Yet, another battle: Substandard rental conditions
23rd May 2016 · 0 Comments
By Della Hasselle
Contributing Writer
In the New Orleans East house where resident Trina Lackey lived with her son, water crept through the walls and the ceiling, and dripped from the kitchen sink. Her floor would soak every time it rained. The dampness produced black mold, which gave her respiratory issues, and she stopped being able to sleep at night. When she called her landlord to fix the problem, he would ignore her calls.
Eventually, he just evicted her.
“You could just see the mold, smell the mold. I got sick from the mold,” Lackey told New Orleans City Council last week. “It would interfere with my husband and I. It was depression, it was PTSD…it was a lot of stuff.”
Lackey’s story was one of about a dozen shared during the council’s Community Development hearing. Chaired by Councilwoman Latoya Cantrell, the special meeting was called to revive a formerly abandoned plan that could help alleviate conditions for those living in substandard housing.
During the gathering of advocacy groups, councilmembers and residents, Cantrell revealed her plans to implement the rental registry, a process that could ultimately force landlords to submit to city inspection, and subject them to fines if they weren’t compliant.
“I’ve said over and over, we have not done code enforcement well. Or enforcement, period,” Cantrell said. “And this is a place we can truly start.”
Ultimately, as Lackey told the council, her story ended well. She found a home to call her own, and is no longer dealing with black mold or any of the other dangerous conditions that plague New Orleans homes.
But for the thousands of others families that are still dealing with negligent landlords, advocates said, the problems keep spiraling.
Dr. George Hober, from the Louisiana Public Health Institute, was among the many advocates who spoke on the hurdles that tenants currently face, as circumstances in many places remain stagnant or get worse, despite ever-climbing rent prices.
Hober and others pointed to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, collected from a 2011 survey about housing conditions in New Orleans.
According to those findings, about 49,000 housing rental units in the city needed major repairs at the time. It was found that many families were dealing with mold infestations like Lackey’s, as 6,850 units had water leaks from inside the apartment or house, and 5,300 had water leaks from outside.
There were other serious problems, too. More than 7,000 units had signs of rats or other rodents, and 5,450 apartments or houses did not have a working smoke detector. More than 2,300 homes had no working bathroom at all.
In addition to the statistics, Hober had anecdotal evidence. He knew of families, he said, who put buckets out when it rains, because it comes inside or runs down the walls. He talked about others living with risk of passing along insect or rodent-born illness.
“We have heard horror stories from organization that were directly dealing with substandard housing. We’ve heard of families that have had untreated sewage leaking into their apartment from units above them, and their daily fight to keep their children free from exposure to those pathogens,” Hober said. “These living situations can have lifelong effects on children, not to mention missed school days and serious cost to the health care system.”
Della Wright, the evaluation manager at the institute for women and ethnic studies, bolstered Hober’s research. She said that although housing instability and displacement occur for a variety of reasons, her work shows that New Orleanians in particular are subject to these problems because of the city’s aging housing stock.
As part of her organization’s research, the institute conducted a survey with about 1,500 youth in the city on their experiences, exposures to violence and their worries and exposure to stress.
According to Wright, the data found that inadequate housing didn’t just cause primary health problems, but resulted in trickle-down, secondary health effects.
Young people, she said, who worried about basic necessities like access to food and housing were three times more likely to report depression, ADHD and suicidal behavior.
“We know that living or being forced to move from homes that are unsafe or unhealthy can contribute to the undue stress that children in this city are experiencing,” Wright said.
What’s worse, advocates said, is that housing conditions are likely to lead to evictions, because of the frequent requests they have to make for repairs, and because of a lack of safeguards that exist in New Orleans to shield them from retribution.
Quintrell Griffin, the intake specialist at the New Orleans Fair Action Housing Center, said she gets calls on dangerous conditions every week. And when those tenants call 311, she said, the operators say they don’t accept calls about landlords.
Griffin pointed to a story about someone she called “Ms. Carroll,” who, like Lackey, dealt with leakage and mold.
Shortly after moving in, Griffin said, Ms. Carroll noticed that when it rained, carpet got soaked and it caused mold on the windows. Water seeped under the toilet, too, which got into the closet, forcing her to throw her kids’ clothes away.
But most concerning, she said, was the leak in kitchen ceiling.
“The only response she got was someone came in to paint over the mold,” Griffin recalled. “Within a few weeks got bigger and turned into a small tear, and then a hole. Again she called, but no repairs were made. Later that week a large chunk of kitchen ceiling caved in.”
Others had stories of carbon monoxide poisoning, exposed electrical wires in children’s bedrooms and even of a young man who fell through the floor recently because the termite damage had gotten so bad.
According to City Council President Jason Williams, conditions like these contribute to the city’s overall poverty, which is in turn one of the precursors to a high crime rate.
“You can’t learn at school when you can’t sleep at night in your home,” Williams said. “These are issues should affect everyone, whether they’re renting, whether they own their home or not, because we’re talking about the lion’s share of the community.”
Now, Cantrell is hoping her proposal can make a dent in the problem. As part of the plan, any fines or fees collected from noncompliant landlords could go into the city’s Neighborhood Housing Investment Fund, she said.
Thanks to Cantrell’s efforts, starting next year the fund will help property owners fix their houses. Before, it was used to help the city carry out code and blight enforcements.
But her plan doesn’t come without challenges. First, she needs to find out where the unsafe housing is, exactly. Although current data gives a number of housing units that infringe upon tenants’ rights, it doesn’t identify property addresses.
Then, she said, she’d need to get local landlords and homebuilder associations on board.
The councilwoman first suggested the legislation last year, but the proposal garnered opposition from those groups, who complained about not being involved. The issue never went before a council vote.
Regardless, she anticipated the matter would come before full council by the end of the summer. And if it worked, she said, the plan would “pay for itself.”
“If we’re doing our job and finding the bad actors, that can go back into the bucket to help enforce as well as improve the quality of life for people,” Cantrell said. “We just need to make sure resources and fees and fines get funneled into that housing trust fund to then improve people’s housing stock in the city.”
This article originally published in the May 23, 2016 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
