When Ruth Cloutier moved into the Bii Di Gain Dash Anwebi senior apartments a year and a half ago, she did not expect to be sitting on the corner of 24th and Bloomington in her walker, waving a sign in protest. She said repairs to her apartment aren't getting done because there's rarely anyone in the management office and no one picks up the phone when she calls the maintenance line.
Dozens of Cloutier's neighbors — most of whom are Native and Black seniors — demonstrated outside their homes last week for the second time in six months, saying there haven't been enough improvements since the last time they brought attention to deferred maintenance, broken appliances, heating problems and unresponsive management.
"More and more people have come forward and started to say, 'My heat doesn't work, my stove doesn't work, I didn't have heat this winter,'" said Regan Reeck, an organizer with HOME Line. The tenant advocacy organization provided translators to gather testimony from Somali-speaking residents, and found the most common complaint was people didn't know how to get ahold of management. Some have not been able to cook in their homes because of broken stoves and ovens, Reeck said.
Bii Di Gain, with its 47 one-bedroom apartments for seniors who pay 30% of their monthly income in rent, was constructed in 2012. It is co-owned by the affordable housing nonprofits American Indian Community Development Corporation (AICDC) and CommonBond Communities. The latter is responsible for general management.
Residents are hoping an upcoming change in management will mark a turning point. CommonBond said it will be divesting its role at Bii Di Gain by July 1, ceding full operational and legal control to AICDC. The boards of CommonBond and Bii Di Gain have approved the transfer, which will be complete pending approval from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Last year, CommonBond said Bii Di Gain was operating at an "unsustainable deficit." CEO Deidre Schmidt told the Legislature about the financial problems facing housing providers that serve deeply subsidized, low-income tenants after the compounding crises of the COVID years, which includes increased costs of security amid the Phillips community's ongoing challenges with homeless encampments.
CommonBond was allocated $11 million in one-time funding through the state's Stable Housing Organization Relief Program. In November, it renewed the rental license for Bii Di Gain, which had been expired for most of 2023, and brought in new maintenance subcontractor Marsden to address residents' complaints.
The housing relief program "provides financial support to non-profit owners of affordable housing so that they can continue to operate even as properties like Bii Di Gain do not generate sufficient rent revenue to cover costs like maintenance, staffing, debt services, etc.," CommonBond spokesperson Katie Selph said in a statement. "This relief has been instrumental in our ability to continue operations but has not restored CommonBond to our pre-pandemic financial stability."
More than 400 maintenance work orders have been completed at the Bii Di Gain apartments since November, including boiler checks, snow removal, appliance repairs and key replacements, Selph said.
Mike Goze, CEO of AICDC, said he does not yet have a contract with a new management company in place, and no date for when the property will change hands.
"CommonBond has the management contract and they need to respond to the things they are required to respond to, and I really don't have much I can do regarding that," he said. "I did have one of the workers for a tenant reach out to me through an email and mentioned a number of things that were amiss in her unit, but when I called CommonBond there were no work orders that were made for that unit. So that was kind of disheartening."
Goze said when AICDC assumes full ownership, he will have more control over what happens at Bii Di Gain, which will "clear up a lot of inconsistencies."
Residents said they were looking forward to having a new manager, expecting that whomever they get will be an improvement. Among their list of demands: the building needed to pay its gas bills on time so that residents won't receive shut-off warnings from CenterPoint Energy; reinstatement of onsite management; the creation of a system that tracks maintenance requests and informs residents when their requests have been received; and cleaning the HVAC system to address mold and dust.
"They may be a nonprofit developer but they have their tenants living in unlivable conditions," said Fadumo Mohamed, who attended the protest to translate for her grandmother, a Bii Di Gain resident. "She hasn't had lights in almost two months. She's not able to let people in. Her stove is working on and off. She calls maintenance but they don't have a person that manages the phone line. You call, you leave a message. You don't get a number. There's no tracking."
