Chapo Trap House - Bonus: Chris Talks To Stonybrook Apartments Activists

Episode Date: August 24, 2018

Producer Chris is back talking to more activists, this time with Crystal, head of the Stonybrook Tenant Association, and Grant, from the Palm Beach County Tenants Union, about their fight against managerial neglect and dangerous living conditions in the Stonybrook Apartments in Palm Beach County Florida. Stonybrook gofundme (for emergency relief and legal action resources): https://www.gofundme.com/stonybrook-emergency-relief Palm Beach Tenants Union paypal (supports the union and helps provide material aid –groceries, organizing materials, etc– to Stonybrook tenants): https://www.paypal.me/pbtenantsunion A list of Millennia's low-income properties nationwide: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1wC9zhSCOAe-trvfIpdzOkSHKdxlDH-fpaIIf23EJKeE/edit?usp=sharing Most recent local news story covering the events: http://www.wlrn.org/post/parents-fear-mold-asbestos-stonybrook-apartments-are-making-their-children-sick

Hi, this is Chris Wade, producer Chris, here with another interview with activists from around the country. Today, I'll be talking to two people fighting against neglect and mismanagement in these Stony Brook apartments in Palm Beach County, Florida. Felix has mentioned their groups a few times on the show, so we wanted to give them a chance to talk about their issues in more depth. Before we start, I just wanted to note, as last time, that I am interested in covering more activism stories, so feel free to get in touch with me if you think there's something

I should be aware of. I'm at Say What Again on Twitter, and my DMs are open. And if you sent me something that I haven't responded, I am looking at everything, just figuring out which actions make the most sense to cover and when. Okay, on to the interview. The Stony Brook apartments are a complex of federally subsidized low-income housing in Palm Beach County, Florida, just 10 miles from Mar-a-Lago. For the past several years, residents have complained about degraded and dangerous living

conditions including physical neglect and the presence of asbestos and black mold. According to the tenants, these complaints have not been addressed by the management company Millennia Housing, which is based out of Cleveland and manages a number of similar properties around the country, many with reportedly similar conditions. I have with me here Grant, who is with the Palm Beach County Tenants Union, and Crystal, who represents the residents of Stony Brook apartments. Thank you both for joining me today. Thank you for having us.

Thank you. So could you start by describing for our audience what the Stony Brook houses are and what the living conditions there are like? Well, this is a low-income housing property. This is also HUD. And the living conditions on a scale of 1 to 10, I'll give it a 1. It's very poor. It's bad.

I've seen a lot of things out here that I noticed that it wasn't right at all, like with just the holes in the staircase, the holes in the building. Since I've been out here, I've watched the living conditions go from bad to bizarre. Like we have had, we have been helping tenants to test it for mold poisoning, lead poisoning. We have had multiple people come back positive, children for mold and lead poisoning, a woman just upstairs from the apartment we're in now, tested positive for lead poisoning. The environment is toxic, again, everything you can think of that's uninhabitable and is volatile to a person's health, asbestos, mold, rats, roaches, bed bugs.

Also half of the kids on the complex are on breathing machines. I have one tenant who just got her one-year-old hospitalized because this is the second time he stopped breathing, and the property was so bad to the point our grandparents didn't even want to step foot on it anymore. Nobody wants to visit the tenants. It's like a cemetery out here, and that's how it feels. It is that bad. I was like, okay, let's see if we can start something.

I ran into Adam and Grant, they were the ones who came in and started helping us with everything that was going on. I was like, okay, I've been trying to organize it for a little over eight months. I was like, let me see where I can go from here just to see if anybody will reach out to us, anybody will help us out. My thing is, the reason why this haven't been, they've held us hostage for so long. They've hindered us for so long. They've also told us, if you run your mouth, you're going to get evicted, you're going

to get put out. We've been threatened since we've been out here. So I'm like, is this subsidized housing, or this is a secret correctional inmate facility? This is what it feels like. So you're kind of scared to do both. You're scared to run your mouth, and you're also scared to work because they've been going up on everybody's rent massively. I mean, we're living in asbestos, we're living in black mold, we're living in pure filth,

and you guys take everything from us. I mean, I got a 15 phrase and millennia went up on my rent, $300. Oh, wow. Yeah, that's the thing that I said. Grant, could you talk a little bit about the tenants association? Were you all putting this association together before you met the Stony Brook residents, or are these two things kind of mutually related? Yeah, we had started organizing our tenants union last year, and it started, the main

focus was to fight gentrification. We were going to CRA meetings, that's Community Redevelopment Associations, which are kind of like at the forefront of gentrifying neighborhoods and stuff like that, but we didn't have... We wanted to really get into the direct action of working with tenants and making material changes. And so, we had somebody in our group suggested that we cannabis at Stony Brook, and we came out here and just went door to door and talked to people and listened to their stories. And from that point, we organized a meeting on April 30th to meet with the tenants, and

we had 40 people show up. Sorry, was that 40? Yeah, 40. Okay. So, as an organizer, it's like scary as hell because you don't expect anybody to come, and then it was a full house. And this was down the street at a community center, because we couldn't have it on property because the property management, Alenia, had closed the community center within Stony

Brook and went and allowed residents in there. Yeah. So, we had it off property, kind of give them a safe space away from management, because we had also heard that management had spies and was really like ears and eyes all over the place. And nobody really trusted anyone. So many people had been displaced because, I mean, all you have to do is threaten somebody with an eviction, and the idea of having an eviction on your record is so terrifying

because where are you going to be able to rent from, that happens, that it's too much trouble to fight that, and a lot of people just leave. How many people in total live in the Stony Brook houses? How big of a complex is this? This is a 216 unit. There's a decent part of it that's condemned from a fire that still have people living in it, by the way, but some of those units were condemned, like just burnt up, couldn't anybody live there?

The hurricane last year took out a decent chunk of a building. So the whole complex just keeps getting more and more damaged, and rather than any repairs, they just move people out of that part, but the rest of the complex is still being inhabited. So what results are you hoping to achieve through both these organizations? I mean, I guess individually or together, what are your goals short and long term? Well, I'll have Crystal talk about the goals here with the immediate goals with Stony Brook. Well, right now, we're trying to get the whole complex demolished. We want it tore down because if you look at it, every building that gets dimmed is like

two buildings on your right-hand side, no longer works. So they're throwing everybody on the left-hand side, and neither are these buildings up to pair for people to be living in. So the long-term goal is to get this demolished, never have it rebuilt up. I mean, this is unbearable. So what would then happen to the tenants if you are able to get the building demolished? Okay, so just a quick background on just like Project Section 8. So there's two different kinds of Section 8 vouchers.

There is tenant-based vouchers, which is what most people are familiar with when they think of Section 8, and there are project-based vouchers. Stony Brook is a project-based voucher, which means the people here do not individually have Section 8. They have Section 8 on the basis of living on this property. So the residents don't have the option to move anywhere. Or else they would lose their Section 8 status. Yes.

Okay. So emergency vouchers from HUD, from the state, from basically anywhere, all these places that have just been ignoring the situation here, and that this situation isn't unique. It's happening all over the place. But Section 8 emergency vouchers from them would be the ideal thing right now, because as much as we wanted to save Stony Brook and keep everybody here and be able to build this place up as a community and have the community control, again, the environmental health factors come in, where just down to its very core, it's rotten and poisonous.

So if I'm understanding this right, the residents are in an extra bind because their housing access is tied to literally these physical buildings right now. So the idea is to achieve getting them declared demolishable would then hopefully allow for the residents in a group to obtain some kind of either emergency voucher or a new project based Section 8 voucher or something like that. This is where we run into multiple issues. So the problem with the project-based is that the only other project-based apartments are on the complete opposite side of the county.

Palm Beach County is a very large county. They are in Belglade and Pahokee, two of the poorest municipalities in the country. It's called the Glades, and it's just sugar cane fields. Stony Brook is in the city. The kids go to school here, it's their community of Riviera Beach. So project-based really is not what we're shooting for. Because it would effectively disband either this whole community or uproot it to a very different location.

Yes. Okay. And then the emergency, this is the problem because the health department, the health inspector actually got up at city council and said when she came in she would have condemned all the units in here, but it would have created a homelessness crisis. Because once you condemn a building, no one is by law allowed to live in it. Even though there are units out here that are condemned right now, we still have people in there.

That's the situation where, and because there's no way to go. Right. Well, that sounds ridiculously impossible to navigate. And I can see now more why the building itself is such a disastrous issue for the residents. There, because everybody is tied to it by this program. So what kind of pressure are you all applying and to which parties? Who are you working with and against to try to achieve these goals? Both Crystal and Edna, who is another tenant here, have been organizing with the tenants

as far as going around, collecting information, documenting things. A woman's baby was just rushed to the hospital last night. She quit breathing twice because of the air quality issues. And when she, when it was, when she took it to the hospital, the doctors, when they found out she was from Stony Brook, told her they're personally coming to Stony Brook today to look at the apartment because they know how bad the situation is out here. Right. And this is a pretty common thing, unfortunately.

So Crystal and Edna have been amazing at documenting these things. And they have, we managed to find a local civil rights lawyer who has, you know, come through and he's now working with the tenants, they are working on a class suit. And that's the, and the class suit is against both the city of Riviera Beach, Millennia Housing Management, the company that is the property management and Global Ministries Foundation, the company that has abandoned all their properties and have been forced by HUD to sell them to Millennia. And that sale is in just limbo out there right now.

It's over, it's over 30 properties throughout the nation. Us, the Palm Beach Tenants Union has been involved with organizing with those other properties now to build a coalition against Millennia in their various, you know, properties because it's, Stony Brook is bad and so is everywhere else that we have, you know, talked to, like a roof just fell in on a, on a teenage girl last week in Columbus, or no, in Columbus, a roof fell in on a baby and it's really, in Kansas, a roof fell in on a 16 year old girl. Jesus.

And all these properties are under the same management limbo where they're trying to be passed off from one company on to Millennia. Some of them Millennia actually already owns out right and the ones in Columbus and Kansas, they actually own already, which is why we're fighting against Millennia owning this property because it's not going to get better. Could you just clarify the relationship between the management companies like Millennia and HUD in regards to these houses? Yeah, the, the relationship is a purely business relationship where HUD just dishes out money

to these companies that manage properties like Stony Brook and they get paid per unit at a fair market value for each unit. So Stony Brook, 216 units, looking when I looked up GMF's records because they're a profit, they had made between two and $4 million a year off Stony Brook. This is while the place is decrepit and, you know, literally falling apart and Millennia, which operates the place as like a open air prison pretty much. It's the same deal with them. And so the relationship with this public and private deal that's going on, which, you know,

is sold as like this is a more efficient way to, you know, make the market-based solutions for affordable housing, that kind of shit. That is, that's what it is. So HUD is just basically funneling public funds to these private developers and the private developers are cutting costs as much as they possibly can. And between HUD and the developers and now these two development companies trying to pass off these properties between each other, it's just nobody is in a position where they can seemingly have to be responsible for the actual issues with the housing.

Right. And the other thing that this does is when you try to fight like for the tenants in this, when the tenants try to stand up and fight, that is how the buck gets passed around to each of those different entities. So nobody's responsible is what we've discovered. And as we've went around to each party, asking somebody to take responsibility for what's going on here, everybody passes the buck on to the next. Chris, so I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the residents' experiences

during the organization and, you know, your movement to try to get some responsibility between any of these organizations. I know that some of you have alleged that there have been some methods of intimidation and, you know, you alluded to threats of eviction or rent hikes. I wonder if you could speak a little more about that. Yeah. Well, like Grant said, we had like 41 when we first started and right after that meeting, it went from 40 to five.

The following week, it went from five to my cars getting vandalized. So they totaled the cars on the property. And here's the thing, because they're going around on all these so-called drug buses, like right where my cars got hit and vandalized, they never had cameras. So now all of a sudden, when they do this little drug bus, they have cameras. I asked them to see the cameras and they were like, oh, no, we'll have to go back. You know, we don't keep video footage within three months. They never had video footages for my cars.

Not only that, 60 people's got evicted. Teresa Lee, she was the management before they fired her. We pushed that issue to get her fired. She wrote up 60 falsely, wrongfully evictions and she blasted them out. Those people, you know, they was conscious to nothing at all. So basically, they packed their bags and then they left. So you got 60 people's who just left and walked out on their units, not knowing these evictions is not even legal eviction.

She wrote up some and Melinda knows about it. You think they did anything with them people's? You think they tried to give them people's back their units? They didn't. Not only that, we have security. I don't know if it's security or the Secret Service or the CSI, but since I've started this, they stand right by my door. They watch me.

It's kind of unsafe, you know, so I don't step outside. I try to stay out the way because of what's going on and we never knew these things was happening worldwide. We just thought this was happening to us. We started putting this information out there and making all this private information public. We went to get in like people was reaching out to us. So many people's contacted us from those other complexes and then we found out that, oh, now we see what they're doing.

They're going around, you know, making millions off these low income, you know, complexes. And they have over like 200 complexes, all of them look like crap. Has that experience of finding other people around the country who have these shared experiences, have you found that helpful? I mean, I assume it's helpful just to know that other people have your experiences, but in more like practical sense that you're able to convince more people around you that this is a fight worth making now that you have these other experiences and kind of a slow coalition building.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I was like, this is way bigger than we think. So my thing is everybody, we've been contacting her for almost two years now. I wanted to ask you guys, do they really exist because we haven't got a call back. Everybody have been contacted and I'm just sitting and like, we feel like it's an inside job done. You know, how you guys collect these funds from HUD, but we can't even get in contact

with them. So it's a lot going on and all the properties are going down. Even the ones you guys own for three years, they look 10 times worse than what ours look like, but ours is bizarre. So I can only imagine what the people are going through. And I said, it's a great fight. It's a big one. I feel like the world needs to know about GMF, millennia, and these so-called churches

that's backing them up, you know? I think that it's sad that a church will, a global ministry, will back up to corrupted companies and knowing little babies are out here dying is too much. Have you seen any results from the work that you've been doing so far? Has there been any, you know, kind of tangible movement with any of these organizations? You know, I said, you said that you've got to have a civil rights lawyer involved now. I'm sure that those things kind of take a long time to get rolling, but I was wondering if you could speak to any of the effects that you've been able to get so far.

Well, yeah. After everybody's funds was getting stolen, and, you know, we pushed the issue to get the management, Mrs. Teresa Lee, fired the whole, after she got fired, she purchased off, she purchased a four bedroom, two bath house, she moved off a truck. So you get her fired and she comes up with all this stuff. Yeah, when they found out that, you know, we were stepping up and coming for it, we finally got new appliances, you know, property got new fridge, new stoves. I'm like, wow, because when we were asking for this a year and two months ago, you guys

told us you was not getting government funds. It was nothing you guys can do about it. And once we started, you know, putting all this stuff out, here's your surprise, a stove and a fridge, right? You guys just be quiet. Why we just continue to step on you guys and make ourselves look great. This is what this situation is. If I could add to that, we have had some, some material wins.

Part of the issue with it out here is that there's so much to the story that it's like easy to get lost in any one bit of it, but for every concession we've won, there has been, it's been a double-edged sword and there's been pushback and retaliation for that. So the most recent example I can give is we got the tenants that were living in condemned units moved to hotels, you know, they need to go and stay in a hotel so they don't have to stay in these units that are condemned. And millennia paid for it and all that. But the thing is, as soon as they moved out of their apartment and they didn't move out,

they were told to just grab some things and go. The locks were changed on their units and they're unable to get back. It was closer to an eviction. Yes. So again, it's like every time, for every step forward, there's two back. Yeah. And then they told them they were trespassing if they came back on the property. Right.

So even, you know, the victory, what you could call victories are couched in kind of an intimidation and a removal of, you know, how access to the housing that they had been in. Yeah. We've gone, we've went down all the tactics, like we're currently on a rent strike, a court injunction right now against the city and millennia. We've hit like everything we can possibly do that way. And so now, yes, we have linked up with the other properties. They have reached out to us.

They said they were inspired by it, which was like crazy, but they're inspired by the work that was being done here. A lot of people have been inspired by Crystal and Edna and we're working together to try and make these changes across the board. Yeah. That was going to be my last question, but it seems like that's kind of where you are. What's next? And, you know, it seems like you're working to pressure your local governments, but also,

you know, this reaching out and this kind of class action thing is the main thing that you're working on now. Yeah. The tenants are working with their lawyer on the class action and as a tenant union, we're working on trying to build this kind of national coalition of tenants because this is so widespread and, you know, as tenants, most people pay most of their income in rent. So just to survive in America today, most of what you work for goes out the window to your landlord.

Since this is chapeau, I'll put it in a video game metaphor. The final boss is finance capital because at the end of the day, that is what is driving all of this. There's a bunch of Wall Street people making a lot of money on the equity and futures and all the crazy like financial black magic that gets done to turn the suffering of like poor people into huge profits for a select few. So that's what needs to change at the end of the day besides, I mean, the whole system needs to change.

Yes. Well, as always, we can lens out until we're talking about the destructive grinding wheel of capitalism itself, but no, no, I understand that this is just one cog in this huge machinery of oppression that you all are fighting against. But it's been very illuminating hearing about this one housing complex and the issues that you're dealing with there. Before we get out of here, is there anything else you would like to tell us, including if there are any ways that if our listeners are interested in helping you, how they could

get involved? Yes. So we have a GoFundMe for emergency relief for Stony Brook tenants. This is to go to all kinds of things from getting testing for the people, for mold and lead to like, we're all working people and this is all like any thing that is done here is done out of like extra time from, you know, Crystal has children, she has a family, she is married and, you know, they have to pay for groceries, they have to like try to get by on top of fighting this, yeah, the huge system we were just talking about.

So not, not only that, I've been working at Publix for a little over four years now. I was a contender running for management and I work in the city of Riviera Beach and it breaks my heart to see that the people that I've served on the city council that they sat here and they played these politic games with us and told us that they were going to, you know, renovate it, they were going to fix it up. I never once told nobody that I stayed in Stony Brook's because of all the, you know, backlash and all the negativity that you get from it. That's a lie if they say that, you know, people don't want to work out here.

I had to step down from cement, I've also gave up full time and they cut me down to part time and as I continue to win the people over on the property and I go to see, I see the damages that was done to the, to the babies and the elderly, those are the innocent ones. So I gave up, I gave up my job for good. I love Publix dearly, but I had to let it go, you know, for right now. I will no longer work in the city of Riviera Beach. I will no longer serve the city if they don't serve us. I've given up, I've given up everything I've had, you know, Publix, that's like, that's

my life. I'm going to go back, but I will not go back until all this stuff is cleared. Like once this all gets done, I'll go back, but for right now, I can't, I can't because I'm, I'm still having people on the property, you know, some people are emotionally damaged and a lot of people just traumatized and, you know, I'm just here. Thank you guys for giving us the opportunity to get our story out. We'll know how Grant and I did it, but I'm like, wow, you know, a lot of people's needs, needs to, needs to hear this, this has to get out.

Not only that, thank you guys for everything. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak and I just wish anybody's, everybody around the world just, you know, reach out to us. You know, it could, it could have been you guys, family members, but it's not so. At the same time, I think everybody deserve, you know, we all deserve equal rights. Well, thank you, Crystal, so much and thank you, Grant, so much for taking the time out of your day to talk with me today about this. You know, this is certainly a very intense thing that you guys are fighting here, so

I really appreciate taking the time to talk to us and we will put the links to the various the GoFundMe's that you mentioned in and some links to some of the other things that you've written and have been written about this and the notes to this. And we'll keep an eye on your whole story and as it develops and keep sharing some updates from you guys. But yes, thank you very much and, you know, good luck with all your work. Thanks. If I could say one more thing real quick.

You know, anyone that wants to get involved, we have a list of properties that's owned by millennia, you know, so if you're in a city in the Midwest or on the East Coast and you are involved with tenant rights or anything, we can help you kind of find where these properties are and, you know, you can help out if they're already organized and you can help them out there. I want to say shout out to Forest Cove in Atlanta. I mean, they're doing amazing work there. They have an amazing community, amazing union going on.

They're fighting very similar challenges with security guards that, you know, are wearing they wear tactical vests and walking around with guns and blast the cops theme song. And yeah, yeah, I mean, it's it's ridiculous. And I mean, they, so if you're in Atlanta, give them some help. Well, we'll absolutely share that list as well and keep everybody, you know, everybody keep their eyes out for those. Thank you all both for talking to us today and keep fighting.