Tenants and former tenants of public housing developments showed up at the Atlanta headquarters of the Department of Housing and Urban Development last week demanding leaders address their concerns about poor living conditions.
Diana Brown, a caregiver from Albany, was part of the small group to rally outside the offices downtown.
Brown said she’s been asking for years that HUD address poor conditions, including mold, faulty amenities and overall disrepair, affecting senior residents at a public housing complex run by the county housing authority.
With a stack of papers in hand documenting the experience of over 100 tenants -- among the stack were letters signed by doctors who saw tenants with respiratory issues, and photos of mold and mildew on apartment furniture -- Brown says so far nothing has changed.
“So what happened? Now we're up here holding them accountable,” Brown said.
The complex of concern, Hudson Malone Towers, scored a 63 on its last HUD inspection, just three points higher than what is considered a failing score. That was in 2017, the last publicly documented inspection.
“We want them to inspect it, we want to know the scores,” Brown said.” We want to know when they fail. We want to know everything about this unit.”
If conditions aren’t addressed, Brown said she’s concerned the tenants, a majority of which are older and low-income, will be displaced. The Albany Housing Authority did not respond to a request for comment.
Brown wasn’t alone in her calls for action. Also present were former tenants of Atlanta’s Forest Cove, condemned for poor conditions, and tenants of GE Towers who are asking the city to address alleged issues with ongoing renovations.
Latresa Chaney said it’s been near impossible to find housing in the city as Georgia’s affordable housing crisis continues. Chaney and her kids moved out of their subsidized unit at Forest Cove in 2019 after conditions became unbearable, she said, and did not receive relocation assistance.
Now she shares a unit with some family friends.
“I can't afford to live in Atlanta where I was born and raised,” Chaney said. “I'm living in displacement … I can't just go and get a house or an apartment any more.”
Most recently, tenants of a complex in Griffin run by the same property management company as Forest Cove were displaced after city inspections affirmed poor living conditions. Months ago the company, Millennia Housing Management, was barred from any new contracts with HUD for five years after investigations across the country proved mismanagement and neglect.
An Atlanta HUD representative said the agency is aware of the tenants' concerns voiced at the rally, the Atlanta-Journal Constitution reported, though the agency did not respond to GPB’s request for comment.
Meanwhile, a new law went into effect this summer mandating Georgia landlords keep housing “fit for human habitation.”
House Bill 404, the Safe at Home Act, makes it so that landlords are liable for repairs and improvements. It also mandates security deposits be no more than the equivalent of two months rent.
Bambie Hayes-Brown, also from Albany, lobbied for the new law, and hopes it helps bring attention to renters in South Georgia. Hayes-Brown lives in Atlanta now and runs a local nonprofit, Georgia Advancing Communities Together.
She said conversations around housing and tenant rights can sometimes happen in a vacuum.
“We talk about that we care about our seniors and children and veterans, and all of those vulnerable populations,” Hayes-Brown said. “Well, let's take care of them.”
While legislation starts to go into effect, Hayes-Brown said she and others will keep advocating for the hundreds of tenants waiting on inspections.
