It’s been more than a month since Maria Angeles, who lives with her family in a South Seattle apartment building, went before the city council pleading for attention to their living conditions. Yet, despite the hearing and a city inspection, little appears to have changed at the apartments.
Angeles, her husband Humberto Sanchez, and their two young children live in a one-bedroom apartment on Rainier Avenue South, where their ceilings are dotted with mold, cockroaches crawl along the kitchen wall, and their stove and heater don’t work. In the apartment next door, mold grows on the ceilings, electrical outlets are missing or defective, a ceiling light hangs by its wiring, and a gap under the front door allows pests and outside air into the apartment.
I reported on these conditions early last month. A city inspector visited the building on June 1 and drafted a list of 60 violations found in four apartments at the building, including Angeles’s.
The inspector instructed the landlord to repair the violations by last Tuesday, July 18, but as of this Tuesday night, he had made few improvements. “They haven’t done anything,” Angeles says through a translator.
Maintenance workers replaced two faulty outlets in her apartment, painted over mold on the bathroom ceiling, and sprayed for cockroaches, Angeles says. But the cockroaches returned and Angeles says other conditions—including mold, bedbugs, and a broken heater—were not addressed.
She says representatives for the property manager have told her several times they would return to fix the other problems, but they haven’t. While Angeles and many of her neighbors speak only Spanish, Angeles says representatives from the company don’t speak her language, making communication difficult. Before the attention from the city, Angeles says the conditions in her apartment went ignored by the landlord. Now, she says, representatives from the property management company come and ask about the conditions “but don’t do anything.”
Next door, where the city inspector also found a lengthy list of code violations, the conditions this week appeared unchanged from my visit in late May.
The landlord, James Boyd, has not returned requests for comment from The Stranger. When I called his office again this morning, a woman who said her name was Stacy answered the phone and said Boyd was out until Tuesday. “They are lying about things not being fixed, so I’m not going to comment,” she said. She declined to give her last name or comment further.
While some improvements, like installing new outlets, may require city permits, the property owner has not recently applied for any new permits, according to available city records.
Geoff Tallent of the city’s Department of Construction and Inspections says his department believed the landlord was making progress on the repairs, but inspectors plan to return to the building Friday. Depending on what they find, city officials will either offer the landlord an extension (if they feel he’s made a sufficient effort to begin repairs) or they’ll fine him, Tallent says. That decision is at the discretion of the Department of Construction and Inspections.
The city council recently strengthened the city’s rental inspection process, but did not increase fines on landlords who allow conditions like this.
Sitting at his kitchen table this week, Sanchez says through a translator that he’s seen city staff and council members come through his apartment “and the conditions are still the same.”
But “no matter what, I still have to pay my rent,” he says.
Now, Sanchez says he’s considering moving. But in order to afford another apartment for his family, he says, he would likely have to move outside of the city.
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