Residents at Timber Ridge Apartments in east Houston said they’ve complained for months about roaches, rats, trash and crime without hearing a peep from their landlord. So on Tuesday, they took their fight to Houston City Council.
“We chose to live here willingly, but we didn’t know when we got here that there was nobody to protect us or address our concerns,” Jenny Robles, a resident at Timber Ridge Apartments, said in Spanish, addressing council members.
Robles was one of about a dozen Timber Ridge tenants who attended Tuesday’s City Council meeting with representatives from the Texas Organizing Project to voice their concerns about the substandard conditions they’ve been living with for months.
Rats eat through their food and roaches crawl through their walls, residents said. Gunshots fly through windows, and their mail room is in such disrepair that the U.S. Postal Service has stopped delivering the mail. One after the other, residents took turns addressing the council and pleading for action.
“Nothing is being done, and I’m not sure what makes this right,” said resident Ariane Hubbard.
Mayor Sylvester Turner said he would send a legal team this week to the apartments at 12200 Fleming Dr., and he might possibly visit himself to determine whether the city could take legal action against the property owners. He noted that the city health department has already issued citations about the tenants’ living conditions.
Turner said regardless of their rental costs, residents should not have to live in squalor.
“It doesn’t matter if you pay $50 a month, you’re not entitled to live in filth and substandard conditions,” Turner said.
One of residents’ key concerns is they don’t know how to register complaints because the property has been overseen by four management companies since January. Residents said they have no way to contact the property owners, a Dallas-based company registered as Timber Ridge Houston DE LLC.
The company could not be reached for comment. When the Houston Chronicle attempted to reach the leasing office by phone Tuesday afternoon, a woman who identified herself only as a temporary worker said that there were no managers on duty at the 704-unit complex.
The Houston Solid Waste Management Department inspected the property on July 19 and sent two notices of violation to the management office, which has not responded, according to city spokeswoman Mary Benton. The city will conduct another inspection on Wednesday, Benton said, “and continue our efforts to make contact with the management office or property management group.”
Residents said mounds of trash left on the property have been cleaned up since KPRC2 first reported the issues earlier this month. On Tuesday, though, a reporter could still see a gutter a dangling off of the roof and a pool filled with filthy, green water. Nearly every mailbox in the mailroom was falling off its hinges, held together by scotch tape or left gaping open.
“We’re paying good money and they don’t tell us anything,” said one 50-year-old woman, who declined to share her name for fear of retaliation.
“We’re living in the worst conditions a human being can live in,” she said.
Residents at other Houston apartment complexes are going through similar ordeals. At Cleme Manor in Fifth Ward, residents recently spoke out about power outages, pest infestations and sewer backups, forcing the property owners to bring in new management to the complex.
The situation led Pct. 1 Commissioner Rodney Ellis to delay funding for another of the company’s developments in Midtown until the Commissioners Court can pass tenant protections for county-funded properties.
sam.kelly@chron.com
