Residents of two local apartment complexes have turned to the city of Whitesboro for help in getting repairs made to their living spaces.
Whitesboro City Administrator Phil Harris said the city is working with PK Companies, the owners of Whitesboro Park Apartments,500 N 4th Street, and Brookhollow Apartments, 2000 Hwy. 82 W. to try to address the issues.
City Inspector Dalton Fallaw said there are serious issues at both apartment complexes and those will be addressed with the property owners, but the more serious issues are at Brookhollow Apartments.
Grayson County Appraisal District records show that Park Apartments were constructed in the 1970s and Brookhollow in the 1980s. Each property is valued at over $ 1 million. Fallaw said between the two complexes there are just under 100 units.
Both he and Harris said just what will happen with the units is the subject of a meeting with the owners scheduled for July 30.
“We provided the ownership with a list of the items that need to be fixed or need addressing,” Harris said.
He said the city plans to find out how and when the owners plan to address the problems and let the owners know the city’s expectations as far as a timeline for those repairs is concerned.
“We have a few hundred issues,” he said noting that some of them are things the city will expect to see addressed immediately while other things they take longer to address.
Though he has not spoken to the apartment representatives directly, Harris said he understands that they have a plan that has been communicated to the apartment residents.
His concern is that the plan might take too long to implement to address the pressing concerns. Fallow said those concerns at the Park complex include among other things, issues with windows that don’t work properly and infrastructure problems that appear to be due to settling of the property. At Brookhollow, he said, there are serious issues with staircases that are coming off the walls both inside and outside of the structure, roof leaks and other problems that could prevent residents from safely inhabiting the dwellings.
He said it is not only an issue of the residents being able to get out of the structures in an emergency, but also one of emergency personnel not being able to get to help those residents in a critical situation.
The city, Harris said, does not want to have to condemn the properties because there are residents being housed at both locations.
And finding replacement housing for those people will be hard.
Both apartment complexes are subsidized housing, and those types of units are in short supply in this area.
One tenant’s issues
Angela Thompson has lived at Park Apartments for several months and said she has been repeatedly promised that repairs would be made to her unit but the repairs that have been made, to things like a gaping hole in her ceiling, have been stop gap measures at best. She said despite having asked on a number of occasions, she has not received a copy of her lease. She also has had several other problems that the staff at the complex have not fixed to her satisfaction.
The kitchen cabinets are falling apart, Thompson’s daughter Samantha Murphy said. And there is a leak under the sink that “is possibly growing mold.” There is also a hole in her ceiling because the ceiling collapsed due to a water leak after a storm.
“The maintenance guy was coming over to fix it and just put a plastic bag over it instead of actually getting it fixed. They were supposed to have it fixed by the 18th (of June) and didn’t,” Murphy said. She said because of the age of the structures, she is concerned that some of the material floating around in her mother’s apartment might include asbestos.
Murphy said there are other issues with the complex that have resulted from there not being an onsite property manager.
Her mother has not, she said, withheld any rent to try to make the property owners address the problems with her unit. Murphy said they considered moving her mother to another complex, but the waiting list for subsidized housing in the area can be up to two years long. Her mother and other tenants are considering legal action if they can find an attorney willing to represent them if the situations are not addressed.
Both Harris and Fallaw said what the city does next will hinge greatly on what happens at their upcoming meeting with the property owners.
Going forward
Fallaw said the city does not currently have scheduled inspections for multi-family residential property once they have received their certification for occupancy.
“They have received fire inspections annually. We are working to get a license that all multi-family complexes would have to have and what that would come with is a yearly inspection, a random inspection of probably ten to 15 percent of the units,” he said.