From bedbugs to mold, living conditions spark reforms for public housing

By Christopher Burbach

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    Nebraska (Omaha World-Herald) — Michael Coleman has reasons to like his little apartment near the heart of Dundee.

“I’ve got some good neighbors around here that I love,” said Coleman, who’s 62 and disabled because of a bad back. “There’s one lady who lives down on the first floor, she and her family took the place of my mom and dad, because they’re up in heaven.”

He can afford the $411 monthly rent he pays for his one-bedroom apartment at Underwood Tower, a public housing apartment building for senior citizens owned and managed by the Omaha Housing Authority. The utilities are paid. Coleman’s cat, named Millie for Coleman’s mother, can live with him. He would have a hard time finding a similar situation at that cost.

But he also has a reason to dread his home. He can live with occasional hot water outages, stove burners that don’t work right and heating that sometimes goes out. But bedbugs for years, that’s too much.

“This is what I have to sleep on every night,” Coleman said, walking into his bedroom and lifting a pillow and sheet corner to reveal mattress seams stained with dark splotches and littered with tiny dead bugs this spring. “I itch at night sometimes. I can’t get no sleep.”

Complaints from residents and advocates — about pests, mold, faulty heat in winter, leaking pipes, hot water failures and other issues — have led to state legislation and intense criticism of the Omaha Housing Authority and its maintenance of its properties, especially its 11 apartment towers. In interviews in their homes, Coleman and several other people who live in OHA towers described problems with their apartments and buildings and slow or faulty responses from the agency. However, several other tenants said they’re happy with their apartments and with the housing authority’s maintenance and management.

OHA officials acknowledge problems, but say they are responsive to residents’ complaints about their living conditions and that the housing the agency provides is safe.

“What we are doing is we’re working to achieve our mission, which is safe, quality, affordable housing for individuals and families that we serve, and we serve a very vulnerable population,” said Joanie Poore, CEO of the agency. “Do we do that perfectly? No, we don’t. Do we do that in unsafe situations? No, we don’t.”

The Omaha Housing Authority owns and operates public housing in the City of Omaha. That includes 11 apartment towers spread around central, South and North Omaha; the Southside Terrace Homes apartment complex in South Omaha; and scattered-site housing around the city. The agency also manages Section 8 rental assistance in the city. The housing authority receives federal funding and is overseen by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The Omaha mayor appoints the Omaha Housing Authority Board.

The housing authority has been on the defensive for nearly two years, since a family took to social media to complain about an elderly relative’s living conditions at Evans Tower in North Omaha. Community advocates, including Sherman Wells, amplified the family’s concerns. Wells, who said he has relatives at every OHA apartment tower, went on to post videos of mold, leaks and pest infestations at several towers and scattered-site homes.

He said he initially tried to work through city government and OHA channels.

But then he joined the search for Levi Blake, an 80-year-old Omaha man who went missing in North Omaha in August and was found dead in May of this year. As part of Wells’ search, he explored the vacant and abandoned Spencer public housing complex. The housing authority had left Spencer East to rot, leaving dangerous conditions behind.

“Clearly, OHA has been unchecked for so long, something needed to be done,” Wells said.

He and other advocates, including Cheryl Weston and Celeste Butler, pressed for action. They continue to do so. Activist Paul Feilmann, a retired mental health therapist known for conducting vigils outside the governor’s residence in Lincoln, has stood outside Underwood Tower with signs for months to attract more attention to the situation.

The concerns reached the Nebraska Legislature. They helped spur lawmakers to pass legislation that shakes up the composition of the housing authority Board, tightens conflict-of-interest rules for board members and prescribes a detailed process for handling and publicly reporting tenants’ complaints about their living conditions.

State Sen. Terrell McKinney of Omaha had introduced similar measures in the prior session but they got nowhere. This year, he combined them with a bill Sen. John Cavanaugh of Omaha introduced to give OHA tenants more rights in the eviction process. The legislation passed as part of LB 840, McKinney’s Poverty Elimination Plan Act.

McKinney, whose Legislative District 11 includes North Omaha, said the housing authority’s board and management were not being responsive to tenants’ complaints about their living conditions.

“And I didn’t feel like they cared about being responsive,” he said.

McKinney said he hopes the legislation leads to fewer people being evicted from their OHA housing and the OHA board and staff improving relations with residents.

“And,” he hopes one day to be able to say that, “overall that the living conditions in OHA-owned properties are improved.”

OHA officials unsuccessfully lobbied against McKinney’s and Cavanaugh’s bill, contending it would make a difficult task more difficult.

What the Omaha’s public housing authority is doing to fix problems

To be sure, providing housing to low-income, vulnerable Omahans, many of whom are elderly and disabled, is a challenging task.

Poore said the housing authority has “areas where it can improve.”

“But we also have aging infrastructure, limited finances, and a lot of complicating factors that come into play,” Poore said, noting that the towers are all more than 50 years old. “We are landlords. We are not assisted living or nursing home facilities. So there are limitations on things we can and can’t do, especially with aging and vulnerable populations.”

Poore conceded that the towers have pest problems, including bedbugs.

“Our properties, like any properties across the city, have bugs at times,” Poore said.

She said pests are a problem in about 10% of OHA units, on average. The numbers “are not dramatically increasing or dramatically decreasing for us,” she said.

The agency works with experts and follows nationally recommended pest control practices, she said. After public attention to the issue this spring, OHA consulted with a University of Nebraska extension educator who specializes in urban entomology.

Poore said OHA preventatively sprays apartments monthly. The agency tailors individual plans for tenants who report problems.

“So if somebody has some sort of an infestation, depending on what that is, that unit is typically then treated every two weeks,” Poore said.

She said OHA gives tenants information about what they can do themselves “and how to make sure that the treatments that we’re delivering are most effective.”

“We work hard to work right alongside tenants because we cannot address any infestation issues without tenants,” Poore said. “Any action that we would take alone would not address any of those issues.”

Some efforts at working with tenants are more successful than others, Poore said.

“Some people have very strong mental health issues that are barriers,” she said. “Sometimes people have physical barriers. There’s a number of different things that happen.”

Poore said conditions in apartments, such as clutter and infested furniture that does not get thrown away, can render spraying for bugs ineffective.

Asked about Coleman’s situation of a five-year bedbug infestation, Poore said she is not authorized to speak on a specific tenant’s issues.

“However, I can tell you that, depending on the condition of the unit, it might not be all that uncommon for someone to have a situation of that nature,” she said. “If you have a piece of furniture that was brought in with bedbugs or that now has an infestation, and that piece of furniture hasn’t been appropriately treated. If your mattress, your sheets, I don’t know how often those things are being laundered or vacuumed or cleaned. I don’t know the condition of the unit.”

Wells called that response “scapegoating.”

If the housing authority believes apartments have pests because tenants can’t keep up with housekeeping, then the agency should help those people by connecting them to outside resources, he said.

The housing authority does connect people with helpers. It has resource fairs, where people that provide services come into the towers and talk with residents. Some take applications on the spot and begin providing services within weeks, as happened this spring with a resource fair at Crown Tower in northwest Omaha.

Coleman said the bedbugs came into his apartment when a generous neighbor gave him a couch five years ago, not long after he moved into his apartment. They’ve never gone away. The housing authority regularly sprays his apartment for insects, he said. He squirts his bedding and surrounding areas with rubbing alcohol. But the infestation persists.

“When they come in and spray, they spray here, they spray there, but they don’t spray the whole apartment like they’re supposed to,” Coleman said.

He said he could use help with housekeeping, although he added that the laundry room in his building often does not have hot water for washing sheets. He said he has reached out to agencies for help with cleaning, but has been told that they can’t come in because of the bedbugs.

He’s far from alone in reporting pest issues in his OHA apartment. And bugs are far from the only problems plaguing tenants.

A lot of the attention that has been focused on Underwood Tower came after a man, Hasani Lee, and his wife moved into his ailing, elderly father’s apartment there as his caretakers. The apartment was infested with bedbugs and the heat didn’t work, Lee said. He has unsuccessfully sued OHA, and the agency has unsuccessfully attempted to evict him and his wife.

Marty Klotz, 68, has lived at Underwood for about four years. He said his apartment got invaded by bedbugs shortly after he moved in. He got rid of them with the help of a spray he buys at a hardware store, he said, picking up a bottle he keeps handy on a counter, along with mousetraps to deal with an ongoing mouse problem.

“Everybody has mice, but not like here,” Klotz said.

Klotz said his heat went out in January and it took weeks for OHA to fix it. He got through the winter with space heaters he bought at Ace Hardware, he said.

OHA officials acknowledged that some of their buildings have had heat failures. They said they’ve provided space heaters until repairs can be made. They have also encountered issues where people reported their heat not working, and OHA workers returned to find the tenants’ windows open, which exacerbates the heating system’s problems.

LaTonia Freeman, who was president of the Underwood Tower residents’ association, said OHA started spraying for bugs every two weeks this spring.

She said the bugs have remained an issue in many apartments. Mold has also been a problem, she said.

Freeman said a part of her shower wall fell down, revealing mold inside the wall. She said the housing authority eventually patched the hole without doing anything about the mold.

“I have asthma really bad, I’m jeopardizing my health,” Freeman said earlier this year. “My doctor wrote two letters stating that I was allergic to mold and that I needed to move. Nothing got done.”

Working together to make ‘safe and happy’ homes

Some tenants said they are happy with their apartments and they have no significant problems.

Jeffery Nelson, 62, lives at Underwood with his bulldog, Fats. He’s lived there about three years. He said he has no issues with pests. His heat works fine. When he reports a need for a repair, OHA workers come and make the fix, he said.

Melvin Sanders, 65, has lived at Evans Tower for 2 1/2 years with his rat terrier, Mr. Cool. Sanders said he feels comfortable and safe there.

“This is real beneficial to me,” Sanders said. “It’s close to everything in the neighborhood, like local stores, and there’s no issue with a bunch of problems. I guess that comes from good management and tenants getting along with the management.”

A fellow Evans resident, 68-year-old Catherine Cooper, agreed. She said the building has some issues, particularly with the old plumbing,

“Usually, when we have a complaint, especially with the new little manager, it is seen to right away,” Cooper said after a meeting of residents with the site manager, Kahla Stanley. The manager had bought donuts for the tenants and made coffee. She told the people her door is always open and her phone always on. She urged to them to let her know about any problem, and pledged to work to resolve it.

“As always, we shall continue to work together to make this a safe and happy home for everybody,” Stanley said.

It hasn’t always been that way in the nearly four years Cooper has lived there at Evans, Cooper said. She credits the new manager with improving conditions at Evans.

“The energy of her, she seems to relate to all individuals and see them as humans,” Cooper said. “I don’t want to get anybody in trouble, but there’s things that happened to me that wasn’t right with past management, but she’s like a little light.”

Conditions have improved at Evans in recent months, Wells said, showing that it’s possible with a concerted effort and management focused on people.

“They put a manager in there who cares about the residents,” he said. “She actually cares about the residents. She actually cares about their conditions.”

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