Trinae Ward dreams of moving her family out of their rundown West Atlanta apartment one day. But for now, she’s grateful her 11-year-old twin daughters no longer fear someone reaching up through the floor and grabbing them while they shower.
Maintenance crews recently patched up several large holes in the walls and floor inside Ward’s second-story, three-bedroom home in the Fairburn & Gordon I and II apartment complex, including a corroded bathroom floorboard that gave her kids a clear view of the bathtub in the vacant unit directly beneath theirs.
The 35-year-old mother of five suspects water damage created the roughly 1-square-foot opening, which she said began as a “soft spot” before caving in around May of this year. She says her daughters worried something or someone would pull them through the hole one day.
“It looks much better,” Ward told Capital B Atlanta on Nov. 20, regarding some of the repairs made in her apartment. “They’re not scared anymore,” she said of her daughters.
Capital B Atlanta visited Fairburn & Gordon several times throughout the fall at the request of multiple residents while following up on maintenance complaints they made previously to city officials and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Our investigation revealed severe maintenance problems there have gone unaddressed for years, all while taxpayers are footing the bill for tenants to live in unhealthy, sometimes dangerous, conditions.
It also revealed how high rent prices, Atlanta’s worsening lack of affordable housing, and HUD rental assistance policies can leave low-income local families feeling trapped in substandard housing with little opportunity to escape.
Living at the complex has taken a mental health toll on Ward, who burst into tears on Oct. 6 while discussing her plight.
“I feel like I live in a bando and I’m paying the light bill,” she shouted, using the slang term for an abandoned home.
Following our inquiry, an Oct. 17 joint Fairburn-Gordon inspection involving HUD, the city of Atlanta and the Georgia Department of Community Affairs revealed 81 housing code violations at the complex, including 13 that were classified as “highly hazardous” health and safety concerns, according to an emailed statement from the office of Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens.
Fairburn & Gordon’s management team, including a woman who residents identified as Kathy Baker, aka “Miss Kathy,” has declined two in-person requests for comment. Baker and staffers for A&B Apartments LLC, the company HUD says owns the property, either haven’t answered or haven’t responded to multiple phone calls and voicemails.
Fairburn & Gordon is a federally subsidized and notoriously blighted apartment complex in west Atlanta’s Adamsville neighborhood. It was built in 1972, according to multiple listing sites, and contains 170 units, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Violent crime and decay at Fairburn & Gordon has earned it a dishonorable mention in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s “Dangerous Dwellings” series for the past two years.
The AJC said in September that the complex is partially owned by Beverly Hills, California-based landlord Behzad Beroukhai, who couldn’t be reached for comment after multiple attempts before publication.
An order of magnitude
Despite Fairburn & Gordon’s litany of problems, local officials acknowledged that it’s not even the worst residential housing complex they’ve dealt with in recent years. It’s been nearly two years since a judge condemned south Atlanta’s infamous Forest Cove apartment complex for being a public nuisance. The mayor’s office said conditions at Fairburn & Gordon aren’t as severe as they were at Forest Cove yet and don’t warrant closure or demolition of the property.
“The legal threshold for an action that would condemn a property or permit the City to demolish or clean and close it requires the structure be substantially deteriorated,” a spokesperson for the mayor said via email. “Forest Cove undoubtedly met this threshold — however not all substandard multi-family projects rise to this level of structural deterioration.”
The mayor’s office declined to specify which conditions at Fairburn & Gordon were deemed “highly hazardous,” but residents say prior to Capital B Atlanta’s inquiry, property managers spent years ignoring their most urgent maintenance requests for issues like mold, water leaks, rats, roaches, busted windows, and broken lights.
The complex is littered with vacant units filled with trash and debris visible through broken glass windows. The pungent odor of mildew permeates many of its buildings. Tenants say some of the maintenance issues were resolved by Nov. 29, but many were not.
Crystal Brown worries that she or one of her children may accidentally consume some of the paint chips that are still falling from the walls of her apartment, which she said contains lead. Fairburn & Gordon opened for business six years before a 1978 ban against lead-based paints was issued by the federal government.
“They make us sign a piece of paper telling us that lead is in this paint,” Brown said of Fairburn & Gordon’s management team. “What am I supposed to do about this paint chipping off my walls and falling all on the floor? My children is not going to eat no paint, but just in case we eatin’ and it falls in their food or I’m cooking and it falls in my food, what are we supposed to do about that?”
Brown is also one of multiple Fairburn & Gordon residents who said they suspect mold in their apartments have caused chronic respiratory issues for their kids.
She said she spent nearly 13 years living in an apartment that was infested with mold before the city of Atlanta forced management to move her into a new unit this August.
Water from a leaky water heater submerged part of the floor inside Brown’s old apartment when Capital B Atlanta visited it with her in early October. A thick layer of black mold coated the wall inside the closet where she said her water heater used to be. Repairs for less serious maintenance issues were still being made to her new apartment on Nov. 21. Brown said there’s mold inside her current unit as well.
“My children stay sick,” Brown told Capital B Atlanta in December. “I just took them to Egleston [Hospital] maybe two, three weeks ago for chronic coughing. They cough every night, all night.”
Fairburn & Gordon also has had a serious rat problem for years, according to Brown and other residents. Brown said she and her kids had to deal with rats eating the bread and cereal on top of her refrigerator last year. She was forced to solve the problem herself by purchasing sticky traps to catch the rodents when maintenance refused or neglected to do so, she said. One rat was so large, she mistook it for her pet chihuahua.
“I thought it was his tail hanging out on the sofa,” Brown said. “I was scared to go to sleep.”
Jasmine Hinton, 32, says she and her children moved into their Fairburn & Gordon apartment four years ago and have dealt with maintenance problems — including mold and mildew that exacerbated one of her daughters’ respiratory issues — ever since.
This past summer, the mother of five says her family also was forced to endure record-high heat without a working air conditioner that management neglected to fix.
“My lights don’t work, I don’t have keys to my unit,” Hinton told Capital B Atlanta in October. “Anybody can walk in and out my door freely because [management is charging us] to even get a lock when they never gave me a key.”
Cherry Gary, 44, said she and her children moved out of their mold-infested Fairburn & Gordon apartment in August at the advice of Atlanta City Council member Doug Shipman’s office, whom she reached out to earlier this year to discuss ongoing problems at the complex.
Gary works as a line lead at a local warehouse. She said she recently moved in with her mother and has been plagued with respiratory illnesses since moving into Fairburn & Gordon nearly four years ago.
“I was just so frustrated because I was sick and I didn’t understand why I was coughing bad,” Gary told Capital B Atlanta in October.
In December, Gary said the mold and other maintenance issues in her apartment still hadn’t been fixed, despite crews working to resolve ongoing issues ahead of a Nov. 29 HUD follow-up inspection.
HUD declined to say whether the reported maintenance problems at Fairburn & Gordon were resolved by Nov. 29. The agency said via email that its inspection scores “are not released to the public until the appeal process has been completed.”
“Our office has requested a repair plan for all units found with deficiencies from the site visit,” a HUD spokesperson added.
“We can’t afford to move”
Moving out of places like Fairburn & Gordon isn’t as easy as it seems for people like Brown.
Fairburn & Gordon is among many apartment complexes in metro Atlanta that receive federal funding through HUD’s Project-Based Rental Assistance program to provide housing to low-income tenants.
PBRA funds are allocated to HUD subsidized properties, not to their tenants. Brown, Ward, and Hinton all live in PBRA subsidized units at Fairburn & Gordon, meaning HUD sends taxpayer money directly to the property’s owners to provide housing instead of to the tenants.
In late October, Brown filed an online application for a Project Based Voucher, which awards federal housing funds to tenants rather than their landlords. Lucas said Georgia landlords aren’t legally required to accept HUD vouchers, regardless of a tenant’s track record.
The vouchers are prized, in part, because they make it easier for low-income tenants to relocate if they have issues with a landlord, though some still may not have enough money saved to pay for a move.
Brown said in early December that she is still waiting to hear back about her voucher application nearly two months after applying, but she’s not hopeful. She knows some people on the PBV waitlist who have waited years to get approved.
“I have a friend right now, [who] got on there in 2017, and she just got approved in 2023,” Brown said.
Brown hasn’t worked a full-time job in about three years, she says, because she can’t afford child care for her children.
“Most jobs now will not let you off because you got to go get your kids,” Brown said. “I got to go get my kids because the school is going to call the caseworkers on me for leaving my kids at that school.”
She and Hinton say even if she had a job, it would be difficult to save up enough money for a new apartment because HUD’s PBRA program requires recipients to pay a portion of their income toward the rent.
“That means that our rent will increase,” Hinton said. “So again, we’re still struggling.”
Since she’s unemployed, Brown said HUD currently covers all of the estimated $1,200 monthly rent for her three-bedroom apartment at Fairburn & Gordon.
“I can’t just up and move, so I am trapped to where I’m at because this is what’s suitable for me right now,” Brown said. “But HUD pays for this unit and the unit should be up to par.”
“HUD is not at home”
Conditions at Fairburn-Gordon are far from unique, according to Alison Johnson, executive director of the Housing Justice League, a pro-tenants’ rights nonprofit.
HUD hasn’t said how many apartment complexes it subsidizes in Atlanta, but Johnson said the agency routinely fails to hold abusive landlords accountable for unaddressed maintenance issues at rental properties receiving taxpayer money to house low-income tenants.
“HUD is not at home,” Johnson said. “They are not watching over these properties. That’s why the owners are allowed to do what they want to do.”
A lack of publicly owned, low-income housing complexes in Atlanta is also part of the problem, according to Michael Lucas, executive director of the Atlanta Volunteer Lawyer Foundation, whose attorneys frequently work on low-income housing cases.
Lucas said public housing was viewed as an eyesore in Atlanta in the 1990s, which is why city leaders got rid of most of it ahead of the 1996 Summer Olympics. He acknowledged public housing systems in other parts of the country also have problems, but said it’s easier for the government to maintain living standards on properties it owns in Georgia than it is dealing with privately owned complexes whose owners enjoy stronger legal protections in the state due to its landlord-friendly real estate laws.
“The importance of publicly owned, publicly managed public housing is under-appreciated,” Lucas said. “That’s partly why we have the Forest Coves and some of the other problems we see.”
Lucas credited Dickens for being more aggressive in the city’s fight against alleged slumlords, but noted that his power is limited since Georgia still has some of the nation’s weakest tenant protection laws.
Johnson said HUD tenants and city leaders, including the mayor and members of the Atlanta City Council, need to do a better job advocating for more legal protections for renters at the state level with the Georgia General Assembly.
“They’ve got to go with the tenants and with the people and show up at the capital,” Johnson said of Atlanta’s elected leaders. “They’ve got to show up in these spaces about evictions, tenants rights.”
She also said HUD must do a better job following up on housing issues raised by its recipients. Earlier this year, U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia launched a probe into abuse of low-income tenants.
Ossoff addressed the issue with HUD Secretary Marcia Fudge in two letters sent to her in late September. His office told Capital B Atlanta on Nov. 21 that his investigation is ongoing, declining further comment.
