“They should be paying us to live here, with all the stuff going on,” Linda Smith tells The Kansas City Star.
“Bed bugs, cockroaches, water running all the time. Sometimes you walk out the door you got a whole floor from here almost down to the corner full of stagnant water. They’re always working on the water. The pipes are old.”
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Smith, 70, a retired bus driver who uses a wheelchair, signed on to a federal class-action lawsuit along with three other elderly or disabled tenants of the Cross-Lines Retirement Center in Kansas City, Kansas, after decades of living in unlivable conditions.
Another tenant, Sharon Richison, 75, tells The Kansas City Star that the smoke detectors are broken, paint is peeling, and there’s black mold in the building that needs to be remediated.
Cross-Lines comprises two high-rise apartment buildings in the Argentine section of Kansas City. Construction was completed in 1971, and the buildings, which sit in a highly industrial area, are intended to serve low-income folks aged 62 and up, or people with disabilities.
Both buildings have been reported to have below-standard health and safety conditions and according to The Star, and has failed numerous inspections from the Housing and Urban Development. Records obtained by The Star show the buildings have had a plethora of complaints and nearly lost their licenses to rent. In 2020, 13 units failed health and safety standards.
“It has fallen far from grace, with its vulnerable tenants left to fend for themselves in the face of numerous habitability issues. This case is likewise about slumlording, with defendants harvesting federal subsidies despite failing to meet basic habitability standards and taking advantage of the residents’ powerlessness,” the 61-page suit against Young Management and Cross-Lines reads.
The people who live at Cross-Star are stuck, as it is all they can afford—hence the class-action suit. Rents start at $397 a month and only go as high as $646 per month.
“Over the past few years, I have received an increasing number of complaints from residents that their housing conditions at Crosslines Retirement Center … has gone from bad to worse,” former United Government Commissioner Ann Brandau Murguia wrote to Mayor Mark Holland, who was in office in 2016 when the state began receiving complaints, according to The Star.
As it stands now, Cross-Roads would need at least $9 million to make the buildings truly habitable. Jason Lundgren, the vice president at Young Management Co tells The Star that his company applied for state funding, but did not receive it.
The suit demands repairs to the elevators, roofs, water lines, and heating and air conditioning units.
At the core of the neglect, in this case, is Young Management Co. Although Cross-Lines is the worst of their buildings, other properties they manage have also ranked poorly—an apartment complex in Missouri, and one in South Bend, Indiana, which was forced to close. The company was sued for both of these as well.
Federally subsidized housing has a slew of issues that this nation has yet to address.
According to Brookings, one of the primary issues is that, due to zoning laws, it’s not legal on the majority of land in cities and suburbs to build market-rate housing outside of single-family homes.
Additionally, when it comes time for the government to build public housing, the operation and construction become murky. Funding for the buildings may be federal, but the operation falls to local housing authorities, and most of those folks have zero experience in new construction.
Lastly, often Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is notorious for building, but not maintaining, instead leaving the maintenance to low-income owners and renters—an obviously untenable solution.