address their housing concerns.  They are confident that their hard work will pay off.   The victory has raised tenants’ hopes and their self-respect.

Source of Income Protection for Section 8 Voucher Holders

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The Cook County Human Rights Ordinance protects individuals from discrimination based on their income (such as child support, social security) however, it specifically does not include protections for people with Section 8 housing vouchers.

With the ordinance as it stands, housing providers can and do deny qualified households solely because they have a Section 8 voucher.  Studies have proven that housing providers refuse to rent to voucher holders as a pretext for other types of illegal discrimination based on race, familial status, and disability.

MTO supports the proposed ordinance amendment that would include protection for individuals with Section 8 vouchers.  Property owners would still have the right to screen applicants.

The city of Chicago and six other municipalities in Illinois, ten states, the District of Columbia, and ten counties across the country have laws in place that protect individuals from discrimination based on using Housing Choice vouchers.

Voucher holders are some of the most scrutinized tenants and have to meet the rigorous criteria of the voucher administrator as well as comply with lease provisions. Nearly 40% of voucher recipients are employed and more than 30% are seniors or persons with disabilities. There is absolutely no evidence that persons who use Housing Choice Vouchers to make their housing affordable perpetuate or increase crime in communities.

Landlord participation in the voucher program is not unduly burdensome. Landlords only have to complete three simple forms. Payments made by the housing authority are made electronically. Units must pass a Housing Quality Standards inspection. Voucher recipients have to complete most of the paperwork.

By supporting this amendment to the CCHRO, the last remaining type of source of income discrimination in Cook County can finally end.

For more reading, check out this research article which found no evidence that voucher holder households increase crime in neighborhoods.

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SOI Talking Points Final