Eugene Mariani knows he’s lucky.
One of the former tenants of the fire-damaged Roosevelt Building in downtown Pittsburgh, Mariani will soon be able to move into another apartment in Squirrel Hill.
“I have insurance, so we got movers, we moved me out. But a lot of people don't,” he said, speaking last week from a hotel room where he was staying.
He knows many of his former neighbors aren’t in such a good position.
Many tenants of the building have been scrambling for weeks to find other apartments. Some are still in the building, some staying with friends or family temporarily. Late last week, some were still in hotels paid for by their renters insurance or local nonprofits.
The Penn Avenue building was the site of a deadly fire in December. Residents were told on December 26 they would have to move out by Friday, Jan. 13th in order to accommodate building-wide repairs needed because of fire and extensive water damage.
After eight residents brought an emergency court action earlier this month, a judge delayed that deadline — for now. Allegheny County Common Pleas Judge Patrick Connelly has said building owner LWE Roosevelt LP and property manager NDC Real Estate Management LLC cannot remove tenants or their belongings from the building.
The city has condemned portions of the building, though not the entire structure. The building’s ownership has argued there was so much water damage from the fire that repairs needed to begin as soon as possible, and tenants should all leave.
The building has 191 apartments; more than half of those are subsidized for low-income residents.
Wallace Spence had been staying at a Comfort Inn on the North Side. But last week, he got the call that the local nonprofit that had been paying for his room there could only do so through last Friday, even with his chronic health issues.
Spence has a new apartment lined up, but he had yet to find out when he could move in. He said if he had to, he would go back to his flooded-out Roosevelt apartment, even though city inspectors condemned it.
“The attorneys stood in court worried about our physical health and what we could catch in there,” Spence said. “Not one of them started out by saying, ‘Everybody I'm sorry,’ and not one of them is, has concerned themselves with our mental health and what people are going through.”
Speaking last week, tenant Andrea Gordon too feared she would soon be homeless. Her apartment in the building is on the 11th floor, which is condemned.
“I'm really trying [to find other housing],” she said. “If I had family out here or somebody I could stay with, that'd be something different. But I don't have that. I don't have that. So I'm just out. You know what I'm saying? I'm just out.…I'll see if I can get into the shelter, I don't even know if I can get into the shelter, I don't know.”
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD, has granted exemptions to certain subsidized housing providers to allow the Roosevelt tenants to have their applications expedited.
“HUD has been working with the owner and local officials to ensure that all displaced residents are housed and that the property is safe and habitable for the return of all the residents. We are awaiting the results of the court action and the owner‘s repair efforts,” a spokesperson said in a statement.
Still, many residents say they’ve been met by endless waiting lists for other subsidized housing.
“Even the places she gave us on the ... lists of places to contact, they say one, two, three years waiting lists,” said tenant Percetia West, referring to a list of other apartments distributed by managers of the Roosevelt.
Complicating the search for many tenants, much of the available affordable housing is not downtown, or even near downtown, but scattered throughout the county said Abby Rae LaCombe, executive director of RentHelpPGH.
“The … locations that we're really looking at, some [are] as far as Heidelberg or Leetsdale, Duquesne [and] the Mon Valley,” she said.
This has made it difficult for Roosevelt tenants, many of whom have lived downtown for many years and depend on public transit.
“This is all against the backdrop of what we already know is an extreme shortage of low-income housing in Allegheny County,” LaCombe said.
Tenant Antoinette Floyd said she was told the only available housing for her would be in McKeesport or Duquesne.
“Neither of those areas are safe,” and she’s concerned about violence there, she said last week, waiting outside a courtroom for another hearing related to the case.
At a hearing on Thursday, Jonathan Kamin, an attorney for the property’s owner and manager, said residents of 129 apartments have moved out. About 35 units are still occupied, Kamin said, and another 26 still have residents’ belongings in them.
Attorneys for the tenants have argued that some tenants only moved out under duress and are not stably housed, but just staying with friends or family temporarily.
Spence, the tenant at the Comfort Inn, said he will have to relocate to a suburb outside of the city. He said the list of subsidized apartments he received from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development didn’t offer many better options.
“Some of the places that HUD offered us were just...it was impossible. It couldn't be done,” he continued. “They were either way too far or just too bad.”
Residents of the Roosevelt Building who need housing should contact the Housing Stabilization Center at 412-440-8107 or in person at 415 Seventh Avenue, from 9:30 am to 4:30 pm Monday through Friday.
