Owner of KC apartments shut down for ‘deplorable’ conditions is linked to fraud, theft
The doors and windows of a Kansas City apartment complex —its basements flooded with two feet of water, rats rampant across the property, its apartments riddled with mold, mildew and bedbugs — were in the process of being boarded up on Monday afternoon, after the Kansas City Fire Department declared the place unsafe and uninhabitable for its nearly 100 residents.
On Friday, the department ordered that the Cloverleaf Apartments in south Kansas City be vacated within 48 hours after a department inspector, having gotten no response to phone calls or emails from the complex’s property management, visited the property at 14554 US-71 Highway on Wednesday to set up an annual fire inspection.
“We didn’t personally reach out to the property owner,” Battalion Chief Micheal Hopkins said Monday, but when they visited, “that’s when we found there was no property management intact. . . .The conditions were deplorable.”
Kansas City records show the owner of the property to be NB Affordable Housing, a limited liability corporation based in Somerset, New Jersey, whose owner has been identified in other media reports as Fredrick Schulman.
The website for NB Affordable Housing has been shut down.
Schulman, through various companies, has had a history of legal problems including, in July, pleading guilty in federal court to being part of a $119 million conspiracy to commit mortgage fraud.
On Aug. 1, the U.S. Department of Justice noted that Schulman, 72, of New York, along with Chaim “Eli” Puretz, 29, of New Jersey and Moshe “Mark” Silber, 34, of New York, each pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud affecting a financial institution.
Between 2018 and 2020, the Justice Department said, Schulman, Silber and Puretz conspired to deceive lenders into issuing a mortgage loan, and Fannie Mae into funding or purchasing the mortgage loans on multi-family property in Cincinnati, Ohio and on a commercial property in Troy, Michigan.
In February, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in Pennsylvania reported that Schulman, Siber and another individual, Jonathan Liani, were charged by the Allegheny County District Attorney with theft, receiving stolen property, conspiracy, risking a catastrophe, making a public nuisance and dealing in the proceeds of illegal activity. The allegation is the men took money from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development that was to be used to improve subsidized housing complexes and illegally diverted it for other purposes.
Cloverleaf Apartments
At least 76 households at the Cloverleaf Apartments had received subsidized housing through HUD.
As of Feb. 1, HUD had already ceased making payments to Cloverleaf because of its hazardous conditions. Working with the Leamus Group, a real estate management firm, HUD was already in the process of helping voluntarily relocate residents from the complex when the order from the fire department came.
By Monday, all residents had been evacuated from the complex. By the afternoon, city workers were nailing plywood across doors and first-floor windows and posting orange flyers outside: “Order to Vacate, Do Not Enter, Unsafe to Occupy.”
Movers, contracted by Leamus, were finishing up, removing belongings to place in storage.
“Over the weekend, we moved a lot of people. It was a lot of work,” Seida Toko-McCarthy, owner of Your Local Moverz of KC. He estimated he helped move more than 70 families. He called the apartments “sad.”
The apartments’ decay was still on full display. Outside, suspension rattling potholes, many a foot deep or more, pocked the asphalt drives circling the apartments. Inside, water still pooled in the apartment basements.
In one apartment, half of the ceiling had fallen in a living room, dangling above an deserted couch. Window glass was smashed. Cracks, 15 feet long and several feet wide, snaked up the sides of buildings.
“It’s like a war zone in there,” Stephan Brown said of apartments. He was there Monday helping his son, Jaylon Womack, 29, who had been hired to help evacuate the complex.
“For the last year, it’s been like horrible. No communication with management. They had water leaks, and rodents like crazy. Paying their rent to no avail — nobody did anything. The (management) office had been locked for months. So many people were displaced.”
Mike Sanders, 28, was driving out of the complex. He said he’d been a resident for nearly two years, paying $850 a month to live in squalor.
“It’s been rough,” he said from the cab of his truck, a trailer hitched to the back. Sanders was carrying out bikes, tools, random items abandoned. Not his stuff, but “it is now,” he said.
“Hopefully they pay something forward for the way they did us,” Sanders said. “Unlivable conditions, let’s just say that. He rolled his truck forward, looked at the apartments and began to drive away.
“They’re lucky we don’t burn these (expletives) down,” he said of the complex.
What fire officials saw
Hopkins of the fire department said:
“When they went to the office, and it was locked up, and it had a flyer on it that said Leamus and HUD were having a meeting to get all the tenants out, the inspector went ahead and started walking into some buildings.”
He said the inspector found multiple busted water pipes from the recent winter freeze and thaw.
“They had water running from the third floor all the way down to the basements, through the walls, over active electrical,” Hopkins said. “Multiple basements full of water two, two-and-a-half feet of water, again, over active electrical. Sheet rock which is damaged and down. And then, just the health conditions. Mold, mildew. Just, in general, the living conditions were terrible, with no property management on site.
“There was no one to fix broken toilets, or broken sinks, or if anything went wrong with anyone’s apartment. People were staying there.”
Hopkins said the fire department contacted the Kansas City Health Department, the office of the city manager and HUD.
“The onus of shutting it down was from the fire hazard standpoint,” he said. “It was a group decision that this was not a situation that we could allow these people to suffer in.”
This story was originally published March 4, 2025 at 1:03 PM.
