Black mold. Broken furnaces. Raw sewage. Is this Kansas City’s worst landlord?

Black mold. Broken furnaces. Chronic flooding. Raw sewage. Holes in ceilings. Threats to shut off utility services.

Welcome to life at the Nob Hill apartments in south Kansas City.

The complex is owned by T.E.H. Realty, an increasingly notorious out-of-state management company that has made squalor and substandard living conditions its calling card. City officials and federal agencies are considering how to hold the derelict property owner accountable for its failure to adequately maintain several apartment complexes in Missouri and Kansas.

But for the Nob Hill tenants who have run out of options, action can’t come soon enough.

U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley has asked Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson to launch a federal investigation. The freshman lawmaker from Missouri has also asked U.S. attorneys in both eastern and western Missouri to investigate the company as well.

The Missouri attorney general’s consumer protection division is also handling complaints against T.E.H., as are the Housing Authority of Kansas City and the city’s health department.

But to what end?

The city of St. Louis filed a lawsuit against T.E.H. after residents complained of uninhabitable conditions. Last week, Wyandotte County placed a T.E.H.-owned apartment complex in Kansas City, Kansas, in receivership after a series of complaints.

Tara Raghuveer, founder of the tenants advocacy group KC Tenants, said regulating out-of-state landlords should be at the top of the city’s agenda.

“With these bad actors, it’s extremely difficult to hold them accountable,” she said.

T.E.H. Realty’s Michael Fein did not respond to requests for comment.

Kansas City does have the power to take action against negligent property owners. So, why haven’t city officials used every tool available?

Under the city’s voter-approved Healthy Homes initiative, health department officials can suspend or revoke a landlord’s permit to operate in the city if standards of living are not met.

Nob Hill is falling far short by every measure. The health department has received 29 complaints about conditions there. T.E.H. has responded by addressing issues in 22 of the cases. Three cases are still pending.

So far, T.E. H. is still open for business.

“It’s concerning, but we are limited in what we can do,” said the health department’s Naser Jouhari.

For its part, Kansas City’s housing authority has taken a more aggressive approach, refusing to issue $47,000 in federal housing payments to T.E. H. unless the firm corrects issues found in government-subsidized Nob Hill apartments.

“There is a consistent pattern of finding errors and not fixing them,” said Housing Authority Executive Director Edwin Lowndes. “They only seem to fix things when they get caught.”

Nob Hill has 269 units. Ninety-three of them are government subsidized. A recent inspection of 81 of those subsidized units found violations ranging from minor problems to critical issues in every apartment.

T.E.H. has until February to fully address the violations. Failure to do so could result in HUD and the housing attorney terminating their contract with the firm.

“We are going to hold them accountable,” Lowndes said.

Given the widespread harm that T.E.H. Realty has inflicted on tenants in multiple cities, local, state and federal officials must pursue every option to hold this bad actor accountable and to provide urgently needed assistance to tenants with no other place to go.

No one should be forced to live in the conditions that have been allowed to persist at Nob Hill. Kansas City leaders still have more work to do to ensure our most vulnerable citizens are protected from unscrupulous property owners.

“We have to treat this like a catastrophic fire and ask: Is there a way to help families with temporary housing needs?” Lowndes said.

There must be.