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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowThe Indiana Attorney General’s Office has obtained a legal commitment from the Indianapolis Housing Agency to rectify living conditions at a downtown apartment building.
The commitment, announced Aug. 14, includes extending new protections to renters at the Lugar Tower Apartments, the announcement says.
According to Attorney General Todd Rokita’s office, at least 40 renters filed complaints earlier this year about deteriorating conditions at the apartments, including a lack of security, fecal matter in stairwells and pest infestations.
The 17-story, 250-unit public housing building at 901 Fort Wayne Ave. was built in 1974 and provides subsidized housing for the elderly and people with disabilities.
The housing agency agreed to address the issues as part of an assurance of voluntary compliance that Rokita’s office filed with the Marion Superior Court.
The AVC requires the IHA to agree to a two-year compliance period in which it must maintain a licensed broker company as the property manager. It also includes an agreement that the housing agency will follow state landlord-tenant statutes, along with local health and housing codes.
“What happened at Lugar Tower Apartments was the culmination of years of neglect and mismanagement,” Rokita said in a statement. “That should anger anyone who cares about fairness and justice. Subsidized housing does not mean substandard housing.”
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Why does an agency funded by the federal government, with a CEO appointed by Mayor Hogsett, have to be legally compelled to rectify deplorable living conditions?
Because the agency is apparently inadequately funded and staffed to pay for maintenance. Or they waste all their maintenance money. Pick the one that indicts your favorite target…there’s plenty of blame to go around.
“fecal matter in stairwells” is certainly not a problem of the building itself. It (hopefully animal/pet fecal matter, but probably not) is a problem of visitors, or, so help us, the tenants.
“pest infestations” is also likely attributable to tenant behavior, but since it’s very difficult to trace the source, the solution is a persistent funding of pest eradication teams that come by every week or two.
“lack of security” okay that’s probably due to funding, but security levels need to be commensurate with threats and security breaches. If a place consistently can’t provide enough security because the crime is so great, again, could the problem be the tenants?
Low-income elderly and people with disabilities are rarely controversial because elderly are not usually themselves heavily criminally inclined. So people tolerate high concentrations of public housing in otherwise high-income areas (like Mass Ave) because it doesn’t cause spillover problems.
But low-income elderly do have grandkids. Monitoring who can visit and stay may help resolve many of the issues that are the source of complaints here.
Lauren…the public housing was put there LONG before Mass Ave became a “high-income area.” One might politely describe that neighborhood in the late 60s (when the towers were built) as “a low-income area”.
True, Chris…but I’m not sure what your point is. Or if we’re really in disagreement. It was an acceptable place to build these towers because virtually all middle-income people had left. No opposition. In fact, much of the housing was “slums” (i.e., historically interesting 19th century homes) that was cleared for buildings like the Lugar Tower.
It sounds like most of the source of complaints is coming from the residents themselves–probably regarding other residents (or their visitors) which are prompting higher need for security and pest control.
I feel for the good decent people who are having to suffer through this. But the fact remains that Mass Ave would have had a much harder time gentrifying if these high-rise towers were filled with young families and their unmonitored children. And now that the area is high income, the stakes are higher to keep everything in a superior level of upkeep.