Roughly three years ago near Eagle Pass, Texas, a mother of three waded through the Rio Grande to reach U.S. soil, with her then one-year-old daughter in her arms. The family had fled threats of violence in their hometown of La Ceiba, a Caribbean port city in northern Honduras.
Life in metro Atlanta, where they soon settled, brought safety but also a new source of agony: a rental unit with living conditions the mother has described as “desperate,” including sewage backups, leaking pipes, and an air conditioning system that was out of service all summer.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is not publishing the woman’s name because she fears both deportation and retribution from her apartment complex’s management.
According to immigrant advocates, the Honduran family’s experience is indicative of chronic issues faced by low-income, undocumented tenants across Atlanta. In a local housing market marred by a dearth of safe, affordable housing units, immigrant tenants may be among the city’s most vulnerable.
The lack of documentation can disqualify some from getting leases in the first place. And once an apartment is secured, immigrant concerns over deteriorating conditions can be easier to brush off.
“I think us Hispanics, us immigrants, they take advantage of us more,” the Honduran mom said.
The apartment complex, Cielo at 325 in Austell, is owned by a New York-based corporation named Cielo CGC LLC, according to Cobb County property records. Covenant Property Services, also a New York company, manages the building.
No one from the company responded to multiple requests for comment from the AJC.
The Cielo complex made news last November when local law enforcement issued an arrest warrant for a staff member of the property management company. He was accused of stealing nearly $10,000 in tenant rent payments. The complex also accumulated a series of code enforcement violations over the years for trash and litter dumped outside.
Cobb County government officials said in a statement that they have no records of comprehensive interior inspections of the property.
‘Your only option is homelessness’
On the landing outside of her second-floor apartment, the Honduran mother was braiding another woman’s hair. It’s one of the many gigs she relies on to help make rent, which is $1,400 for her two-bedroom apartment. The woman also takes shifts at a local bakeshop. On weekends, she makes and sells pollo con tajadas, a chicken and plantain dish common in Honduras.
Credit: Lautaro Grinspan
Credit: Lautaro Grinspan
Outside of the apartment’s front door, on the open-air landing, sit several weary-looking couches which the family slept on throughout the summer to escape the heat inside. In addition to the broken AC, the family couldn’t open one of the apartment’s windows to let in a breeze because wasps had built a nest against the glass. Nighttime temperatures inside rarely dipped below 90 degrees, and the woman said the heat triggered eczema flare-ups for her youngest daughter.
The broken air conditioning unit is just one of many grievances.
The woman said they have also had to deal with sewage backup in their bathtub, holes in the wall, and water spots in the ceiling. In recent weeks, a crew tasked with removing the wasp nest broke the living room window. The window still hasn’t been repaired, and the family has replaced the window with cardboard.
The AJC spoke with five other Cielo tenants, all Honduran. They showed photos and videos of water leaking from holes in the ceiling and mold in walls and doors. They complained of mice and cockroach infestations, as well as months-long AC outages. One couple said their three young children, ages 4 through 9, would wake up crying in the middle of the night during the summer because of the heat.
They are now worrying about being unable to warm the apartment in the winter. Another resident said that extensive mold in her apartment gave her seven-month-old granddaughter respiratory issues.
Credit: Lautaro Grinspan
Credit: Lautaro Grinspan
The group said they have tried reporting their issues to the leasing office, but they have had trouble finding someone to speak with. Even when the office is staffed, they said their concerns have rarely resulted in maintenance work being done.
That’s an experience many area tenants are familiar with, said Erin Willoughby, an attorney with the Atlanta Legal Aid Society.
“I think increasingly we see just a lack of urgency from landlords” to address habitability concerns, she said.
According to Willoughby, many corporate landlords look after their bottom line by performing minimal to no repair work, and then selling their properties when problems start piling up.
“It’s just a cycle that happens,” she said. “They’re not thinking about the quality of life of the people who have to live in those properties. Their concern is: ‘How much money can we make as quickly as possible?’”
In Georgia, unlike 41 other states, tenants are susceptible to swift evictions for withholding rent.
Many of the Honduran tenants said that they ended up in the Austell apartment building because, unlike other complexes, Cielo did not require valid social security numbers to get a lease. It is common for landlords to request social security numbers to run credit checks on potential tenants.
Because getting a lease under their name can prove difficult, undocumented immigrants sometimes resort to exploitative sublease agreements, or to renting apartments at troubled properties. Apartment searches may also be strained by transportation challenges: in Georgia, undocumented immigrants can’t get driver’s licenses. They are also barred from accessing public homeless shelters or benefiting from housing vouchers.
“They know that we will just put up with anything because we have no other option. How would we look for something else?” said a Cielo resident, who works in painting and roofing and doesn’t have a license or car.
“Most of the time, your only option is homelessness,” said Stephanie Coreas, executive director of Los Vecinos de Buford Highway, a nonprofit that supports immigrant tenants in the metro area.
Credit: Lautaro Grinspan
Credit: Lautaro Grinspan
Empowering immigrant renters
Coreas’ ties to Buford Highway, the nerve center of Atlanta’s immigrant communities, spans decades. She first settled there as a young girl in the 1980s when her family moved to the region from El Salvador. In 2017, she helped found Los Vecinos to help immigrant tenants advocate for themselves in the face of hazardous living situations.
“We work with a very vulnerable community, a community that a lot of times just feels like they don’t have any rights. They are living this way and because they are undocumented, they feel like they’re not allowed to say anything, or they can’t complain,” Coreas said.
Among the most recurrent problems immigrant tenants say they have reported to Los Vecinos are black mold, faulty plumbing, broken ACs, rodent infestations, and electrical outages.
“We’ve had families that have gone months without being able to cook for themselves within their apartments. I think we’ve seen quite a bit of everything, and it’s just very alarming,” Coreas said. When some landlords “know you’re undocumented, they use that to their advantage as well. It impacts the treatment folks get.”
Credit: Courtesy
Credit: Courtesy
Earlier this year, Georgia lawmakers approved a bill that will mandate modest protections for people living in neglected rental homes, including a standard of habitability. But the legislation fell short of defining what is habitable, and didn’t set up an enforcement mechanism.
Los Vecinos teaches and encourages immigrant tenants to contact county code enforcement to report issues, and to invite inspectors inside their units when they’re on site. In its statement to the AJC, Cobb County confirmed that an individual’s residency status does not influence its process for filing complaints, which is accessible to all.
Workshops organized by Los Vecinos also cover how to manage relationships with property managers, and the nonprofit is building capacity to represent people in court. Recently, it helped a family who had long been suffering from mold and water damage win over $100,000 in damages.
Coreas said Los Vecinos’ outreach work around tenant rights is high stakes, given the toll bad housing can take on individuals’ physical and mental health.
“It’s heartbreaking because they know that this journey, everything they did to get here was not for nothing,” Coreas said. “But living here can be such a hard thing, and it can be something that completely breaks someone. It’s just not easy.”
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