Around 1 a.m. on June 3, as Yadira Villanueva and her family slept, the ceiling in their one-bedroom apartment collapsed. The 40-year-old mother bolted upright. She could smell the soaked insulation and chalky Sheetrock that had walloped her from above. The air was thick with dust.
Villanueva turned to her 10-year-old son, with whom she shared the bed. The boy was shaking.
“Help me! Help me!” she told him. Trembling and crying, mother and son frantically lifted the debris that had buried the second bed, where Villanueva’s 21-year-old daughter and 2-year-old granddaughter had been sleeping.
“Oh my God, it killed her,” Villanueva cried, before her daughter came to. They found the little girl safe under layers of insulation and drywall.
They pulled themselves out of the mess and went to the living room. Too scared to sleep, they waited up until the Kendall Villas front office opened at 9 a.m.
The Kendall Villas are not luxury apartments, but they aren’t exactly affordable housing either. Villanueva’s monthly rent added up to $1,318, an amount that was tough for her and her daughter, both housekeepers, and a family friend to cobble together.
For that amount, you might at least expect the ceiling to stay attached to the joists. But that’s not how lower-cost housing works these days in Dallas despite repeated promises from the city to hold landlords accountable for substandard conditions.
Kendall Villas represents a broader problem for the city. Despite overhauling its rules for landlords in 2016 and endless paeans to the importance of equity, City Hall still hasn’t figured out how to hold the owners of large apartment complexes accountable for repeated code violations that make life miserable for people like Villanueva and her family.
This isn’t the only complex in town charging four-digit rents for one-bedrooms with plumbing leaks and peeling floors. Why are Dallas residents living in these conditions when they are paying $1,100, $1,200 or even $1,300 a month for a one-bedroom, at or near the limit of what they can afford?
For a long time, there was a sort of wink, wink, nudge, nudge arrangement around housing like this. Don’t go too hard on us on code and we will keep the rents low was a sort of unspoken arrangement for generations. The underlying threat was that if the city pushed too hard, there wouldn’t be any affordable housing at all.
From what we have witnessed, the city has held up its end of the deal. But the rents didn’t stay low. Now there are many families like Villanueva’s, crammed into small apartments to share ever-rising costs while living in ever-deteriorating conditions.
I began covering City Hall as a member of this paper’s breaking news team in 2016, the same year the City Council revised its housing standards. Writing about the housing struggles of Bachman Lake residents has become a rite of passage for local government reporters like me. No one was naive enough to think stricter rules were going to prevent code violations, but some of us were optimistic that the city would crack down on habitual rule breakers and that more people would get a better home for their hard-earned pay.
It’s been eight years. City managers and councils have come and gone, but the plight of low-income tenants in Dallas remains a regulatory failure you can count on.
Leaking sewage, moldy vents
Dallas code compliance workers weren’t warned about the cracks that Villanueva said had formed around the bedroom light fixture a few weeks before the ceiling collapsed. She said her family complained to the front office, not the city. But city staffers were aware that many of Villanueva’s neighbors had concerns. A code compliance supervisor had talked to residents in April at the behest of Dallas Area Interfaith. The nonprofit said residents relayed stories about raw sewage leaking onto walkways, electric stoves sparking and mold in bathrooms. Based on their photos and video, and what I saw in person, I believe them.
DAI met again with city officials in May. The concerns persisted into June, when DAI hosted another meeting with city workers at Kendall Villas. A code compliance officer surveyed Villanueva’s collapsed ceiling, according to DAI representatives who were there.
That same day, city records show, a resident in a different Kendall Villas apartment logged a complaint with 311.
“The roof in the bathroom collapsed,” reads the complaint. “I called 311 2 weeks ago and nothing happened, call me in Spanish, I need update.”
DAI member and Kendall Villas resident Yazbeth Esquivel, 35, helped organize neighbors who had concerns. A handful of complaints trickled into 311 in May, and more than 30 came into the system at once in June. Many residents were vague, listing things like “tub,” “smoke detector” or “electricity” as problems. Others reported “living room ceiling is falling,” “roof has a hole,” “mold in air ducts” and “water gets in through the chimney.” A few of them included pictures.
Despite all this — the recurring requests for help, the obvious state of disrepair in some of the units, the litany of confirmed code violations — Kendall Villas looks fine on paper. It passed its most recent city inspection this year with a score of 80. In the 2½ years that Freshwater Group has owned the 97-unit apartment complex, the New York private equity firm has received a single fine: $686 this month for leaving residents without hot water for days.
I spoke with Darrel Bencomo, a regional manager for Freshwater Group based in Florida. He pointed fingers at everyone else. The previous owners. Acts of nature. The tenants and their children.
“I’m human, and I wouldn’t like anybody living in bad conditions,” he said. “We do get to our maintenance requests. But they have to report it in order for us to know. We don’t go door to door checking, do you have a problem?”
At least Bencomo took my call. I contacted the city’s media office for an interview with the director of code compliance, Christopher Christian, or a deputy. Instead I received a one-page statement telling me that the owners of Kendall Villas had been notified about 32 code violations since they took over and that they had remediated all of them. The city had investigated a “reported biological growth” resulting from “a roof leak associated with extreme storms,” but that, too, had been fixed. I was told to attribute this statement to the faceless “City of Dallas.”
Meanwhile, Esquivel, the tenant who organized her neighbors and advocated on their behalf, is getting ready to go to court. Freshwater Group told her last month that it wouldn’t renew her family’s lease even though the company had said in a notice dated in May that it would, letters show. Stuart Campbell, an attorney with the Dallas Eviction Advocacy Center who represents Esquivel, said the landlord is retaliating. Attorneys plan to file a restraining order against Freshwater Group.
Bencomo said that Freshwater Group does not retaliate against tenants for complaining to the city.
When remediated isn’t fixed
The city’s latest graded inspection of the property identified 21 violations in January. Freshwater Group was given until late February to fix potholes in the parking lot, repair the swimming pool pumps and replace sewer cleanout caps, among other things. The city told me that all these problems were remediated.
But how quickly?
The pool was photographed with green stagnant water and trash in May. Two months later, when I looked at it, it was still not working. There was standing water again when I dropped by on Thursday.
Sewer cleanouts were covered with plywood when I first visited Kendall Villas in June. New cleanout caps had been installed by the time I returned in July, shortly after Dallas Area Interfaith officials met with city staff again.
A crater in the parking lot was still there when I drove by on Aug. 6. The hole was finally patched up when I stopped by Thursday.
It all raises the question, what’s the point of the city’s deadlines? Because in all of these cases, “remediation” due dates appeared worthless.
Residents say code workers mean well. Their frustration is not with a single person or entity. It’s with a landlord that they say ignores them and a city bureaucracy that lets it happen.
Another Kendall Villas resident, Jenny Arce, told me water began leaking from the ceiling over the bathtub in her first-floor apartment in the spring. She said she complained to the front office, and a maintenance worker cut a hole in the drywall. But neither the leak nor the ceiling was repaired then. When Arce’s neighbors upstairs used their shower, the water would drip down and splash in her tub.
Records show Arce filed 311 complaints twice in June. I saw the hole in her ceiling myself that month. By that point, the leak had been there for months, she told me. It was repaired in July.
A big part of the 2016 reforms was a requirement that landlords provide the phone number of a person who could be reached 24 hours a day in case of emergency. But tenants said the property managers are unreachable after hours.
A resident recalled that police had been unable to contact the landlord during a welfare check on a Saturday in June 2022. Firefighters disabled an apartment door and found a tenant dead of natural causes. The resident said she gave the officers the contact information that Freshwater Group had provided tenants — a Dallas phone number and a New York phone number. A Dallas Fire-Rescue incident report confirmed her account that first responders were trying to reach the landlord hours after arriving at the apartments.
The blame game
Bencomo, the regional manager for Freshwater Group, attributed the collapse of Villanueva’s bedroom ceiling to a storm.
He said most complaints relate to issues dating back to the previous owners.
Under the former landlord, Kendall Villas passed a city inspection with a score of 100. Longtime residents said there were recurring maintenance issues then, too, but that the property manager responded quickly.
As for the disabled swimming pool, Bencomo said it’s under repair. He told me that tenants’ unattended children were ripping the emergency phone off the wall, stealing life preservers and throwing rocks and bottles into the pool. He conceded some of the damage may have been caused by outsiders.
The parking lot gates don’t close anymore, though they did under the previous landlord, according to tenants. The pool was working then.
Bencomo disputed that residents like Villanueva had complained to the landlord about problems in their apartments. He said a lot of the 311 complaints had never been reported to the landlord’s office.
“At the end of the day it’s going to be my word, it’s going to be their word, and then there’s the truth,” he said.
I’ll believe my own eyes, and I saw holes in residents’ apartments, a pit in the parking lot and the stagnant pool.
You have to wonder what would become of the residents of Kendall Villas without advocates like Dallas Area Interfaith pressing the city on their behalf.
The city told me it issues fines when landlords make an “insufficient effort” to fix violations or blow deadlines without just cause. There is such a thing as a “habitual nuisance property” designation for places with three or more code citations within the span of a year. Kendall Villas doesn’t qualify, the city says, though it will continue to monitor the property.
That’s cold comfort for Villanueva, a recent arrival from Mexico. She gave up on Kendall Villas after the landlord charged her $1,650 a month for a larger apartment following the ceiling collapse.
Now she pays $1,020 a month at a complex nearby. It’s a smaller unit in a building surrounded by pavement, and the family still shares a bedroom. There’s no leafy courtyard between buildings like the one at Kendall Villas, where her son liked to play with other kids.
But here, she notices maintenance workers mowing the grass and fumigating. She spots the front office manager walking the property.
There are no cracks on her ceiling or leaks in her bathroom. Here, she can sleep at night.
Julieta Chiquillo is deputy editorial page editor for The Dallas Morning News.
We welcome your thoughts in a letter to the editor. See the guidelines and submit your letter here. If you have problems with the form, you can submit via email at letters@dallasnews.com
