Carmella Holloway, (seated, center), is a plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit against the Housing Authority of the City of Milwaukee. (Photo by PrincessSafiya Byers)
By PrincessSafiya Byers
This story was originally published by Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service, where you can find other stories reporting on fifteen city neighborhoods in Milwaukee. Visit milwaukeenns.org.
Bedbugs are making life miserable for Carmella Holloway.
Holloway lives in College Court, 3334 W. Highland Blvd., a high-rise apartment complex managed by the Housing Authority of the City of Milwaukee, or HACM.
She says she has woken up to bedbugs crawling in her ear.
“I was scratching and scratching. I thought I had shingles until I went to the doctor, and they informed me that it was bedbug bites,” she said. “I am ashamed to go have people over and ashamed to go outside. How is this OK?”
Holloway is one of five College Court residents who filed a lawsuit in Milwaukee County Circuit Court against HACM last month.
‘Uninhabitable’ living conditions
The class-action suit was filed on behalf of the residents by attorney Michael Cerjak of the law office of Barton Cerjak for “uninhabitable” living conditions.
Residents say they are living with “persistent and rampant bedbugs.”
The Housing Authority’s College Court is a 251-unit, two-tower complex constructed in 1968. Its one-bedroom apartments are reserved exclusively for low-income individuals.
All plaintiffs in the lawsuit attest to seeing many bedbugs in their apartments, and many say they have been bitten repeatedly by them.
Stacy Ream, another plaintiff in the lawsuit, said the infestation creates a health and safety issue for tenants.
“I am paying to live in a home that is uninhabitable,” Ream said. “I pay my rent on time every month but stay at my mother’s house”
NNS reached out to Housing Authority officials who said they could not comment on ongoing litigation.
“They’ll tell us it would help if we’d throw away our furniture,” Holloway said. “But I can’t afford to replace all the furniture in my apartment and they don’t offer help”
The tenants seek rent abatement under Wisconsin Statute 704 This means residents would not be required to pay their full rent until the problem is fixed.
Cerjak said he believes it is a first-of-its-kind lawsuit in Milwaukee for a class to ask the agency to fix the problem rather than asking for a money judgment.
This lawsuit is the latest step in a campaign by Common Ground of Southeastern Wisconsin to improve conditions for residents of the city’s Housing Authority.
‘A systemic failure’
For years, residents have demanded an investigation and leadership change at the Housing Authority, alleging lost rent payments, poor management and maintenance problems.
As a result of their continuing demands that something be done, the City of Milwaukee began overseeing Housing Authority residents’ maintenance concerns.
The Common Council also approved $250,000 in funding last October to enable the Housing Authority to accelerate maintenance and repair work and to make other improvements to properties.
A list of several thousand work orders issued in the past five years, obtained by Common Ground via a records request, shows routine maintenance issues consistent with a large complex, but also more than 2,000 entries related to “pest control” and many explicit mentions of “roaches” and “bedbugs.”
”What we are asking (HACM head) Willie Hines to do is spray the entire building in a comprehensive way, not play whack-a-mole because whack-a-mole doesn’t work,” Common Ground organizer Kevin Solomon said at a news conference. “We didn’t want to sue. We were forced to sue.”
Pastor Will Davis of Invisible Reality Ministries and a member of Common Ground’s Strategy Team said, “The infestation is another systemic failure by Willie Hines.”
“Nothing at HACM will improve until Hines and senior leadership are replaced. HACM’s biggest problem is incompetent management — not money or systems,” Davis said. “Anyone protecting Hines is partly to blame for residents’ suffering.”