Mice, mold, bed bugs. Apartment complex for low-income seniors ‘left to rot,’ suit says
Mice. Bed bugs. Cockroaches. Leaky faucets and kitchen stoves so old they can’t be fixed.
That’s the short list of nuisances that the folks who live at Cross-Lines Retirement Center in Kansas City, Kansas, have had to contend with for years.
Sharon Richison says you can add to that list peeling paint, broken doors, useless smoke detectors and icky black mold that won’t go away no matter how much bleach-mixture you spray on it.
“Because of the mold, I’m having migraines,” said Richison, 75.
She lives in the newer of Cross-Lines’ two half-century-old high rise apartment buildings for low-income people who are 62 and older or have disabilities. The buildings share a lobby at 3030 and 3100 Powell Ave. in the Argentine district of KCK.
Both are worn out and pest ridden. A neighbor of Richison’s stuffs rags in the gap under her refrigerator to keep the mice out. Richison tries to keep the bedbugs at bay with insecticide she buys at WalMart.
“The whole two buildings are bad,” Richison said.
But for her and the other 200 residents, the rent at Cross-Lines is about all they can afford, and government has so far been ineffective in ensuring that they get their money’s worth.
The buildings’ poor health and safety conditions are cataloged in voluminous detail within hundreds of pages of inspection reports obtained by The Star. The reports were compiled since 2016 by the local, state and federal regulatory agencies that oversee the apartment complex.
Cross-Lines regularly struggles to score passing marks when the federal department of Housing and Urban Development sends inspectors to evaluate, HUD’s website shows. Sometimes it fails.
More than once, the Unified Government of Wyandotte County and Kansas City, Kansas, has threatened to suspend rental licenses on Cross-Lines’ units.
But the people who live there have few affordable alternatives, said Linda Smith, one of three tenants who have signed on to a class-action lawsuit that they hope will improve conditions. Smith, 70, said she and her neighbors deserve better.
“They should be paying us to live here, with all the stuff going on,” Smith said. “Bed bugs, cockroaches, water running all the time. Sometimes you walk out the door you got a whole floor from here almost down to the corner full of stagnant water. They’re always working on the water. The pipes are old.”
The retired bus driver worries more about being trapped in a wheelchair in her eighth-floor apartment in case of an emergency.
Many of Cross-Lines’ residents are disabled, yet the retirement center next to the rail yards does not have the accommodations required under the Americans with Disabilities Act. It was built before push-button doors were required for people who depend on wheelchairs and walkers, for instance. Cross-Lines has none.
Building management, Smith said, has repeatedly refused her request for a unit on a lower floor, even after a firefighter had to help her into one of the two elevators in her building when there was a fire in the apartment beneath hers in 2019.
“All I know is I want to get out,” she said. “I would like to get out of here and get a better place.”
But with rental rates soaring across the metro area, she’s not sure where she would go that she could afford.
Neither does Angela Markley, the Unified Government commissioner who represents the district that Cross-Lines is in.
“There are people who would like to move out of that building,” she said. “But there’s just really no place for them to go. We lack apartments in general, in the neighborhoods that I represent, and then we certainly lack apartments that are subsidized in a way to the senior citizens who can afford to live in them.”
Failing grade
HUD inspects Cross-Lines regularly as it does other public and private properties that benefit from federal aid programs. Cross-Lines was built with the aid of federal loans and some of its tenants are part of the Section 8 rent subsidy program. Others pay market rates, but it differs for everyone, as it is on a sliding scale based on income.
Last summer, the taller of the two towers, the nine-story Cross-Lines II, got a failing grade: 56 on a scale of 100. The older building next to it scored a 62, two points above the acceptable minimum.
Those scores measure the physical conditions that Richison, Smith and the others put up with. In a separate evaluation by the Kansas Housing Resource Corp. last year, the state agency rated the retirement center’s operations “below average” in its annual Management and Occupancy Review, according to documents obtained through an open records request.
Other records obtained by The Star show that the Unified Government has repeatedly threatened to suspend Cross-Lines’ rental housing licenses on units that fail inspection. At least 13 failed minimum health and safety standards in 2020.
Since 2016, state officials fielded more than two dozen tenant complaints, Kansas Housing Resources said, without citing examples.
Former UG Commissioner Ann Brandau Murguia began calling attention to the deteriorating situation at Cross-Lines in the same year, 2016.
“Over the past few years I have received an increasing number of complaints from residents that their housing conditions at Crosslines Retirement Center…has gone from bad to worse,” Murguia wrote HUD’s regional director, as well as then-Mayor Mark Holland, U.S. Sen. Jerry Moran and others back then.
But the complaints have continued, prompting the federal lawsuit asking that a judge order improvements to a facility that the suit claims has been “left to rot.”
Upgrade proposed
At $397 to $646 a month, no one expects the apartments at Cross-Lines to be as nice as the luxury high rises downtown. But the federal government does require that the units be “decent, safe and sanitary.”
Cross-Lines has long struggled to hit even that minimal mark because the complex hasn’t seen a major upgrade since the original five-story, 88-unit Cross-Lines I building was opened in 1971.
Neither has the 120-unit Crosslines II been modernized since it opened a few years later.
Sen. Pat Pettey, president of the center’s board, acknowledges that the center has suffered from decades of neglect. She says a turnaround plan could be in the works. But the problem as always has been coming up with the money.
“We’re looking at major infrastructure improvements, which would involve a major investment,” Pettey said.
It would take $9 million just to bring the oldest of the two buildings up to date, according to a proposal now before state officials. Making it happen hinges on a huge increase in federal rent support subsidies and a more than $1.8 million boost from a competitive state program to fund affordable housing.
It’s a big ask considering that Kansas divided $6.8 million last year among a dozen projects. Cross-Lines applied, but wasn’t one of them.
“They told us they liked the application, they just said they ran out of funds, and said they’d like you to make a proposal again this year, which we did,’’ said Jason Lundgren, the vice president at Young Management Corp. Cross-Lines hired the Bucyrus, Kansas, company to run the facilities after the former in-house manager fell ill.
The proposal calls for replacing the heating, ventilation and air conditioning system that critics contend is a contributing factor to the mold problem; upgrading fire alarms and elevators; and putting in new doors and windows, among other things.
If that assistance doesn’t come through, however, the project might not, either, and that will likely mean more of the same, which the lawsuit calls unacceptable.
‘Left to rot’
To support the need for judicial intervention, the complaint filed in February in U.S. District Court paints a dire portrait of living conditions
“This case is about a ‘retirement center’ left to rot with its elderly and disabled tenants captive to bed-bug infestations, decaying rodent bodies, flooding, leaking, and mold,” is how the 61-page lawsuit against Cross-Lines and Young Management opens.
What began 50 years ago as “a tranquil, hospitable community for seniors,” the suit continues, “has since fallen far from grace, with its vulnerable tenants left to fend for themselves in the face of numerous habitability issues.
“This case is likewise about slum-lording, with Defendants harvesting federal subsidies despite failing to meet basic habitability standards and taking advantage of the residents’ powerlessness.”
In addition to monetary damages, the lawsuits asks that a judge immediately force the defendants to take a series of corrective actions.
It asks that the judge order Cross-Lines and Young Management to hire a pest-control company to get rid of the insects and vermin, hire another firm to inspect for and remediate the mold and install fire-escape routes and fire prevention mechanisms suitable for an elderly and disabled clientele who are now vulnerable on the upper floors with only two elevators for each building.
One of them is barely big enough for four people.
The suit also asks the judge to order that those elevators be inspected and fixed, the air handling system scrubbed clean, the leaky roofs and water lines patched or replaced and building security beefed up.
A similar lawsuit filed against the owners of Central Park Towers, another low-income apartment building in KCK that Young Management came in to help save, made similar demands.
Rather than make major improvements, the for-profit, out-of-town ownership group sold the 12-story building at 15 N. 10th St., which is now vacant and undergoing a complete renovation.
Pettey said Cross-Lines has no intention to divest an institution her father, the late Kansas state Rep. Harley Huggins, helped start..
“No, we’re not interested in selling it off,” she said. “We are interested in…being able to maintain affordable housing, primarily senior housing in the Argentine area. That’s been the goal all along.”
The goal was set in the 1960s by Cross-Lines Cooperative Council, a group of ministers formed to better the public welfare in working class neighborhoods like Rosedale, Armourdale and Argentine.
Hoping for ‘best case scenario’
Pettey said she is hopeful that, under the direction of Young Management, Cross-Lines Retirement Center will become a better place to live.
When HUD inspectors gave Cross-Lines a failing grade last year, current management fixed the problems that were cited, she said.
The Unified Government’s supervisor of rental inspections, Todd Yergovich, said any units that were in danger of losing their licenses have been repaired to the UG’s satisfaction.
Young Management comes in for heavy criticism in the federal lawsuit for not adequately tending to tenants’ needs, but Lundgren said the company has a good record overall and is often hired to turn around government subsidized housing projects that are in decline.
“We’ve been in business 50 years,” he said. “There was really no management there when we got there.”
Not all of the properties that Young Management operates are federally subsidized. But of the 18 that are listed on the company’s website, all but three get high rankings in the 80s and 90s on a 100-point scale.
Cross-Lines is the lowest ranked in Young Management’s current inventory. Two properties that Young Management operated until recently — Little Village Apartments in Buckner, Missouri, and Miami Hills Apartments South Bend, Indiana — ranked poorly.
The company was sued in both for allegedly cutting corners on upkeep.
Young Management denied the allegations and the suit is still pending. The Indiana case was closed after a confidential private settlement was reached.
Lundgren said Young Management inherited the problems cited in the lawsuits.
“Our scores with HUD are typically impeccable,” he said.
Key to turning around Cross-Lines, he said, would be convincing the agency to subsidize the rent on all the buildings’ units through the Section 8 program. Currently, only two dozen units are.
If that happens, it will make getting help from the state for renovation that much easier, he said, because it would not only reduce rents for the tenants but provide a solid stream of income to make it less likely Cross-Lines will fall into ruin once again.
Markley, the UG commissioner, hopes he’s right.
“Best case scenario is they do what they promised and they fix the place up,” she said.
Worst case: nothing gets better, Cross-Lines shut downs and the residents must find someplace else to live.
“The painful part is we don’t have the amount of housing that we need to accommodate all of these individuals,” she said. “It’s easy to say, ‘well, we should shut this place down because it’s a mess.’ But then where do we put these people, you know, who deserve better living conditions, but who can’t afford to go out on the open market?”
This story was originally published March 28, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
