"Living Hell"

INVESTIGATIVE CATEGORY

Houston Chronicle
03/11/2021

Tenants in a HUD-subsidized complex in Galveston, Texas, complained about living conditions to every level of government and told Houston Chronicle reporter Sarah Smith that no one would help. She looked into Millennia, the parent company, and quickly found similar complaints from tenants across the country. Her 12-month investigation of Millennia and HUD involved interviewing tenants and advocates and reviewing tens of thousands of pages of HUD, state, county and local inspections, internal emails and court records.

Her investigation was unlike any the Houston Chronicle had ever produced. We decided to try something extraordinarily ambitious: write the national investigation as a long-form narrative told over six days in print and as one story online. The results were an intimate deeply reported account of tenants living in the worst possible conditions in publicly subsidized housing. Among the findings:

• Inspectors have found potentially dangerous health violations such as mold.

• A federal audit of a Kansas City property found Millennia owed HUD tens of thousands of dollars and had processed paperwork for a dead tenant.

• A former Millennia employee in Florida gave a sworn statement alleging her manager persuaded a tenant to testify for Millennia in exchange for favors such as job interview prep, babysitting and clothes.

• A fractured system of housing enforcement leaves tenants without recourse and allows each level of government to blame others.

To get the key documents Sarah made exhaustive records requests and did complicated record keeping.

To get a full picture of the conditions at the properties and what officials were doing (or not doing) about them, she sent over 2,000 records requests that yielded thousands of responsive records.

Her first set of requests was with the Department of Housing and Urban Development for inspections of the properties. Because she knew these would be slow — and might not have come back in time for publication — she sent records requests to localities. She made a spreadsheet of each Millennia property and sent FOIAs at the municipal, county, and local levels. She requested code enforcement records, building permits and building department inspections, fire department inspections inspection records, 311 calls, health department inspections and consumer protection bureau complaints about each of the 254 apartment complexes.

HUD often contracts with public housing agencies to do its inspections. Sarah requested the inspections from the contractors, which helped her get around the slow HUD response. As Millennia participates in the Low Income Housing Tax Credit program, she filed records requests with the state agencies administering the program.

With each inspection-related FOIA, she began to identify specific people in charge of overseeing Millennia properties. She then submitted FOIAs for their emails.
She then organized the thousands of responsive records into a spreadsheet by date, state, city and property, hyperlinking to each individual record and specifying the page numbers and contents of the documents.

LINK to content online

Submitted by Elizabeth Pudwill.