For Syracuse activists, state housing law represents a shift in power
By Emma Folts
This article was originally published in The Daily Orange.
Tawanda O’Neal wants desperately to move her family out of their apartment on Syracuse’s Northside. But she doesn’t want to move until the company that owns her home exterminates bedbugs that have festered inside for about a year.
Endzone Properties, Inc. owns O’Neal’s apartment, along with 44 other properties. A property manager she has dealt with rushes her off the phone often and doesn’t send maintenance to properly address issues with the property, O’Neal said. She only knows his first name, Sam.
After first calling the manager about the bedbugs, a person came with store-bought bedbug spray. In response, O’Neal called the Division of Code Enforcement for the first time in July 2018, she said.
After calling Code Enforcement, O’Neal got her first eviction notice.
“Before I called Codes in July, I never had an eviction notice, never, and I had been here for two years at that point,” she said.
The owner of Endzone was not available for comment.
O’Neal lives with her three children and grandson. The bedbugs are only one of several code violations the family has dealt with since moving into the apartment in May 2016. A hole in both the roof and the ceiling caused rain to pour into her son’s bedroom. She can hear birds through the walls, and dead birds rot in her attic. The floors are warped. Two windows remain broken after about two years.
“I just don’t know where to start,” O’Neal said after a sigh. “I’m between a rock and a hard place. I want him to finish exterminating my house so I can move.”
While O’Neal continues to struggle with eviction notices and home repairs, a statewide law has given tenants more rights and protections against landlord exploitation. The Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act of 2019 passed through the New York State Legislature on June 14. Activist groups consider the bill a monumental effort in furthering tenants’ rights. Real estate trade groups strongly opposed the legislation.
An eviction court judge can now find that a tenant was unlawfully evicted if the eviction took place within a year of the tenant contacting their landlord or code enforcement about issues with their property. Tenants can’t be forcefully removed until at least two weeks after an eviction court’s decision.
Both unlawful evictions and blacklists of tenants with prior evictions were also made illegal by the 2019 law. Changing the locks on a tenant or forcefully evicting them are classified as unlawful evictions. Such evictions would be considered misdemeanors, with each violation fined between $1,000 to $10,000.
Syracuse activists Palmer Harvey and Jaime Howley lead the Syracuse Tenants Union in part and work to inform tenants of their rights. After meeting Harvey at one of O’Neal’s eviction court appointments, O’Neal shared her story with her.
Harvey has advised O’Neal about record keeping and has informed her of the recent legislation. Harvey has also encouraged O’Neal to tell other tenants that a court notice doesn’t mean defeat — tenants can fight their landlord in court.
Harvey attends eviction court proceedings, interviews tenants and visits their properties as part of a study with Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. In Syracuse, 66% of residents rent their homes, according to a handout from the union. When visiting tenants, Harvey said she has seen doors off hinges, broken windows and a particularly large cockroach infestation, among other problems.
“Just court watching alone, people want to tell you their stories so bad,” Harvey said. “Now they have this backup, this new law, they have so much more power than they know of.”
Mary Traynor, a lawyer for Legal Services of CNY, also heads Syracuse’s tenants union. On a Saturday in late July, Traynor was sitting with Harvey and Howley in a semi-circle of folding chairs in Beauchamp Branch Library on the Southside. The three were hosting the union’s seventh Tenant Teach-in — monthly sessions used to educate local tenants.
Harvey told The Daily Orange that a landlord-tenant relationship used to be like the “wild, wild west,” but this bill helps to even the playing field. The July teach-in focused on informing the tenants of the rights and protections granted under the new legislation.
“Being that the laws have changed recently, we’re trying to make a big push to make people understand what their power is,” Harvey said.
O’Neal is not alone in her struggles with her Northside apartment. In 2016, Endzone had 71 complaints to Code Enforcement regarding property condition — more than any other Syracuse landlord, according to a study Maxwell conducted in 2017.
State records list John Kiggins as the CEO of Endzone. In 2006, he was briefly jailed for neglecting to address code violations on several Syracuse properties, Syracuse.com reported. In 1991, he was jailed for six months on the charge of mortgage fraud. In 2016, a 13-year-old died in a fire in O’Neal’s apartment. Marks from the smoke remain on the ceiling.
Endzone has issued O’Neal several eviction notices — all of which occurred after she asked Sam, the property manager, to fix an existing problem with the property or after she called Code Enforcement, she said. All of the cases in eviction court have been either dismissed or withdrawn on behalf of the landlord, O’Neal said.
After calling Code Enforcement for the first time in July, it wasn’t until February that the bedbug extermination began. The process can involve up to three rounds of chemical treatment. Only one round of extermination was conducted in O’Neal’s house, she said.
O’Neal has repeatedly called Code Enforcement to follow up on the bedbug fumigation, as well as to inform them of the other unaddressed code violations on her property. She was told she can’t make another complaint because the violations are still open. Online property records show violations for bedbugs, a leaking bedroom ceiling, a broken refrigerator, a running toilet and malfunctioning outlets among others.
Maintenance workers patched up the hole in the ceiling, but the hole in the roof was never fixed — the ceiling will fall through again.O’Neal’s grandfather, a plumber, fixed her toilet.
O’Neal’s children hate it there. She wants to move, but doesn’t want to risk bringing bedbugs to a new property. She doesn’t want to bring bedbugs to a homeless shelter, either.
“What’s the point of me moving right now and potentially bringing these things somewhere else?” she said.
While tenants have new forms of recourse under state law, Syracuse is also tackling the issue of evictions at the local level, with the goal being to improve overall housing stability. In May, the city unveiled 11 initiatives to improve housing quality, prevent evictions and direct residents to resources.
Serious housing problems exist in private housing in the Southside, Northside and Southwest side areas, said Sharon Sherman, executive director of The Greater Syracuse Tenants Network. The network seeks to educate and empower tenants, particularly those with low-incomes.
The Bureau of Administrative Adjudication launched in Syracuse this April as a means of resolving unaddressed code violations. Its goal is to improve compliance by expediting the process of charging fines and penalties for unresolved code violations on owner- and tenant-occupied properties.
“We’ve seen a huge increase in compliance once (owners have) been ticketed or prior to getting ticketed,” said Ken Towsley, director of the Division of Code Enforcement.
The action and threat of evictions, as well as housing quality, are suspected to contribute to the city’s high rate of resident mobility, said Stephanie Pasquale, commissioner of the Department of Neighborhood and Business Development. About a quarter of city residents move at least once a year, according to city data.
Some landlords assure prospective tenants they will fix problems with their property, but never address the problems once the tenant has paid their first and last month’s rent and moved in, Pasquale said. Non-payment of rent and job loss are also a factor in resident mobility, she said.
“We still have a long way to go, we have a lot of work to do and a lot of families to help and continue to support,” Pasquale said.
Howley and Harvey said the new city initiatives were “fabulous” and “brilliant.” Coupled with the 2019 state pro-tenant legislation, the city could really make changes, Howley said.
Towsley said good landlords have to be recognized more than they currently are. Code Enforcement needs to work with landlords and guide them to resources, he said.
“We need them to be successful for us to be successful,” Towsley said.
Sherman works to educate landlords at the Greater Syracuse Tenant Network through organizing landlord training sessions. Smaller landlords often lack the resources to know what they should be doing or what’s available to them, she said.
O’Neal was due in Syracuse City Court on July 22 after receiving her most recent eviction notice. Court records classify the case as a holdover eviction, an eviction lawsuit leveled against tenants regardless of whether they paid their rent.
In court, O’Neal told Judge Vanessa Bogan that she can’t move until the house is exterminated of bedbugs. Bogan ordered the extermination process to be restarted by the time Endzone and O’Neal return to court on Aug. 5.
If the extermination doesn’t happen, O’Neal said she’ll lose everything. When she moved to the apartment, she hardly had furniture — at first, her belongings included children’s beds that her sister bought and an inflatable mattress — but she eventually had furniture, a bedroom set, a kitchen table and a television.
A lot of her belongings have been damaged or thrown away because of the bedbugs or the hole in her roof and ceiling, O’Neal said. She doesn’t think she should start over for a problem she didn’t cause. She’s been looking for other housing, she said.
Endzone Properties followed through with the second bedbug extermination.
“I’m a good mother. I take very good care of my home, the little bit of stuff I do got I try to keep up, I try to keep it nice,” O’Neal said. “I just feel like these landlords take advantage of that, they take advantage of these single mothers, they take advantage of the fact that we have limited resources.”