Some residents of a troubled Atlanta housing complex say they welcome the news that they may soon be relocated.
“I’m so happy,” said Linda Ford, a resident of the Fairburn & Gordon Apartments, when she learned U.S. housing officials plan to terminate their contracts with Fairburn & Gordon Apartments after the owners failed to bring the dilapidated west Atlanta complex up to code. “It’s about time we get some kind of solution.”
Ford, a 60-year-old grandmother who has lived at Fairburn & Gordon for 15 years, is among several residents who expressed joy to Capital B after learning that U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development officials could soon move them out. But even as they look forward to a way out, there are questions about the timing and the availability of new housing options.
HUD said in an emailed statement that relocating the roughly 23 subsidized tenant households is “dependent on available local housing stock.” Atlanta suffers from a shortage of affordable housing units, and finding landlords that accept Section 8 vouchers can be challenging.
Capital B first reported last Friday that Fairburn & Gordon risked losing its federal funding, when HUD confirmed that it had issued “demands for corrective action” and “notices of default” against the complex’s owners, A&B Apartments LLC, in mid-February. The action was in response to severe maintenance issues that residents say have gone unaddressed for years in some instances.
The impending funding cut comes about six months after Capital B reported that Fairburn & Gordon residents had accused the buildings’ management of misleading HUD officials during routine inspections by directing them to examine apartments that were in better condition than units with the worst repair problems.
Within days of Capital B’s inquiry, city and federal inspectors visited the property and discovered 81 housing code violations at the 52-year-old complex, including 13 classified as “highly hazardous” health and safety conditions.
HUD has paid some or all of the rent for qualifying Fairburn & Gordon tenants through its Project Based Rental Assistance program since 1983. The agency has active contracts with Fairburn & Gordon to provide quality rental units to qualifying low-income tenants.
HUD said Wednesday that it also rejected A&B Apartments’ plan for corrective action last week “due to insufficient details and failure to provide timeframes for realistically and timely repairing the properties.”
A&B Apartments failed to meet its Feb. 28 deadline to address the serious problems at Fairburn & Gordon and comply with the agency’s requirements, a HUD spokesperson said.
Those requirements included conducting an exterior survey of all buildings and “100%” of the property’s deficient units, in addition to developing a relocation plan for affected tenants and a repair timeline to fix the property in accordance with HUD’s guidelines.
A&B Apartments and its Fairburn & Gordon property management team couldn’t be reached for comment Wednesday. HUD said it is now beginning the process of canceling its Housing Assistance Payments contracts with Fairburn & Gordon.
“As part of the abatement process, HUD will issue Tenant Protection Vouchers for the tenants to use at other properties,” a HUD spokesperson told Capital B Atlanta via email. “A HUD relocation contractor will assist the tenants in finding replacement housing.”
That news excited Jasmine Hinton, a Fairburn & Gordon resident who said HUD’s actions gave her hope that change is coming.
“It made me feel like we was finally being heard,” she said. “Someone, as in HUD, they care how we [are] living, and this is not how we’re supposed to be living.”
Retired house cleaner Bonnie Brown said she welcomes moving out of Fairburn & Gordon, and she doesn’t care how long it takes. The 73-year-old great-grandmother said the kitchen ceiling in her two-bedroom apartment caved in last year due to leaky plumbing in the unit above hers.
As recently as Tuesday evening, water could be seen dripping through large holes in Brown’s bathroom ceiling into a plastic basin sitting on her toilet. She’s one of several residents who complained to a Capital B Atlanta reporter about mold and broken heating and air conditioning systems this week.
After dealing with so many maintenance problems in recent years, Brown said she’s ready to move at any cost.
“It’s just been miserable for me, but I had to deal with it,” she said.
Ford said she’s been forced to catch 15 rats in her home all by herself in recent years, using traps she bought after maintenance men working for Fairburn & Gordon downplayed the problem.
She said leaky plumbing from an apartment above hers has caused raw sewage to flood her floors on multiple occasions, damaging her wood furniture. Last summer, she endured sweltering, record-high temperatures in Atlanta without a working air conditioner, a problem she said still hasn’t been resolved.
A few weeks ago, firefighters were called to deal with a gas leak in Ford’s building. A poorly installed replacement bathtub also left the inside of her bathroom walls exposed for six weeks. She said she feared rodents and other pests would crawl out of the walls as she bathed. The bathtub was fixed over the weekend.
Ford said HUD shouldn’t have a problem relocating housing aid tenants like her who have endured Fairburn & Gordon for years.
“The stuff they tell you is just ridiculous, like you’re supposed to live like this,” Ford said of her property managers and the maintenance men they hire. “We [aren’t] supposed to have to live like this.”
