Alexandria leaders view maintenance problems at Southern Towers
During a tour of Southern Towers, tenants showed City of Alexandria officials why they’ve been complaining about the landlord, the CIM Group.
Tenants invited the officials into their apartments to show them broken appliances, mold, and holes in walls. They spoke about rent increases; infestations of mice, bedbugs, and roaches; leaky pipes; broken elevators; new charges for utilities; and $100 fees for paying rent late,
The tour, on Sept. 20, was organized by African Communities Together (ACT), an organization that has been pressing for the better treatment of tenants since CIM Group purchased the five-building complex on Seminary Road three years ago.
CIM has been telling Alexandria officials that they have been making improvements, so ACT arranged the tour to give the city leaders a first-hand look at what conditions are really like for the tenants, most of whom are immigrants.
For example, CIM says they eradicated mold when all they did was paint over it.
Related story: Southern Towers tenants charge landlord with exploitive practices
In one apartment, a man named Abbas showed City Council members a big hole in the wall where maintenance workers removed a broken air conditioner. Instead of fixing the hole, they covered it with duct tape. Roaches and rats are coming through, posing a threat to his children.
The city leaders also saw trash piled up in a hallway next to a broken trash chute covered with caution tape.
Kasaye, who pays $1,500 a month for a one-bedroom apartment, showed the city leaders mold in her bathroom, a hole in the kitchen wall making the cabinets unstable and ready to fall down, and a non-working oven.
Perhaps the most disturbing story was told by Jimmy Bangura who reported to management last January that his oven wasn’t working, flames sometimes burst out of the burners on the stove, and his apartment smelled like gas.
He complained several times over the past few months but management told him they didn’t have enough manpower to make the repairs.
Then in July, he was making coffee in his kitchen when a blaze shot out of the stove setting his jacket on fire. Bangura was burned so badly, he had to have surgery and skin grafts and spent weeks in the hospital.
When he was discharged – with a huge scar under his arm – he was greeted with a five-day eviction notice. ACT is helping him get rent assistance and low-cost medical insurance.
City Council member Alyia Gaskins said the failure of CIM Group to handle maintenance is “totally unacceptable.” City Council member Sarah Bagley said the city needs “to step up inspections and code enforcement.”
Mice, mold, and bedbugs are health issues,” said Vice Mayor Amy Jackson. “The highest priority is safety and security.” The city housing and health departments “are on red alert to come up with a solution.”
If CIM continues to ignore tenant complaints about maintenance failures, the city could potentially impose fines on the company, Jackson said. If things don’t improve, “we’re looking down that road.”
CIM Group refused to meet ACT’s request for a town hall meeting with tenants, said Sosseh Prom, director of housing justice for the nonprofit organization. Instead, they held a virtual meeting where tenants weren’t allowed to speak, and CIM never responded to their written questions.
CIM is now holding one-hour tenant meetings in each building between Sept. 13 and 21.
Prom pointed out several problems with those meetings. For one thing, tenants weren’t given enough notice, making it difficult for them to adjust their work hours or arrange for childcare.
In addition, she said, the rooms where the meetings were held were too small to accommodate a big crowd, CIM didn’t provide translators, and only 10-15 minutes were allocated for questions.
“This is obviously not a reasonable amount of time to get meaningful feedback and engagement from the community,” Prom said.
ACT wants the City of Alexandria to provide more affordable housing, more deeply affordable housing, and a more robust year-round utility assistance program.
For the Southern Towers residents, Prom said, the City of Alexandria should bring CIM Group to the table and call on them to negotiate in good faith. And, she says, “We want the city to issue a public statement condemning CIM in the harshest way possible.”
This is criminal. These slum lords are charging a small fortune for small apartments that are not inhabitable.
There are lots of apartments in Alexandria that are not much more expensive per month, that are quite nice, definitely not complete sh!t holes. These slum lords must get away with this by targeting immigrants and not doing stringent credit checks.
I recall some years ago, maybe 10, when I visited my sister in law at Southern Towers. That mice, roaches and mold were very real then. And, the elevators NEVER worked. Ever. Made me fear for disabled residents in higher floors who would struggle evacuating in am emergency. The stairways were always occupied with persons doing drugs, and the basement areas were just as scary, you don’t know what’s lurking. The outside of the property, the parking lot and hiding places…all trash.
I’ll state the obvious since no one else has: The people that live in the towers are mostly responsible for the squalid conditions ——not the landlord. You could move all those residents to a brand new facility with the best landlord and in six months you would have the same problems.
Which people out of the 2,261 units are the ones responsible for the conditions? All of them? How do you know – or are you just generalizing?
Jeez, are rents that high these days, $1,500 for a disgusting 1 BR apartment?
At CIM Group, we firmly believe in the partnership between residents and landlords, working collaboratively to foster a thriving, healthy, and inclusive community-minded environment. Integral to this partnership is the timely reporting of necessary repairs by residents. As a result, we are troubled with several inaccuracies and untruths in Annandale Today’s story that misrepresent our ongoing commitment to residents and the Southern Towers community. Specifically:
• We are committed to the long-term success of Southern Towers and its residents with whom we have put a strong focus and effort into ongoing engagement. All resident meetings are announced well in advance. We provide ample notice by featuring the meetings, among other places, in our monthly and weekly newsletters, which inform residents weeks ahead of the event. These communications also feature upcoming community and resident appreciation events that we are hosting which are printed and posted around the property in addition to being distributed digitally.
• We are saddened to learn about the injuries sustained by Mr. Jimmy Bangura in a fire and wish him a speedy recovery. While the story claims that he reported issues with his stove back in January, our records indicate he did not report any maintenance issues regarding his stove until July 2023. Those repairs were completed in a timely fashion, and Mr. Bangura was provided with a satisfaction survey where he was given the opportunity to highlight deficiencies in the timeliness of repairs. He did not participate in the survey.
• This news coverage was our first notice we received of the fire in Mr. Bangura’s unit. We contacted him immediately so we could enter the unit to inspect for damage and investigate the cause. We learned that successful repairs of the stove were completed on July 3rd, more than two weeks before the fire incident. From our discussion with Mr. Bangura, it unfortunately appears the most likely cause was wholly unrelated to the building or the appliances.
• Mr. Bangura was not late on his rent in July and therefore did not receive any requests for payment. Unfortunately, he was significantly delinquent in September which triggered a demand for payment, which Mr. Bangura resolved. He was not assessed any late fees nor were eviction procedures initiated.
• Mr. Bangura did not report the fire to our staff, as required by his lease, shortly after the incident or in the months since then. We cannot underscore the importance of residents immediately reporting all fire incidents. This is so that we can inspect the affected residences and ensure they are safe and habitable.
• We have no maintenance requests for mold from Ms. Kasaye Kahasu. Mold is a serious issue and must be reported to staff immediately so it does not spread.
• It is impossible that our mold mitigation efforts in Ms. Kahasu’s apartment were to “paint over it” because there was never a reported need for mold mitigation.
• Mr. Abbas Imam’s complaints, unfortunately, omit key facts. Mr. Imam was informed, along with all of the other residents, of the need for us to conduct air conditioning maintenance and replace the existing units in the building, which were outdated. The notice provided a schedule of the work to be performed and that sections of walls would be removed for the workers to access pipes. Residents, including Mr. Imam, were informed that there would be temporary wall coverings until the repairs were complete, at which time drywall would be reinstalled. The entire project is expected to last four weeks.
• We take pride in the support our team provides to our valued residents and provide a variety of ways to submit maintenance requests for any issues they may be experiencing, including online through the resident communication portal, via telephone or email to the management offices, or in-person during office hours. We are also implementing a new Maintenance Engagement Program, where a dedicated member of the on-site team will be stationed in the building lobbies during set hours and be easily accessible to assist with submitting work orders. This program will allow us to engage with residents by discussing service and maintenance concerns on the spot.
Well done. Good luck dealing with those tenants. I can’t imagine what you deal with. I think I’d rather panhandle than do your job.