Ciara Daniel thought someone was breaking into her family’s home when her 12-year-old son, Charles, woke her up in a panic.
“He woke up screaming, holding his ears, shaking his head,” the single mother of two recalled when Capital B Atlanta visited her three-bedroom trailer at the Hunter Ridge Mobile Home Park in Irondale.
In reality, the intruder was a cockroach that had crawled into Charles’ ear while he was sleeping last August, according to him and his mother.
“It went so far up into his ear I had to take him to an emergency room to get it removed,” Daniel said. “We [now] sleep with plugs in our ears.”
Daniel and her children have spent more than three years living at Hunter Ridge, the epicenter of metro Atlanta’s eviction crisis, according to an Eviction Lab analysis released in February.
She and Charles both bear large scars on their arms that they said were caused by a piece of sharp, protruding metal in their door frame that went unfixed for months.
Residents have accused property management of rushing to file evictions against them to force them to pay excessive late fees, court costs, and maintenance charges while ignoring or failing to resolve most repair requests in a timely manner.
That includes roach infestations caused by infested used appliances taken from vacant trailers, according to multiple tenants, who said the complex’s management team has a policy against treating for pest control.
Hunter Ridge’s property management team, and owner River Valley Communities, haven’t responded to multiple requests for comment.
Hunter Ridge resident Charles Daniel (left) and Ciara Daniel show scars on their arms that they say were caused by a sharp piece of metal in their door frame that went unfixed for months. (Chauncey Alcorn/Capital B)
The massive trailer park — located on Tara Road in an unincorporated part of Clayton County near Jonesboro — has been an affordable housing refuge for many Black and Hispanic Georgians struggling to obtain affordable places to live amid a statewide housing crisis.
It’s home to an estimated 850 tenant households, according to online listing sites, with rent prices starting around $1,300 for three bedroom units.
Plywood covers windows on multiple abandoned, dilapidated trailers, which are often occupied by squatters and mischievous children, according to residents.
Discarded furniture and appliances from evicted tenants are often abandoned on the side of the road instead of hauled away.
Tenants who spoke with Capital B Atlanta said families who move to Hunter Ridge to save money are making a costly mistake. Some said they’re often billed hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars for maintenance issues they didn’t cause, but they pay the fees anyway to avoid getting an eviction notice on their doors.
Hunter Ridge filed an eviction against Capria Camp in November 2024. She told Capital B Atlanta it was because she didn’t immediately pay a $1,200 maintenance charge for shattered windows on her trailer that she didn’t break. She said the charge was immediately added to her $1,500 monthly rent.
“They didn’t tell me the $1,200 was going to be due in less than seven days,” Camp said. “They would not work with me. They said that if I don’t pay it within the seven days, we would be evicted. It made me feel like crap. [There] was no consideration, like you’re subhuman. You don’t deserve to have any kind of notice.”
Hunter Ridge resident Taffani Hudson warned other people on Facebook to only use the trailer park as a “last resort” for housing.
“They lure you with new homes,” Hudson wrote in July. “They hardly fix anything. I had to call code enforcement because they wouldn’t fix my air in the middle of the summer. I won’t even get started on the police activity.”
Court records show Daniel has had at least nine evictions filed against her over the course of more than three years. Her mother, Varita Daniel, 58, has stayed current with her rent despite having to deal with maintenance problems management has failed to resolve over the course of two years at the property.
She said she went four months without working heat during the end of last year, which forced her to spend money on space heaters to keep warm when temperatures dropped as low as 18 degrees.
“When I withheld the rent and told them I insisted on them [repairing my heat], they come with an eviction notice,” Varita said. “If you don’t pay the rent, you’ll get evicted.”
Varita said a faulty electrical grid recently caused her refrigerator to break and the replacement was infested with roaches. So is her stove, which has the charred remains of roaches under at least one burner. A putrid, “spicy,” smell coming from the stove has dissuaded Varita from cooking.
“I guess I’m supposed to cook with the roach burning up under my thing,” she said.
She’s been forced to buy her own pest control supplies. She showed Capital B Atlanta the large bottles of Ortho she’s used to kill the bugs.
Rosylin Robinson, 83, said she’s called Clayton County’s code enforcement division to deal with a freestanding pipe that she said pumped raw sewage under her trailer. The retired Lockheed Martin assembly line worker said she’s lived at Hunter Ridge for 36 years and it wasn’t always like this.
“When my [late] husband brought me out here, this was the most beautiful place you ever did see,” Robinson said. “I don’t know what done happened to it.”
Tatyana Boykin said she received her first eviction notice in March after being 16 days past due on her rent.
The 21-year-old works as a local grocery store cashier. She, her sister, Tajé Boykins, and their mother, who asked not to be identified for fear of persecution, have lived at Hunter Ridge since December.
They said they fell behind on their rent shortly after moving in because they were forced to spend money to live elsewhere when their water stopped working for multiple days without any warning from the property management team.
“We have had to stay with family, use bathrooms, elsewhere,” Boykin said. “We’ve had to use a lot of our funds to go other places,” her sister added. “We were sleeping in the car one weekend.”
They also spent a week without a working stove, leaving them unable to cook.
The family said they were informed later that the shutdown was caused by a “tree branch” clogging some of the property’s water pipes. They said they were charged an estimated $500 in late fees over the course of two months, which made it harder for them to catch up on their rent.
“When we were going to pay [the rent], they added the late fees,” Boykin said. “Then they [filed] the eviction.”
Tenant complaints to Clayton County’s housing code enforcement division have led to agents visiting the property, but rarely solve the problem, multiple tenants said.
One anonymous complaint on the company’s Better Business Bureau profile came from a mobile home park tenant who said they were billed for maintenance violations before calling code enforcement to assess their property.
“A code enforcer come out and tell me there was no issue with the property and that he hadn’t given any violation fines to [property manager] about my porch/yard,” the complainant wrote. “He then proceeded to tell me that the company is trying to get money from the tenants on bogus violations because River Valley Communities LLC had just been hit with over 80 fines for various different violations on management’s behalf.”
When reached for comment, Clayton County Commissioner Tashé Allen said what’s happening at Hunter Ridge is “deeply concerning.”
The property resides in Allen’s District 3 geographic area. She said she plans to follow up with staff to ensure housing code complaints have been reported and explore what other actions have been taken.
“No one should feel trapped in a cycle where it becomes harder and harder to stay housed,” Allen told Capital B Atlanta via email.
“I will also be scheduling a ride-through with [Clayton County] code enforcement to assess the community and identify any potential violations firsthand,” she said. “If residents are experiencing code enforcement issues, I encourage them to contact my office directly so we can ensure their concerns are properly documented and routed for follow-up.”
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