Shared from the 4/22/2019 Houston Chronicle eEdition

Galveston residents ‘living in mold’ at low-income units

Tenants endure vermin, sewage, outages in complex subsidized by HUD

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Mark Mulligan / Staff photographer

Sinks of wastewater challenge Cynthia Minix, who has to sterilize plastic syringes to feed her husband, who had a stroke.

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Photos by Mark Mulligan / Staff photographer

Peyton Johnson, 3, plays in front of her home at the Sandpiper Cove Apartments in Galveston, which aHUD spokesperson in Texas noted was “trending upward” after its most recent inspection.

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Cynthia Minix submerges her dishes in boiling water to sanitize them because her sink has been backing up.

GALVESTON — Jessie Jordan’s grandson was convinced blood was coming out of the toilet.

She made her way down the narrow hall to the bathroom to see for herself.

“That ain’t no blood,” she said. “That’s poop.”

Jordan, 62, has lived at the Sandpiper Cove Apartments in Galveston for 12 years with her son and grandson. It’s the only private housing complex in Galveston with rent subsidized by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

For the past several months, however, the sink has stopped up. Sewage has come out of the toilet. Mold climbs up the bathroom walls and dots the hallway ceiling, scattered amid the plastic butterflies and 2-foot-high collector’s dolls that Jordan hoped would add some cheer.

Like most of the low-income residents there, however, she can’t afford to move anywhere else. There’s a long waiting list for the Section 8 housing run by the Galveston Housing Authority.

“We’re not getting treated right,” Jordan said. “We are living in mold, and we’re sick. I’ve been going to the doctor for all this here. I can’t take it anymore.”

For years, residents say, they’ve endured mold, rats, cockroaches, bedbugs, broken air conditioning and sewer backups. HUD inspections show persistent problems, but inspectors have not returned since 2016, when the complex received a passing score despite such health and safety violations as broken smoke detectors.

In March, a power outage in six of the buildings lasted nearly four days. Still, the complex qualifies for federal housing dollars.

“We have government entities put into place to help protect those people who are the most vulnerable people in our communities,” said Ericka Bowman, a community organizer with the advocacy nonprofit Texas Housers. “Instead of being helped and protected, they’re being ignored.”

Sandpiper Cove is a privately owned apartment complex with 192 units and a HUD contract that allows tenants to pay 30 percent of their income after deductions, or a minimum of $25 per month. HUD pays the difference.

A spokesperson for Millennia Housing, the Ohio-based company that owns Sandpiper Cove and dozens of other properties, did not respond to specific questions raised by the Houston Chronicle but provided a general statement.

“Our plan calls for the property to be the subject of a tax-credit application process whereby we will be able to complete a rehabilitation of the physical asset,” Millennia spokesperson Valerie Jerome said in anemailed statement. “As part of our mission, we work to preserve affordable housing developments for residents needing good, quality and affordable rental housing.”

‘I still ain’t got no food’

When the power went out in her apartment last month, Cynthia Minix knew she was in trouble.

Her husband, John Deason, is unable to care for himself after a stroke, and Minix uses a special machine to feed him through a tube.

Without electricity, she had to buy oversized plastic syringes to push the liquid through the tube. She boiled the syringes to sterilize them.

“We just not getting help,” said Minix, 51, who used candles to light the apartment. “We’re just stuck in this house with no lights, using burners. Four days.”

Another resident said she spent $134 to stay at a motel for two nights with her children. She didn’t want her name used because she was afraid of retaliation by management. She said the manager at Sandpiper Cove gave her canned goods.

“My kids can’t just survive off canned food and beans,” she said. “I put money down for my kids to eat and now I lost over 75 percent of that and all I have is canned goods.”

The power was temporarily restored when the company brought in a generator. Jerome said the property will need two new transformers: one to replace the transformer that went out, and another that was almost out.

“While work is underway, there will be intermittent times when residents will be without power as buildings are transferred from generator or aged transformer to new transformer,” she said. “We plan to provide advance notice to minimize inconvenience.”

Minix also had to throw the perishables in her refrigerator and freezer. She pays $398 per month for her one-bedroom apartment, but threw out $150 worth of meat.

“That kind of money was for rent,” she said. “I still ain’t got no food.”

‘Nowhere to go’

Ashley Cooper’s son got lucky.

He was taking a shower in their Sandpiper Cove apartment when the ceiling fell down. Had he been sitting on the toilet, the ceiling would have collapsed on his head.

Cooper, 39, lived at Sandpiper Cove for about three years with her two children until 2016. Her rent ranged from about $245 to $430, depending on her salary.

“It was horrible,” she said. “I lived there because I had nowhere to go with my children.”

The Cooper family lived on the second floor. Whenever someone took a bath or a shower, she said, water leaked to her downstairs neighbor’s apartment. Her neighbor usually came upstairs if the water was leaking down to make sure someone was taking ashower.

Carlika Johnson, who lives next door to Minix, said her sink overflowed so much that it dripped all over the floor.

“It’s horrible; it’s nasty,” she said. “It just be like a whole bunch of different debris and particles in there. It has that horrible smell to it and it’s a brown-looking color.”

Johnson, 23, has lived at Sandpiper Cove for 2½ years. In those years, her ceiling in the bathroom leaked and she said she still has mildew in her first-floor unit from when Hurricane Harvey roared through. She asked to move into a different apartment because she wanted her kids away from the mildew. So far, she said, she hasn’t gotten a transfer and her maintenance requests have been ignored.

“They make it seem like they’re going to come out and do something, like they’re going to get it right away,” she said. “But I don’t see nobody.”

Eileen Razey, 27, said the air conditioner in the apartment she shares with her four kids has been broken for 2½ years. Though maintenance has come out, she said, the vent just blows hot air.

She’s on the waitlist for a Section 8 voucher in nearby Texas City, but wishes she could stay in Galveston, close to work.

“We work hard and we pay our rent,” she said, “and they’re not fixing nothing.”

Trending upward?

A regional HUD spokesperson in Texas wouldn’t comment on the recent problems, but noted the Sandpiper Cove complex is “trending upward,” with improvement noted in the most recent inspection more than two years ago.

The complex scored twice as well in 2016 as it had in the October 2015 inspection, though multiple health and safety concerns required immediate fixes. Millennia Housing acquired the property in March 2015.

The November 2016 assessment, a Real Estate Assessment Center inspection, was meant to assess the physical structure and safety of the complex. Inspectors on-site were supposed to randomly check a sampling of units and look at the building exterior.

Another 2016 inspection by a contractor — called a Management and Occupancy Review and mostly meant to focus on whether a property is complying with HUD management guidelines — noted that Sandpiper Cove had failed to correct multiple issues cited in the 2015 inspection, including damaged doors, peeling paint, a missing toilet tank cover and an inoperable stove. It also noted that the apartment complex did not have a comprehensive preventive maintenance plan.

Sandpiper Cove disputed nearly every finding of the report.

As part of compliance for the 2016 MOR inspection, Sandpiper Cove property managers conducted a self-inspection of the units. They found that five units had problems with smoke detectors, three had roaches and multiple units had broken doors, holes in the walls and missing stoppers.

Sandpiper Cove has its next MOR inspection scheduled for May 1. The last REAC inspection should have been in late 2018, but was delayed by the government shutdown.

“These apartment complexes are passing HUD inspections, and it’s surprising that they are,” Bowman said. “How is it that these apartment complexes that are visibly unlivable — how is it something so evident can possibly pass?”

‘The only choice I had’

Galveston demolished its public housing units after Hurricane Ike in 2008, and has rebuilt only about half of those 569 units so far, though state and federal funds have been available.

The city has state funds to rebuild the remaining 287 missing units on behalf of the Galveston Housing Authority, which would then own and operate the facilities. Political squabbling over where to build the units, however, has delayed the project. Funding could run out by the end of the year.

Meanwhile, the waiting list for current Galveston Housing Authority properties has long been closed. Sandpiper Cove is the only other option on the island.

“The problem with terrible conditions in a lot of affordable housing, including privately owned, is that this is the only housing people can afford,” said Madison Sloan, director of disaster recovery and fair housing at the nonprofit Texas Appleseed. “Even if it’s dangerous, if you shut it down, people will be homeless.”

Several former tenants of Sandpiper Cove said they moved out once they got Section 8 housing in other cities.

“This is a reoccurring theme,” said Bowman, who has been working with tenants there for the past six months to help them organize. “They’re feeling as if, ‘This is what I’m going to have to accept.’ ”

Texas Housers filed suit suit against HUD in 2018 on behalf of residents of the Coppertree Village Apartments in Houston, which operates under the same HUD program as Sandpiper Cove. It cited similar problems, including mold and a lack of a preventive maintenance plan.

For now, tenants are waiting — for a way out or for repairs.

“I’m trying to get Section 8 to get the hell out of here,” said Johnson, who continues to battle with the overflowing sink. “I don’t want to be over here no more, but this was the only choice I had at the moment.” sarah.smith@chron.com

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