Landlord with Boston ties lashed for Katrina evictions
TERRYTOWN, La. -- Until the eviction notices began to arrive, Solomon Benjamin and Patti Joseph believed they had dodged the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina.
Their one-bedroom apartment in this New Orleans suburb, which suffered no flooding or widespread destruction, was unharmed in the storm. Its good condition was verified by a federal inspector who found Joseph ineligible for housing assistance because of ''insufficient damage." Their landlord took a different view, launching an aggressive three-month campaign to remove Benjamin, Joseph, and all remaining tenants from the complex of about 200 units. Former residents believe the ouster took place so the units can be renovated and rented to higher-paying tenants.
''They didn't have to put nobody out," said Benjamin, 65, a retired shipyard painter who had lived in the complex for two years. ''They just wanted us out."
''They" are Leonard J. Samia, one of Boston's largest and most notorious landlords, and LES Realty Trust, a Samia partnership that owns Louisburg Square Apartments, a sprawling cluster of low-income, two-story buildings on the west bank of the Mississippi River, 6 miles from the French Quarter.
According to former residents, housing advocates, and legal aid attorneys in Louisiana, Samia took advantage of the chaos that consumed New Orleans after the hurricane -- a lawless time when police, courts, and social service agencies were overwhelmed with emergencies -- to force out tenants. The tenants were among the city's most vulnerable residents, their lawyers said, lacking the money and know-how to fight the eviction pressure they faced.
Samia did not return calls for comment, and ultimately a Louisiana justice of the peace approved the evictions. One of Samia's lawyers said the evictions were necessary because of damage to the apartments.
In interviews with the Globe, former tenants, their lawyers, neighborhood residents, housing advocates, and community activists said it was a concerted, relentless eviction effort. In those interviews, stories emerged of attempts by the complex's managers to oust tenants despite a statewide eviction moratorium; of demolition crews gutting the apartments of tenants who had not yet returned after fleeing the hurricane; of units emptied of personal possessions by contractors, and of contractors and building employees who then cherry-picked valuables such as VCRs and televisions from trash heaps; of contractors now living in the same apartments that tenants were told were uninhabitable; of license plates removed from tenants' cars in the complex parking lot and then towed as abandoned vehicles; of access to mailboxes blocked by the demolition and locked laundry facilities; and of garbage and construction debris piled near doorways, attracting flies and vermin that created intolerable living conditions.
Similar complaints were also made in sworn statements by former tenants and in written accounts by antieviction volunteers who supported them. Those statements have been given to the Jefferson Parish sheriff's office, according to housing activists, who have asked the sheriff to investigate allegations by tenants that sheriff's officers had intimidated and threatened residents to pressure them to leave.
In a letter to the sheriff, the Louisiana attorney general, the US Attorney for the Eastern District of Louisiana, and the New Orleans office of the FBI, William P. Quigley, an attorney for the tenants and a law professor at Loyola University, also asked that those allegations be investigated.
In an interview, Quigley, who described the actions by building managers and sheriff's officers as ''outrageous" and ''flagrantly illegal," said he ''never did get any satisfactory response" to his letter, but said it caused the sheriff's officers to ''back off a fair amount."
''In a situation where horrible landlords are a dime a dozen, the owner of the Louisburg Square Apartments stands head and shoulders above everybody else in the worst landlord category," said Quigley, who directs Loyola's law clinic and poverty law center.
Colonel John Fortunato, a spokesman for the sheriff's office, said he would not comment on intimidation allegations without the names of specific officers. When a reporter called back with officers' names and car numbers, as documented by tenants, Fortunato did not return calls. Neither did another spokesman, Colonel Robert Garner.
In Boston, Samia Cos. is infamous for poor maintenance, safety violations, sharp rent increases, and its refusal to negotiate with tenant unions at many of its estimated 3,000 rental units statewide. In the past five years, Samia has been a defendant in 20 criminal cases in Boston Housing Court and has been cited for more than 100 code violations by the city's Inspectional Services Department. Complaints about the properties range from overflowing trash and rodent infestation to uncertified fire escapes and unmaintained smoke detectors.
The Louisburg evictions have sparked protests at the Terrytown complex. Louisiana housing advocates contacted their Boston counterparts, which spurred a rally at Fordham Court, a Samia-owned apartment building in Jamaica Plain.
At the rally last month, representatives from the Boston Tenant Coalition, the Allston Brighton Community Development Corporation, and City Life/Vida Urbana, a Jamaica Plain group, demanded that Samia replace Louisburg tenants' personal items and allow them to return with no increase in rent. A delegation of housing activists, joined by Boston City Councilor Felix D. Arroyo, visited Samia's office to make the same request but were unable to meet with him, an Arroyo spokeswoman said.
The Louisburg evictions also prompted Mayor Thomas M. Menino to write a letter last month to Samia urging him to allow the tenants to return at pre-Katrina rents. ''It would be wrong for anyone to use this disaster as an opportunity to increase profits on the backs of devastated, vulnerable families," Menino wrote in the letter.
Samia did not return several calls for comment and was not available at his Brighton office last week. A woman who answered the door at Samia's house -- a six-bedroom mansion perched on a one-acre wooded lot with a gated driveway, high stone fence, security cameras, and a statue of a large camel in Lexington's wealthy, historic Meriam Hill neighborhood -- said ''no comment" and slammed the door.
Robert Finnegan, a lawyer for Samia, said in a telephone interview that the Louisburg Square evictions were legal.
''There are some pretty explicit court documents set forth in New Orleans," Finnegan said, ''and all actions taken by my client are consistent with those." Finnegan also maintained that the complex was uninhabitable. ''The roofs were all blown off. And once the roofs are blown off, all the possessions are gone," he said. ''The number one factor is mold. You'd be jailed in Massachusetts if you permitted people to inhabit some units down there that are just laden in mold."
Five months after Katrina pummeled New Orleans, flooding vast swaths of the city, it is difficult to tell what damage the Louisburg complex incurred because, former tenants and neighborhood residents say, a contracting company began gutting many of the units soon after the hurricane hit. They recall that, in scattered areas after the storm, trees were downed, windows were broken and roofs were damaged, but they said many units were intact and unharmed.
Soleil Rodrigue, an antieviction volunteer who assisted the Louisburg tenants, said she visited a half-dozen units in November and ''none of the apartments I went into had any storm damage whatsoever." Some units were unlivable because high winds had destroyed parts of their walls or roofs, she said. But she firmly rejected assertions that the complex was uninhabitable.
''What was so sad about the situation is that these folks had returned after Katrina to see what was wrong with their property and were happy that it hadn't been damaged," said Bernadette D'Souza, a lawyer with New Orleans Legal Assistance who helped the Louisburg tenants defeat one of the eviction attempts.
The Louisburg complex occupies an entire block in a dense residential neighborhood, and is faced on two sides by ranch-style single-family homes. On its other two sides are apartment buildings that are similarly modest and low-slung. A one-bedroom unit rented for about $400 a month, and legal aid lawyers said the complex served primarily low-income tenants, including the elderly, disabled, unemployed, single parents, recent immigrants, and people working menial jobs.
Earlier this month, the complex was surrounded by a chain link fence and posted with ''No trespassing" signs. The interiors of many units were visible through broken windows and missing doors, and many had been stripped to the studs. The grounds were cluttered with garbage, including discarded furniture, electronics, and appliances.
Constance Pendergrass, who has lived in a house across from Louisburg for 15 years, said the complex had long been a troublesome neighbor. She said it was a source of frequent noise, drug-dealing, and several homicides.
Shortly after the hurricane, Pendergrass said, contractors arrived at the complex and ''just started throwing people's stuff out the windows -- dressers, couches, mattresses -- along with refrigerators and stoves and wallboard. Everything. But if they wanted to keep things, they didn't do that. . . . They put it on the ground in front of the apartments, went through it, got everything out they wanted, and then came with a little bulldozer with teeth on it, crushed it all up and put it on the street. That was terrible."
Gloria Coleman White, 39, a nursing assistant and security guard who was recently hired as a
According to the Jefferson Parish Code Enforcement office, a complaint was received in October that major renovations were taking place at the complex without a permit, but the office has been too overwhelmed with work to investigate.
At the complex, a man who identified himself only as ''Joe" and said he was a supervisor for BMCI Contracting, the Terrytown company involved in the demolition, referred all questions to building management. A call to BMCI's office was not returned, and neither were calls to Lisa Bourgeois and Sheila Davenport, the building's managers.
Tenants and their lawyers say it was Bourgeois and Davenport who first tried to oust the tenants in late September, when a statewide eviction moratorium was in effect, by ordering them to vacate their units. Some tenants left, but some stayed.
When the moratorium ended in late October, several remaining tenants found tacked on their doors eviction notices for nonpayment of rent, even though management had refused to accept their payments, according to tenants and their lawyers. That eviction effort was defeated by legal services lawyers.
Another eviction attempt soon followed and was approved by the justice of the peace. The given reason for the evictions was only that ''owner requests possession of property."
''Maybe there were apartments that weren't completely damaged or that could possibly be livable, but how do you work around that or have somebody living in a place where the whole thing is basically under construction?" Vernon J. Wilty III, the justice of the peace who approved the evictions, said in an interview. ''It becomes a liability for people working on it and a hazard for people living there."
By the time the actual evictions took place in December, fewer than a dozen tenants remained. The rest had steadily left over the previous three months.
''By that time, there was only a handful of people left who were willing to put up with the harassment, the deteriorating conditions, and the clear pushing of people out," Quigley said.
Quigley, former tenants, and other housing lawyers believe the apartments are being renovated so that they can be rented at higher rates. They note that the large-scale loss of homes and apartments in southern Louisiana, where more than 200,000 houses were destroyed by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, has created a highly competitive housing market. It is also a newly lucrative market; realtors say many apartments in the city now rent at double or triple their pre-hurricane rents.
A few former Louisburg tenants, including Benjamin and Joseph, are now living at an apartment complex called Faith Place across the street from the Louisburg complex. That means they can watch daily as contractors live in some of the same apartments they were told were uninhabitable. At least one of those contractors, who is living with his wife and daughter in a seemingly pristine first-floor unit with no apparent damage, talked to a Globe reporter on a weekday evening earlier this month. His wife roused him from bed so he could come to the door to speak.
As a television played in the background, the contractor, Tommy Hebert, said he found the apartment through ''acquaintances" and is renting it temporarily, although he said he did not know how much rent he paid or to whom he paid it. His wife, in a brief conversation, said he is helping renovate the Louisburg complex. But Hebert was vague when asked what work he is doing, describing himself as a ''freelancer" and ''scavenger" working at several sites in the area.
Bertha Dugas, 44, a heavyset housecleaner, said she had lived at Louisburg since 2003. Dugas is the leader of Louisburg Square Tenants Association, a small tenants rights group formed after the hurricane, and because of that role she has dubbed herself ''the white [Martin] Luther King."
Dugas has also moved to Faith Place, as has Joseph, 47, a chain smoker who said she is disabled and unable to work because of a heart condition. In a plastic bag, Joseph stores the numerous eviction notices, court orders, and federal documents she has accumulated since the storm. With loud soul music playing, she showed a reporter those documents, including a Nov. 28 rejection by the Federal Emergency Management Agency of her request for housing assistance. The form, which reports her annual household income as $6,912, indicates that she is ''ineligible" because a FEMA inspector determined that her apartment had ''insufficient damage." Another form, dated three days later, orders her to appear at an eviction hearing.
Other former Louisburg tenants have found more makeshift housing.
Jamyra Walters, 22 and pregnant, lived at Louisburg with her 3-year-old son and fled to Jacksonville, Fla., where her boyfriend worked, when Katrina made landfall. She said she returned to New Orleans the day before Thanksgiving to find a moldy refrigerator and broken windows, but an otherwise undamaged apartment.
Still, she said in a phone interview, she was told by building management to vacate the unit, so she moved in with her mother in Gretna, La., and later to a cabin at a nearby state park, where she now lives with her boyfriend's mother.
''Where were people supposed to go," she said, ''especially if our home wasn't damaged?"
