At a dramatic 2023 news conference in Atlanta City Hall, former Forest Cove resident Felicia Morris, known as “Ms. Peaches,” stood alongside Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens and civil rights attorney Ben Crump, sharing her experiences at the dilapidated apartment complex in southeast Atlanta where she lived for decades.
Through tears she described years of living with rats, mildew, tainted tap water and crumbling walls. Over time, she said, residents’ cries for help went unanswered.
Despite Dickens’ promise that day to get tough on Forest Cove owner Millennia by enlisting Crump to file a class action lawsuit on behalf of residents, no complaint was ever filed. And in the past year, Crump, a nationally recognized lawyer, has not responded to multiple requests for comment from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on the status of the case.
That has left Morris wondering if she will ever get justice and compensation.
“I’m disappointed because of all the suffering we had to go through,” she told the AJC. “They were going to help us get a lawsuit — we would get paid. We still haven’t got paid.
“We’re still waiting,” Morris said. “We haven’t heard from nobody. Nobody called us.”
Unusually, no complaint was filed in court at the time of the announcement. Even so, officials did get into specifics, stating a lawsuit would seek damages for residents relocated because of the poor living conditions. And they said they would seek to recoup the $10 million the city paid to support the residents.
Credit: Olivia Bowdoin
Credit: Olivia Bowdoin
By early 2024, there was still no sign of the legal filing. Dickens told the AJC at an editorial board meeting in February 2024 that mounting a class action was “more difficult than I thought,” but said he hoped the law firm would move forward by the end of the year. At the meeting, he did not say if the city planned to file its own separate lawsuit but said that other cities had expressed interest in taking legal action.
“We still want our money from Millennia and we intend to get it,” he said.
Fast-forward to April 2025, and the city does not seem any closer to making it happen. That has raised questions about why no suit has been filed and whether the mayor has abandoned the idea of taking legal action.
Dickens administration officials won’t say either way.
“We are not going to reveal our legal strategy,” Courtney English, chief policy officer and senior policy adviser to the mayor, said in a statement. “But we are committed to helping and fighting for the 800 Atlantans who lived in the former Forest Cove complex — grandfathers, grandmothers, mothers, fathers, daughters, sons and people who just wish to live in dignity — who were instead forced to live in deplorable conditions.”
According to documents obtained by the AJC through the Georgia Open Records Act, the Dickens administration hired Crump in January 2024 to represent the city against the Millennia — a Cleveland, Ohio-based company which has a portfolio of more than 200 properties and has faced separate allegations of financial mismanagement and unsafe conditions at several of its complexes.
However, nothing in the documents show Crump is representing former residents in a prospective class action.
Crump was set to be paid $975 per hour, and 30% of any settlement amount awarded. But as of March, the city has not paid the attorney for any work.
Alison Johnson, executive director of the Housing Justice League, believes the city was instead paying “lip service” to the Forest Cove residents and suggested the 2023 announcement was a publicity stunt.
“Once they were relocated and scattered throughout Georgia, they were out of sight, out of mind,” Johnson said. “There hasn’t been follow-up simply because nobody really cared.”
Credit: City of Atlanta
Credit: City of Atlanta
The city began demolishing Forest Cove last year. Meanwhile, Johnson estimates more than 200 families were displaced from the complex after they had to relocate in 2022.
Last year, former residents told City Council members at a tense meeting that they were still struggling to find quality housing and were far away from good jobs and schools — it wasn’t the first time they raised concerns about the relocation process. Some said they were worse off in their new housing than they were at Forest Cove.
The city has said it will do all it can to find a pathway back to a new affordable housing development in the Thomasville Heights neighborhood, where many had lived for years.
The mayor’s office said Crump did meet with former Forest Cove residents “in order to evaluate their legal options” and “signed several of them up for representation.”
According to Morris and Johnson, no one from Crump’s law firm followed up after that initial meeting at the recreation center in Thomasville Heights. Morris said no one has asked her about the facts of the case, even though the city suggested she would be one of the lead plaintiffs at the Oct. 6, 2023 news conference.
Council member Jason Winston, who represents the area in which Forest Cove is located, told the AJC that he is aware of the first meeting between lawyers and residents, but he is unsure of where the issue stands today.
“That’s a good question. Even I want to know the answer now,” Winston said.
The Millennia Companies did not respond to a request for comment. Derek Bauer, an attorney for Millennia subsidiary and Forest Cove owner Phoenix Ridge, confirmed no lawsuit has been filed against either company.
Phoenix Ridge had sued the city of Atlanta over its decision to condemn and demolish Forest Cove after it was given the green light for a $60 million plan to redevelop the apartment complex. On March 17, the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a ruling that dismissed the complaint against the city.
Still, Bauer said the federal appeals court ruling touched upon one “narrow claim” regarding the mayor’s authority, and that the company is still litigating the rest of its allegations in Fulton County Superior Court.
Credit: Daniel Varnado
Credit: Daniel Varnado
The state court lawsuit filed in December claims the city condemned the Forest Cove property without giving the developer adequate compensation, and breached its contract by refusing to ask a judge to vacate a demolition order after residents were relocated.
“The litigation will be a lengthy process, but one which our client expects will ultimately demonstrate the city’s illegal conduct and mistreatment of both our client and the Forest Cove residents who were stuck in the middle,” Bauer wrote in an email.
Last year, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development filed and served administrative complaints regarding 16 Millennia properties subject to HUD contracts, alleging the company misappropriated more than $3.3 million.
According to HUD, Millennia took money out of the properties’ accounts without agency approval and siphoned it into entities affiliated with The Millennia Companies, or its founder and chief executive, Frank Sinito. Then in October, federal agents raided the executive’s home as part of a criminal investigation. Millennia asked HUD to pause the administrative proceedings because of the criminal probe, but it refused.
Sinito and Millennia responded with a lawsuit in federal court in Ohio seeking an injunction against HUD, and arguing the agency’s administrative proceedings for civil penalties are unconstitutional because the company was deprived of a jury trial.
That case is still pending.
Editor’s Note: The story has been updated to clarify the city enlisted Crump to explore filing a class action lawsuit on behalf of residents.
Credit: Ben Gray
Credit: Ben Gray
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