Residents of the Lexington Heights, Highland Park, Hidden Pines and Rosemary Place neighborhoods issued a list of six demands to their landlord and property management company at a news conference last week, including new leases for all tenants at reduced rent.
Dozens of Athens residents in these neighborhoods are facing displacement after Prosperity Capital Partners bought their homes in June and greatly increased their rent, in some cases by 40% or more. The new management company, Strategic Management Partners (SMP), also does not accept the Section 8 vouchers which many residents had relied on for housing.
Tenants unable to pay the rent increases were given 60 days to vacate their homes, which is the minimum amount of notice required by Georgia law before a month-to-month lease can be terminated.
Tenants scheduled the press conference for Aug. 31, the day many of them were told to leave by. It resembled a protest, with tenants and supportive community members holding signs saying “housing is a human right” and “slumlords out of our city.” At the same time, in a nearby home across the street, the management company was negotiating with some Lexington Heights tenants, but they refused to do so with the group as a whole. About 20 people attended the press conference.
Juana Hulin, who has lived in Highland Park with her three daughters for the past five years, read the tenants’ six demands aloud. These tenants want Prosperity Capital and Strategic Management Partners to:
• provide new leases to all tenants with reduced rent and to accept Section 8 and other subsidized housing vouchers.
• delay rent increases until all renovations and maintenance necessary for the tenants’ health and safety have been addressed.
• cap the amount of future rent increases to a maximum of 10% per year.
• remove the surcharge for online payments and allow other payment options, including cash and check.
• provide necessary maintenance and access to all services and amenities including trash pickup.
• provide relocation assistance, such as money for security deposits and the time to find desired housing, to anyone who wants to move.
At the time of publication, Strategic Management Partners had not responded to these demands.
Hulin also explained her situation, saying that the monthly rent for her three-bedroom home in Highland Park is increasing from $825 to $1,700 starting this month. She said the stress of dealing with this situation has affected her and her daughters’ mental health.
“I have children that are going through a mental health crisis right now,” Hulin said. “This has been an undue burden on me and my family. If me and my three girls don’t come up with the $1,700, we will be homeless. I haven’t been able to sleep. This has been a burden on my heart to carry every single day.”
As Hulin spoke, SMP was negotiating with some Section 8 tenants in a nearby home as the press conference was held. Andrew Saunders, interim director of the Athens-Clarke County Housing and Community Development Department, was present for these negotiations. He said that, as a result of the meeting, two Section 8 tenants have secured a 30 day eviction grace period. Furthermore, a landlord who owns another neighborhood in Athens was also present at the meeting and has volunteered to accept the two tenants into available vacant units, according to Saunders.
This means that at least two tenants in the affected neighborhoods should be able to avoid the specter of homelessness for the time being. But Saunders stressed that it doesn’t mean that Athens’ problem of outside investors buying up low-income properties has been solved. In fact, it’s been an ongoing issue for some time and will continue without further government action.
“This situation has occurred for a long time in our community,” Saunders said. “If there is any benefit for what is happening right now, it is that it has cast a spotlight on this practice.”
Saunders said that HCD is “actively investigating and implementing programs and policies to help address the immediate and long term needs of our community,” but he added that they can’t solve the problem alone.
Regardless of what the local government ends up doing, no potential policy could be implemented quickly enough to help some tenants, including Barbara Daniel, who moved out of her home in Lexington Heights, where she has lived for over 20 years, last Wednesday. She also attended that day’s press conference to tell her story.
Daniel said that when Strategic Management Partners negotiates with some tenants and gives them but not everyone extra time, that she feels discriminated against. “They gave my neighbor another 30 days,” she said. But [the negotiations] should have been a week or two before we had to move. Why did they have the meeting the day we were supposed to be out?”
Daniel tried to attend the negotiations with management herself, but she said she was booted from the meeting because she brought along her lawyer, Sarah Gehring. “This was nasty and embarrassing. I have a right to have a lawyer,” Daniel said. “If you’re doing nothing wrong, you should have been able to say it in front of her. To me, you have something to hide. I’m going to keep on fighting.”
Diana Lopez Garcia contributed to this report, which originally appeared at Athens Politics Nerd.
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