Tenants battling with apartment complex

AUSTIN (KXAN) - Some renters at an affordable housing unit in South Austin are making strong complaints tonight against their landlord.

One renter claims her air conditioning was intentionally shut off. Others claim there is a rodent problem. And they say the complaints are being ignored by the property managers.

Calls the the Tipline prompted KXAN to go to the Residences at Onion Creek Apartments at 810 E. Slaughter Lane in South Austin. It is a tax-credit, affordable housing apartment complex financed through the federal tax-credit program.

Some of the complaints we heard involved mold, maggots, mice and trash. The renters we spoke with said their complaints were ignored for months by the property managers.

“My master bedroom was completely flooded with water, and mold was growing inside the bathroom as well as in the bedroom,” said resident Danielle Bevan.

Added her husband, Joshua: “The outlet in the dining room is actually arching electricity.”

The Bevan's have a 2-year-old son, and Josh said that when he could actually see sparks coming out of the dining room outlet he was worried and repeatedly called the property managers for weeks.

Another claim came from a former manager of the complex. Stacey Conley said that another manager “physically walked into (a resident’s apartment) and turned off his AC when it’s 110 degrees outside.”

Conley said she was fired June 21 after just 10 weeks on the job. She is now facing eviction. She said the Residences at Onion Creek have gone through several managers in the past year.

Numerous calls for response to both the apartment complex and the company that owns it, Georgia-based NuRock, went unreturned. One call that was answered ended when a representative for the apartments hung up before addressing questions.

Renters said they took photos to document their complaints of mold, maggots, mice holes, rodent droppings and piled-up trash and called the office several times to let managers know of their complaints. They sent those pictures to KXAN.

Another renter, who did not want her identity disclosed, said it got unbearable when she had a newborn baby and no air conditioning.

“He seemed like he was running a fever," she said. "But he was just hot and he was miserable.

“He was sweating. He was crying. I was sweating. I was miserable.”

After staying with her parents, the renter finally checked into a hotel with her baby and came back to the office a few weeks later to see if the air conditioning was fixed.

But it was close to 5 p.m. and, she said the managers did not like it, telling her “you need to get out of the office or we’ll call the police.”

Another example, residents said, is evident at one of the buildings that runs parallel to Slaughter Lane.

It was more than a month ago that a truck lost control and crashed through a fence, slamming into the outside of an apartment with the family inside. More than a month later, KXAN took cameras back to the spot where the accident happened, and no repairs had been done.

The family was still living inside. Marc Sustaita lives in that apartment with his wife and five daughters.

“They even asked my wife to call our renters insurance to take care of that, which is rather ridiculous,” he said.

However, the day after KXAN cameras were there recording the damage, repairs began.

The Texas Tenant Advisor, www.texastenant.org/repairs, is an online resource that tells renters to notify their landlord in writing when there’s a problem. In cases where a repair is needed, the renter should expect to wait a reasonable amount of time for that repair to be addressed, which is usually about one week.

None of the renters at The Residences at Onion Creek interviewed for this report had documented their problems in writing. Instead, in each case, the renters called the complex management office and verbally registered their complaint with the understanding the office was writing up a work order.

ANuRock was financed to build the Residences at Onion Creek through investors in the Federal Tax-Credit Program. That means it was paid for by investors, who financed construction in exchange for tax-credits.

It is considered a highly successful program all across Texas. Tim Irvine, the director of the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs, said the statewide the program is “incredibly successful, probably the most successful affordable housing program on the planet."

The TDHCA oversees the tax-credit housing program in Texas. There are approximately 100 properties and more than 15,000 units in Central Texas alone.

Irvine said he could not comment specifically about the Residences at Onion Creek because his enforcement team had not seen the renters' claims. But, he added, allegations like these are rare in the tax-credit program.

“We do have enforcement tools that we do use, we have used them on limited occasions” he said, “We always go through an informal process first to try to sort things out but sometimes it is a situation where somebody