Tenants at the Homewood House apartments on Frankstown Avenue say they’re worried about their safety.
Since earlier this year, the roughly 100-unit apartment building in the heart of Homewood has been without a security guard.
“The security we had was dynamite,” said longtime resident Bagumba Lowery, referring to the armed security guard who previously worked in the building, watching both entrances and making visitors sign in. “He was good. Very good.”
The security the building used to have, “kept a lot of the riffraff out,” agreed resident Eddie Wright, Jr.
Without a guard, a number of the buildings’ elderly residents said they are worried about intruders who come into the building and use drugs, and others who try to enter residents’ apartments.
“This is our home,” said Nancy Walker, who has lived in the building for eleven years. “Get us the protection that we need, and get a guard in here.”
“We want … the management and the company that is running this place, [to] spend some money on security,” said Lowery, who is also the building’s tenant council president. He and other tenants believe the guard was a victim of their landlord’s cost-cutting measures.
Homewood House is one of a number of affordable local communities where tenants say a new owner is unresponsive to problems, and not investing in their properties.
Online Allegheny County real estate records list the property’s owner as Homewood House Apts LLC, with a New Jersey mailing address.
State incorporation documents show the LLC shares an address with NB Affordable, a company that purchased more than 1,300 affordable apartments in and around Pittsburgh earlier this year from longtime local affordable landlord AHRCO. The properties are privately owned but receive a public subsidy to house low-income tenants.
The sale to NB included Mon View Heights in West Mifflin, Bellefield Dwellings in Oakland, Tribrad Apartments in Braddock, and Kelly Hamilton Apartments in Homewood, among others, according to U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.
Longtime Pittsburgh housing activist Carl Redwood has been working with the tenant council at Homewood House and another one at Bellefield Dwellings, particularly around their security concerns.
The properties are being managed by Lakeside Management.
“Lakeside Management has been cutting costs by cutting security among other things,” Redwood said.
“I don’t sleep well”
In another property not far from the Homewood House, tenant Kelley Johnson says she’s at her wits’ end with problems in the apartment where she lives with her young son: a sinking bathroom floor, water coming out of her ceiling from the apartment upstairs, and more.
“I don't feel safe here … I'm stressed,” Johnson said. “I don't sleep well, like, because I'm worried that something is going to happen, something in this house is going to collapse. And my son and I are going to get hurt. That's my biggest fear.”
Complaints with NB and Lakeside have been heard elsewhere: Wilkinsburg resident Geraldine Smith says she returned home to her apartment after several months visiting a relative out of town and found a festering mold problem had covered the walls and her belongings.
“You can't even go in there,” she said; she’s staying with family outside of the apartment for now. But — like other residents — she's struggled to get a response from management.
Homewood resident Johnson stopped paying her rent earlier this year, telling Lakeside Management in a certified letter she wouldn’t be paying until the issues with her apartment were resolved; she never heard back.
“Just because we're low-income doesn't mean that we don't deserve somewhere safe to live,” Johnson said.
In both Johnson’s and Smith’s case, some problems predated the sale to NB; AHRCO had previously faced tenant complaints about housing conditions.
Johnson, like many residents, has been frustrated in trying to get help for her housing issues from her building’s management.
She’s repeatedly tried calling and gotten nowhere, she said.
Online Allegheny County real estate records show the property owner of her apartment as the Nancy D Washington Irrevocable Trust, a company linked to longtime local affordable landlord AHRCO, which sold all its properties to NB Affordable. Johnson said she was told earlier this year to stop writing rent checks to AHRCO, and to write them to Kelly Hamilton Apartments, one of the properties included in the AHRCO sale to NB. Lakeside Management, the company managing other former AHRCO properties, took over earlier this year as the property manager.
NB Affordable and Lakeside share a mailing address in Monsey, New York, about 35 miles outside of New York City, according to business registration paperwork for Lakeside filed in Pennsylvania and Allegheny County property records.
Neither NB Affordable nor Lakeside responded to requests for comment for this story.
Tenant advocate Redwood has reached out to Lakeside and to HUD officials about resident concerns at Homewood House.
In an email response to Redwood, Lakeside officials said the resident council was not representative of all the building’s tenants and said those residents were abusive toward Lakeside staff.
“Most of the residents at the Homewood house are happy with our changes to the site and have been extremely happy with the direction that the building has taken under our management,” the Lakeside official wrote.
A Lakeside official also told Redwood in an email it had disabled previous key fobs and issued new ones to residents as a security measure, as well as posting someone at the door to sign guests in. (The individual posted at the door is another tenant, not a guard, according to tenant council leaders.)
In the meantime, Redwood is hopeful more residents will work to form tenant councils, which residents have a right to do in HUD-assisted housing.
“All the former AHRCO properties, each of them needs to have a functioning tenant council, and those tenant councils need to talk together because they have a common management company that they have to communicate with, and it would be better if they could communicate jointly at times than just each building having to fend for itself,” Redwood said.
“Quality and affordability”
One national affordable housing advocate, Kate Walz, associate director of litigation at the National Housing Law Project, said she’s heard concerns about NB from elsewhere.
“The Law Project has heard from advocates where NB Affordable has bought or is considering buying properties in their states and is concerned about NB Affordable's performance,” Walz said.
When the sale of AHRCO properties was announced in March, NB said in a statement it planned a multi-million dollar investment in the properties, saying it had a “track record of upholding … quality and affordability” in its properties.
Earlier this year, an NB official told The Pittsburgh Business Times she was “often” visiting the Pittsburgh area overseeing renovations of NB’s holdings. Those could include “various beautification projects, upgrading apartment interiors along with upgrading mechanical systems and HVAC,” in the coming 24 months, the Business Times reported in May. She also said the company intends to keep the properties affordable.
HUD officials told WESA earlier this year that affordability for the properties is guaranteed for some time. Of the 14 properties included in the sale: two had contracts with HUD renewed for 20 years at the time of closing and won’t expire until 2043; 10 properties have contracts that will not expire until 2031 and two properties have contract that will expire in 2025 but have a use agreement in place which will continue the affordability requirement until 2035.
But conditions have begun to draw scrutiny from some local elected officials.
Khari Mosley, Pittsburgh city councilman-elect for Homewood, who has visited Homewood House and been in touch with tenant leaders, plans to raise the issue with federal officials.
“We want to make sure … that our senior citizens in the community are being treated with dignity and respect,” Mosley said.
Walz, from the National Housing Law Project, says it ultimately falls to HUD to make sure apartments like Homewood House and elsewhere are a good place to live.
“This is HUD-assisted housing, the federal government is paying these funds so that low income families have safe, decent and affordable housing. It is HUD's responsibility to ensure that owners are maintaining their properties in a condition that is safe and habitable for these families,” she said.
A HUD official said of the 14 local properties that were part of the sale to NB, it has received about 29 complaints, with the majority of the complaints coming from three properties.
“Of the complaints received management has addressed or is currently addressing the concerns raised by the residents. In addition, of the three properties with the higher volume of complaints, one is scheduled for a HUD inspection [this] week and the other two were inspected within the last 2 years and received positive scores,” a HUD spokesman wrote in an email.
“Resident health and safety are a top priority for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and we encourage residents to reach out to us directly if their concerns are not being addressed by management,” he wrote.
