On March 18, about a dozen residents of the Alms Hill Apartments in Walnut Hills gathered in the former hotel’s dimly lit community room, along with members of Legal Aid Society of Greater Cincinnati and Josh Spring of the Greater Cincinnati Coalition for the Homeless. The group, calling itself the Alms Residents Association, was there to talk about its tussle with the building’s owners, New Jersey-based PE Alms Hill Realty LLC, and discuss a list of demands it had drawn up at a previous gathering.
The standoff between the building’s owners and residents is intensifying and is central to a lawsuit now on its way to federal court. The imposing 200-unit building on Victory Parkway, built in 1925, has drawn a great deal of scrutiny recently after the city of Cincinnati announced it would file a lawsuit against PE Alms over living conditions there.
The complaints by residents and the city are alarming: apartments swarming with bedbugs and roaches, tenants without heat throughout the winter months, unfixed leaks causing water damage and many other problems that make the building difficult and dangerous to live in. But an attorney for the building’s owners says PE Alms, which bought the building in May 2013, has done what it can as quickly as possible to fix problems present there. City records show the building has had more than 100 complaints for code violations in the past decade, and about 60 since PE Alms purchased it in May 2013.
The owners say that recent attention by the city and the media is overblown.
“The lawsuit is an over-dramatization,” says PE Alms attorney Louis Sirkin. “The owners of the Alms have done a significant amount of work. I have a stack load of completed repairs” since the city first began investigating the building, he says.
At the most recent ARA meeting, however, residents told a different story.
“I’ve been living here for three years, and three winters have gone by where I didn’t have any heat,” said resident Nicole Thornton. “My son’s been sick and no one cared. I have two kids I have to take care of. And nothing gets done. When the new people bought the building, they said [they would fix things]. The most they’ve done that I can see is put tint on the windows. How is that helping me and my kids?”
The group has been working for months on its list of demands to address concerns like Thornton’s. It covers nearly 30 items, asking for owners to repair elevators, windows, plumbing, appliances and other physical equipment at the building. It also asks for big improvements to accessibility to the building and communication between owners and residents.
The final set of demands, that management cease threats and intimidation against the residents and treat them with respect, was the one the group seemed to come back to over and over again.
Renee Jones, President of the Alms Residents Association, has worked with Spring from the Homeless Coalition to write letters to the building’s owners and to organize residents.
“The biggest concern that most of the residents have is, ‘Are we going to lose our apartments? Will we get put out if we come to these meetings?’ That’s what they want to know,” Jones says.
Sirkin says he’s unaware of any attempts to intimidate residents and said he had no other comment about the building’s management, which is led by a man named Robert Griffin.
“No one wants to kick them out,” Sirkin says of the residents. “No one wants to give them below-quality living.”
As attention-grabbing as the tales of conditions in the Alms building have been, the stories of intimidation and threats by management there have raised just as many eyebrows. Virginia Tallent, an attorney for Legal Aid who has been working with the tenants, told members of Cincinnati City Council that the building’s management has bullied residents, even entering apartments with firearms on occasion.
“There have been intimidation and retaliation tactics used at the Alms when folks have brought up concerns that have been very egregious, things that we fortunately don’t see every day,” she says.
Despite their fear, residents have stepped forward, particularly during a meeting of the City Council’s Law and Public Safety Committee March 16, when more than a dozen showed up to testify about the Alms.
That committee meeting has caused further tensions between the owners and the city. Alms attorney Sirkin says he notified Council he would not be able to attend to give the owners’ side of the story that day due to commitments to other clients. He says it’s inappropriate that the hearing was held when the lawsuit is pending.
“We plead our case before a court,” Sirkin says. “It’s been a hatchet job. I’m offended by the demonizing of my clients by the committee.”
The city has been aware of the situation at the Alms since last September, when police officers initiated an investigation after seeing conditions in the building.
“Up until that point, we’d had a relatively good working relationship with the management of the Alms Apartment,” says Lt. Joseph Milek of the Cincinnati Police Department. “I’m not saying there weren’t problems — historically the same problems have persisted to one degree or another. But in September, some changes started to occur.”
CPD arranged a tour of the facility, led by management, during which officers saw bedbugs, mold and extensive leaks in the building. Soon, the city’s Law Department got involved. By December, the city wanted to do a full-on inspection.
“The response from the ownership group was honestly surprising to me,” says city attorney Mark Manning, who has led the city’s legal efforts. “They said ‘No, you’re not allowed to come in the building.’ ”
Police got a warrant and searched the building Dec. 4, then filed 29 pages of orders for the owners of the building involving maintenance and code violation issues, many of them corroborating complaints by tenants.
Manning and Milek say some improvements had been made by February, but not nearly enough. On Feb. 17, the city formally filed a legal complaint against the owners of the building. That complaint is picking up steam.
Many of the tenants in the building are recipients of voucher or unit-based housing subsidies, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development has joined the city’s suit, which was recently moved to federal court by a U.S. attorney, court documents show.
Meanwhile, the city is looking at another tactic: placing the Alms in receivership and holding residents’ rent in escrow to pay for repairs. The owners of the building received more than $1 million from HUD last year in subsidized rent payments, and the Cincinnati Metropolitan Housing Authority and the city could ask courts to funnel that money toward a receiver empowered to spend it on fixing up the building.
“I can tell you, when you cut the funds off, people start paying attention,” says Councilwoman Yvette Simpson, who has spearheaded that effort. “If the owners believe they’re going to continue receiving subsidies, things will never change. We should not hesitate. They should not continue to receive funds.”
Nearly every council member has weighed in on the building. Councilman Wendell Young visited the meeting on March 18, listening to residents’ complaints in the odd twilight of the building’s community room.
“I think you have the entire council on your side,” he told them. “That doesn’t always happen. But none of this would have occurred if you hadn’t come to council. It actually takes nerve on your part to have been there. None of us, and I’m the second oldest member on City Council, have heard of people having to live in conditions like the ones you’re describing, and in a few cases, have seen.”
Young talked about how his brother and sister once lived in the building and shared memories of its former life as a luxury hotel.
“This was a very nice building,” he said. “To hear about what’s going on here is just appalling.” ©
This article appears in Mar 25-31, 2015.