Private management of subsidized housing creates problems for low-income older Arkansans

Tommy Mitchell, 55, sits in the living room of his studio apartment at the Maple Place complex in North Little Rock on March 20, 2024. Mitchell said he and his doctor agree that the studio apartment is too small to meet his needs, but apartment management has not moved him to a bigger unit despite multiple requests. (Tess Vrbin/Arkansas Advocate)

Carolyn Price refuses to push herself past her limits.

The 77-year-old asks her relatives or neighbors to get items from high shelves when she needs them, and she knows where the flaws are in the carpeting of the Little Rock apartment she has called home since January 2010.

“I know where to step, how to step, and I just take my time,” she said.

Price chooses not to get upset about these things. Nor does she worry about having to change her own air filters or about the mold lining her baseboards and her shower faucet. 

Apartment management hasn’t fulfilled her requests for maintenance and repairs, but stress would worsen her heart condition, she said.

“I try to stay calm and think positive and be in an upbeat spirit,” she said.

She is far from the only elderly Arkansan who says those in charge of low-income housing complexes don’t pay enough attention to residents’ needs.

Rental Assistance Demonstration in Little Rock and North Little Rock

Little Rock:

• Cumberland Manor

• Metropolitan Village

• Fred W. Parris Towers

• Jesse Powell Towers

• Cumberland Towers

• Sunset Terrace

• Two portions of Madison Heights

North Little Rock:

• Cedar Gardens

• The Homes at Pine Crossing

• Hillside Pointe

• A portion of Holt District Homes

Non-RAD privately managed low-income complexes

Little Rock:

• The remainder of Madison Heights

• The Homes at Granite Mountain

North Little Rock:

• Hickory View

• Maple Place

• Oak View

• Hemlock Courts

Little Rock’s housing authority, the Metropolitan Housing Alliance, owns its two non-RAD properties. The North Little Rock Housing Authority owns Hemlock Courts. The other three non-RAD properties are owned by limited partnerships formed in order to get private funding for renovations, said Christianne Brunini, chief marketing officer at Knight Development.

Price lives at Cumberland Manor, one of seven Little Rock apartment complexes once managed by the city’s public housing agency but now run by private companies as part of the federal Rental Assistance Demonstration program. RAD is aimed at improving living conditions in deteriorating public housing stock. The program has seen mixed success nationally.

Arkansas tenants say they’re often ignored by private management and the apparent revolving door of building staff. Tenants and housing experts say bringing in outside management decreases tenants’ well-being instead of increasing it, especially since older people have greater health needs.

“Big property management [companies] that are out of state are only interested in one thing, and that’s the money,” said state Rep. Richard McGrew, R-Hot Springs, a landlord and property manager who at one point owned and oversaw about 400 rental units. “They’re not interested in the tenants.”

Nationwide, privatizing public housing often leads to “unmitigated confusion,” said Anna Luft, a New York City attorney and advocate for the city’s tenants who receive federal housing aid.

Public housing agencies and private management companies tend to disagree on who’s responsible for meeting tenants’ needs, especially older tenants with health problems, Luft said.

“If housing authorities don’t want to accommodate them, I would say that the private management companies that take over RAD want to do it even less,” she said.

Chandra Profit, 63, has lived at North Little Rock’s Hickory View complex for six years. She said in March that the city’s housing authority was more responsive to tenants when it was still in charge of the building. As of last month, several units are mold-infested and the windows don’t open, she said, so leaving their front doors open is often tenants’ only option to breathe clean air.

Profit filed a consumer protection complaint with the Arkansas Attorney General’s office about the Louisiana-based company that manages Hickory View. The attorney general’s office referred her to the North Little Rock Housing Authority, and the housing agency “said they’ve got nothing to do with it” since they no longer manage the property, she said.

The Advocate attempted to contact NLRHA Executive Director Belinda Snow and instead received a response from Christianne Brunini, chief marketing officer at Knight Development, Hickory View’s primary owner and sister company of M&T Property Management. M&T has managed Hickory View and four other North Little Rock properties since 2022.

Brunini said M&T was “fully engaged” with the properties and “providing prompt and responsive service” to residents. She also said there had been no complaints on file about mold at Hickory View or neighboring Cedar Gardens.

Tenants can submit “a work order and expect emergencies to be addressed in 24 hours and non-emergent issues to be resolved within a reasonable timeframe,” Brunini said.

In late March, a Hickory View tenant sent a complaint about “shades that haven’t been installed and cracks in [the] bathroom wall” to North Little Rock city officials because management “won’t fix anything,” according to city code enforcement documents obtained via an Arkansas Freedom of Information Act request.

Management promised to take care of both problems, code enforcement officer Cedric Williams wrote. He also recorded that Cedar Gardens management sent a maintenance worker to paint over mold spots in an apartment after a resident complained in October 2023.

Cedar Gardens and Hickory View code enforcement

Still, many tenants at some complexes M&T manages have repeatedly said they feel ignored, including during situations that risk their health. A July heat wave caused distress for Cedar Gardens residents because the complex’s air conditioning system malfunctioned.

Elderly people and those with disabilities or other specific needs tend to fall through the cracks during RAD implementation, said Luft and Lauren Song, a National Housing Law Project senior staff attorney who specializes in RAD.

Song said private management companies sometimes disregard or undervalue federal regulations.

“If they’re primarily in the private sector, they’re not particularly sensitive to the needs of low-income populations [and] not very familiar with regulatory tendencies,” she said.

RAD’s mixed results

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development instituted RAD in 2012. It converts public housing units to Section 8 housing choice vouchers or project-based vouchers.

RAD allows housing authorities to contract with private management companies in order to secure funding to improve living conditions. The companies handle building maintenance and day-to-day operations, while housing authorities continue to own the land and administer tenant vouchers.

Housing authorities in several Arkansas cities — including Fayetteville, Fort Smith, Hot Springs, Paragould, Pine Bluff and Texarkana — have converted some or all of their properties via RAD since 2016.

Success is “very dependent on the housing authority that’s involved, the property that they have, the condition that it’s in, [and] how they’re going to operate it,” Fort Smith Housing Authority Executive Director Mitch Minnick said. “…It’s not going to work for every housing authority in Arkansas.”

Minnick said RAD went smoothly in Fort Smith, partly because the housing authority didn’t involve private entities in converting the 288-unit Nelson Hall senior living complex. The agency’s own staff provides both maintenance and oversight.

The housing authority had received an influx of HUD funds after demolishing another building with the purpose of constructing a new one, and using these funds for RAD eliminated the need to take on debt, as housing agencies often do during RAD, Minnick said.

“We had a lot of factors that came together at the right time that made RAD a no-brainer for us,” he said.

Housing authority administrators throughout the state told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in December 2016 they hoped RAD would loosen the grip of HUD’s low-income housing regulations while still meeting low-income people’s needs. HUD regularly audits subsidized housing, but there’s no entity closer to home monitoring RAD conversions and whether they follow federal regulations, the Democrat-Gazette reported.

Little Rock’s housing authority, the Metropolitan Housing Alliance, cut ties with Houston-based management firm ITEX in 2021 after disagreeing on how to divide responsibilities for three properties set to go through RAD.

Luft said it’s not uncommon during RAD negotiations for housing authorities and management companies to each hold the other responsible for taking care of both the tenants and the properties.

“Both are interpreting the rules and the regulatory scheme in a way to make it not their responsibility,” she said.

The properties affected by the 2021 dispute — the Homes at Granite Mountain and two portions of Madison Heights — will no longer go through RAD after HUD took issue last year with the MHA governing board’s conduct.

Board chairman Kerry Wright has been on the board since March 2023 and previously served on the Harris County Housing Authority board in Houston. He said his years of experience with subsidized housing have not made it clear who’s supposed to ensure that both housing authorities and private companies handle RAD properly.

“HUD needs to realign this thing, and they need to have complete control,” Wright said.

Gloria Davis points at the part of her ceiling with a history of leaks in her North Little Rock apartment on March 18, 2024. Davis said she is looking for an apartment at a different complex so she can leave Hickory View after six years there. (Tess Vrbin/Arkansas Advocate)

Tenants’ struggles

The mold in 72-year-old Gloria Davis’ Hickory View unit has worsened her chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), she said. The apartment has also had leaks in the ceiling and plumbing, and she said management’s attention to these problems ends with “patching up stuff and not really doing a darn thing.”

“They come up here and act like they’re doing something, but when they leave, the problem is still there,” Davis said.

HUD requires owners and managers of subsidized complexes to keep all units “functionally adequate, operable, and free of health and safety hazards,” according to federal law.

Davis said she doesn’t want to move but believes her current situation is untenable, so she has applied for another North Little Rock apartment.

Tommy Mitchell, 55, lives in a studio apartment at Maple Place in North Little Rock. He said he has asked repeatedly, with support from his doctor, for a one-bedroom unit to fit his service dog, a bigger bed and, most importantly, his motorized wheelchair.

“They keep moving people into the one-bedrooms that they have, but they won’t take care of me, and I’ve been here the longest,” Mitchell said. “…I can’t hardly think because I’m in that small apartment, and I’m having more anxiety attacks.”

Mitchell said he’s tried to pay attention to changes in management at Maple Place, which is run by M&T but isn’t a RAD property.

Tenants in subsidized housing aren’t always able to commit management changes to memory. Price said her brain surgery might have coincided with a management change at Cumberland Manor, which might have led to a change in her rent due date and a late fee she thought was unwarranted.

Wisconsin-based Gorman and Co. manages Cumberland Manor, which went through RAD in 2017, and eight other Little Rock complexes.

Cumberland Manor and Metropolitan Village did not undergo renovations during RAD because they were built in 2009 and still in good condition, former MHA board chairman Kenyon Lowe told the Democrat-Gazette in 2021.

Another Little Rock RAD complex, Sunset Terrace, began renovations in December 2022 that should be complete this month, MHA’s Wright said.

Georgetta Harshaw lived at Sunset Terrace when the renovations started, and management eventually moved her into a finished unit. Like Mitchell, she ended up in an apartment that wasn’t accessible for her motorized wheelchair, she said in January.

“To go from the street to the front door, there ain’t nothing but stairs,” said Harshaw, who later moved to Indiana to be closer to her family.

Carolyn Price sits on her couch in the living room of the Cumberland Manor apartment in Little Rock, where she has lived since 2010, on March 20, 2024. Price said she covered the windows with sheets to keep the cold air out during winter because the windows are not properly insulated. (Tess Vrbin/Arkansas Advocate)

Next steps

In 2021, Arkansas became the last state to pass a warranty of habitability law creating required minimum standards for rental housing. The law mandates hot and cold running water, potable drinking water, electricity, a sanitary sewer system, a functioning roof and a functioning heating and cooling system.

Tenants’ advocates have said the law needs more teeth, including a mechanism to prevent tenants from retaliation for complaining about living conditions. 

State Sen. Jonathan Dismang, R-Searcy, said the law was “a good start” and the best compromise tenants and landlords could reach at the time.

State Rep. Jimmy Gazaway, R-Paragould, sponsored a different 2021 bill with more required rental housing standards. The bill died in committee, and Gazaway said in an interview last month that he may introduce legislation in 2025 revisiting the issue on a piecemeal basis.

McGrew said he wants to help increase the state’s number of available rental units, including those for senior citizens, and ensure that property managers are well-versed in state housing laws. He hopes this will discourage the involvement of out-of-state corporations, he said, and plans to do this both through legislation and the efforts of a landlord-tenant working group he oversees.

According to a 2021 AARP study, 77% of adults over 50 want to age in place rather than find a new home.

Price is determined not to move. Not only does she refuse to live in a nursing home, but she also has become close to her neighbors.

“They are just like family, the older people [at Cumberland Manor],” she said. “I can call any one of them to help me.”

This reporting was supported by a fellowship from Columbia University’s Age Boom Academy.

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