She watched her Lee’s Summit apartment fall apart. Then, the union came knocking
Mikayla Daniels’ living room is perfumed with incense, but when she opens the kitchen cabinets, she says she can always smell the mold growing inside.
Daniels’ apartment is full of Chiefs memorabilia and colored lights, and she loves to host. Barbecue grills and tiki torches are stacked in the corners of her kitchen. But to get to them, you have to step around the burned patch of kitchen floor held together by seven-year-old duct tape.
There’s a cavern in Daniels kitchen where a dishwasher used to be, cluttered with dusty garbage she says building management refuses to remove. The carpet is perpetually peeling. Mold spores and rust bloom around the bathroom fixtures, and a mysterious black smog pours from her vents and sticks to her walls.
Daniels, 34, has lived in the Sage Crossing Apartments in Lee’s Summit for 13 years, since shortly after her first child was born. Now an engaged mother of three sons who play football, Daniels says she’s watched her home and the complex fall into disrepair.
She’s hoping unionizing can help her find a way out.
Daniels is among 70 residents in the complex who worked together with the citywide tenant union KC Tenants to form a union for the building after Capital Realty Group, which owns the complex, said it would sit down to bargain with any such union that formed at one of its properties.
The group of neighbors is the first in Lee’s Summit to form a tenants’ union, said Anna Heetmann, an organizing fellow with KC Tenants.
“I just want to see change take place around here from the landlord, from Capital Realty,” Daniels said. “They really need to do what we are asking, because I feel like we’ve complied, and we’ve given up a lot, and we haven’t received anything…it’s definitely been hell.”
Capital Realty Group and Laura Del Toro, the property manager at Sage Crossing, have not responded to requests from The Star to comment for this story.
Issues pile up
The first several years in Sage Crossing were relatively peaceful, Daniels said. She began noticing a significant decline in living conditions and responsiveness from building management when New York-based Capital Realty Group bought the complex in 2017.
“Before, there were some hiccups, but any problems that we had, we could go to management, and they immediately took care of it,” Daniels said. Before CRG took over, Daniels was promised new flooring, new outlets, a full bathroom remodel and the removal of a broken dishwasher and garbage disposal. She was even consulted on paint colors.
But under new ownership, progress ground to an immediate halt without discussion, Daniels said.
“Everything was, ‘Oh, we have to wait on this, COVID this, orders are on back order, we can’t get the cabinets we need,” Daniels said. “Everything was just stalled.”
The maintenance crew working under CRG’s first property manager often ignored requests from her and her neighbors, Daniels said.
Crews removed Daniels’ dishwasher in 2018 but never replaced it with a cabinet as promised. The blank space in her kitchen is now filled with dusty construction materials and some old baby bottles, which Daniels said aren’t hers and which she said maintenance workers have refused multiple requests to remove during several unit inspections.
Later that same year, a small fire flared in Daniels’ kitchen while a neighbor was watching her sons, she said. Daniels rushed back from the store to an evacuated building and a crowd of irate firefighters. They told her that the fire extinguishers in the hall had been zip-tied closed, Daniels said, so that residents could not access them without a key.
Fire responders insisted that building management provide Daniels with hotel vouchers, then clean up the soot and fix her floor. Only the vouchers materialized, Daniels said.
“[The kitchen] still looks the exact same way that it looked in 2018,” Daniels said. “They still have not done my floor at all, and it’s a complete trip hazard.”
Her old garbage disposal is still in place and frequently belches waste back into the sink. Meanwhile, cracks have formed on Daniels’ walls and around her doorframes – signs of a collapsing foundation, she thinks – and she said running her bathtub has caused leaks to appear in her downstairs neighbor’s home.
About Sage Crossing
Representatives from KC Tenants began visiting Sage Crossing in June to assess the property, Heetmann said, then came back to interview tenants and form an organizing team.
A door-knocker recruited Daniels to the cause when she was cooking at home one afternoon, she said. At first, the prospect of sharing her housing issues with the public unsettled her, which Daniels said she thinks has stopped some of her neighbors from joining in.
Sage Crossing, a 152-unit building at 600 NE Howard St. in Lee’s Summit, was built in the early 1970s. It’s part of Capital Realty Group’s portfolio of 14,000 homes across 28 states, according to KC Tenants organizing fellow Hell Woods.
On the same day that Sage Crossing tenants unionized, unions also launched simultaneously at Park Square Apartments and Paraclete Manor Apartments, two other complexes in Kansas City owned by the same company. All of them have a majority union, according to KC Tenants, which is when more than half of the occupied units in a building are represented.
Sage Crossing is unique because it has historically housed residents who are fleeing domestic violence situations, Heetmann said.
“Historically, Sage Crossing has been acknowledged as a safe haven for a lot of single moms,” Heetmann said. “So the issues around harassment and intimidation… have been especially traumatizing for the people who live there.”
Woods said that CRG and president Moshe Eichler often purchase and take over buildings with significant populations of elderly residents, immigrants, single mothers and families with young children.
Tense relations, lease violations
Along with a growing list of maintenance issues, Daniels says she and her neighbors faced an increasingly hostile living environment when CRG hired Laura Del Toro, the current property manager at Sage Crossing.
Del Toro arrived in 2019, about a year and a half after CRG took over. Her predecessor was known for “trying to be cool with everyone,” Daniels said. The former property manager had briefly tried to move Daniels into a less decrepit unit – but did not follow through with tenants on recurring issues.
For Daniels, this took the form of missing utility reimbursement checks. Daniels said that while living at Sage Crossing, she’s been eligible on and off for housing grants that reimburse utility costs via check to residents without income. The checks are supposed to be distributed directly by Sage Crossing, Daniels said. Though her eligibility has changed several times, she hasn’t seen a cent since at least 2019.
Now, Daniels said she suspects CRG is aiming to force her into eviction proceedings. Property management, she says, has developed a reputation for calling the police on tenants without just cause.
“It’s been a lot of attacking and aggressiveness,” Daniels said. “I’m not getting anywhere with anything I actually need in my unit. And it’s made me feel defeated.”
Under the terms of Daniels’ lease, Del Toro as property manager can create records of suspected lease violations and can begin eviction proceedings when a certain number are accrued. Daniels said she has been cited for several violations, all of which she claims were unfair and all of which she says have since been cleared.
“She’s tried to pad my file with violations left and right, but they keep having to be removed,” Daniels said.
At one point, Daniels said, Del Toro took photos of her children from security footage and posted them around the property, claiming that they were trying to break into cars in the parking lot. At another point, Del Toro cited Daniels in relation to pet waste near her building, claiming without proof that Coco or Charlie, the emotional support animals registered to one of Daniels’ sons, were responsible.
“I’m like, ‘I need to know that you’ve seen this happen for sure,’” Daniels said. “I want to see some actual proof. Never got it. She hung up in my face.”
The pet waste saga led to a verbal altercation between Daniels and Del Toro at the Sage Crossing property management office, which prompted Daniels to call the police. Daniels is now banned from visiting the office in person, she said.
The citations and altercations came to a head on June 2, Daniels said, when Del Toro called Lee’s Summit police to break up a last-day-of-school barbecue that Daniels was hosting for some other families. Daniels says that Del Toro falsely accused her of breaking several building regulations and insisted that she bring the smoking grill back into her apartment. Del Toro also filed a lease violation notice claiming that Daniels “cussed her out,” which Daniels denies.
“[The responding police officer] did say that they had gotten phone calls about other tenants from her, and they were getting kind of perturbed with all the calls they were getting from her about tenants that they couldn’t do anything about.”
Joining a union
By summer 2025, Daniels said, she didn’t want to stay at Sage Crossing but felt she was running out of options.
Daniels, who has received rental assistance on and off during her time living at Sage Crossing, told The Star that she had previously reached out to the city of Lee’s Summit, the Lee’s Summit Housing Authority and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. She called Capital Reality and left messages with their human resources staff that were never returned.
Daniels was briefly eligible for a Section 8 housing voucher last year, she said, but found that it wouldn’t cover the full cost of a new apartment in the area. She tried to apply the voucher to her current lease at Sage Crossing, but the voucher expired as she was told the apartment complex wasn’t “up to par” to meet the requirements of the housing program.
Section 8 voucher recipients can live anywhere as long as the owner agrees to rent under the program and the building meets certain minimum housing quality standards.
“They were like, ‘(the building) wouldn’t pass an inspection for Section 8,’” Daniels said.
After spending her whole life in Lee’s Summit, Daniels is prepared to leave the city for better housing if needed. She hopes, though, to keep her 11-, 12- and 14-year-old sons in city limits so that they can keep attending Lee’s Summit schools, where they play football.
Daniels said that since KC Tenants got involved at Sage Crossing, property managers have told residents there would be a “big renovation” but have mostly been scraping and repainting walls. Residents have seen at least one representative of Capital Realty Group patrolling the property in the past several days, Daniels said.
Coats of paint have been quickly applied to common areas, and some apartments have been sprayed for roaches, bringing fumes that caused the Lee’s Summit Fire Department to make another visit.
Daniels said she hopes continuing to work with the union will improve her quality of life mentally, even if it takes time for physical changes to follow.
“I like for family to be around, friends to be around and just to be a lively community,” Daniels said. “And I feel like us having this is bringing that back, and it does give me some peace of mind.”
