Mice, frozen pipes, flooded basements: Tenants in once-condemned Cranston complex are unionizing

CRANSTON − Melissa Potter opens the front door of her apartment at 1890 Broad St. and looks down at least 6 feet into a flooded trench that runs along the front of the building.

Potter and nine of the 17 other tenants in the building, condemned in 2021 and then reopened just on the first floor a year later, gathered in front of their once-green courtyard with representatives from the advocacy group ReclaimRI to say they are forming a tenants union to try to force owner Jeffrey Butler and his company Elmwood Realty to bargain on new leases and fix the property.

The apartment building was entirely shut down and its 39 families pushed out in July 2021 after a woman nearly fell through a second-floor walkway and city officials determined the building was uninhabitable, the Cranston Herald reported at the time.

Photos and video from WJAR show a pleasant courtyard with bushes, grass and other plantings. That has been replaced with caution tape, mud, ripped-up trees, the trench and a construction dumpster.

The second-story walkways have been removed, and many apartment doors stand open. The brick façade on most of the building has been removed, leaving behind a black-tinted cinderblock surface. One one side of the building, the yellow façade is still falling off.

Tenants say complaints go unaddressed

Tenant Audrey Gordon said she called repeatedly about the door being open in the apartment above hers, which allowed the pipes to freeze, which flooded her apartment.

"It flooded in my kitchen first, then in my living room, and instead of cutting it out and venting it to get all the wetness out of it, or just cutting it out in general, they just painted over it," Gordon said. "And so they still have the door open, and reasonably it could flood again."

Her daughter is hooked up to a feeding tube, so she had to roll her and the machine out of the way of the water. She enlisted her daughter's nurse to help bail water out of the apartment.

"It was a lot," she said. "It was like five buckets of water that we're dumping out."

Potter said they want the heating systems to be fixed, the major construction outside their doors to be finished and Butler to deal with the flooding.

They said they received no notice about construction on the site, or the massive trench in front of their front doors. The only emails they receive are admonishments not to throw household trash in the construction dumpster.

The site looks so dangerous that Cranston firefighters responding to calls have assumed everyone must be squatting, Potter said.

Tenants say state agencies placed them in bad situations

Eugene Vasquez, 21, who aged out of the Department of Children, Youth & Families' Voluntary Extension of Care Program program in February, said he was put at the apartment complex by a social worker who would not let him inspect the premises before signing a lease. The stated goal of the program is "(supporting) young people in becoming self-sufficient, independent and thriving adults."

Vasquez and his girlfriend are paying $1,150 for a studio apartment and had to repeatedly complain about gaping holes between a newly installed bathtub and the floor. Mice had been coming through the holes and into his apartment from the basement.

The gaps are now smaller, and he is unsure if mice will still get through. (Mice can squeeze through holes as small as a quarter of an inch, about as wide as a pencil).

Audrey Gordon said she and her children were placed at the complex through a state program after everyone was kicked out of the shelter she had been in because of mold.

"I've lost faith in the state," she said.

Building sold in December 2021

The building was sold by HPM Capital Partners to Butler's Spring Street Realty LLC in December 2021. City officials said they were having problems with HPM Capital Partners, and property manager Josh Hennessy, when the building first closed, according to WJAR.

Butler did not respond to requests for comment.

Tenants fear reprisals from landlord sued over retaliation at other property

All of the tenants who gathered last week said they are worried that Butler will retaliate against them. ReclaimRI organizer and State Rep. Cherie Cruz, D-Pawtucket, said, after they dropped off the notice at his office, one of the staff members there attempted to get everyone's names.

The Rhode Island chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Justice are suing Butler for retaliating against two tenants who are organizing with ReclaimRI at properties in Pawtucket and Warwick. Butler left voicemails threatening to evict the tenants, the ACLU says.

More: Their landlord threatened eviction when these tenants organized. Then, they won a victory in court.

With no framework to enable a union, what does it mean?

While renters have had a right to organize since 1986, it's been little more than just that: a right to organize.

The law has none of the framework of labor organizing, such as delineation of who adjudicates claims, who can be part of one, or the general rules of collective bargaining.

Rep. David Morales, D-Providence has introducedH7962, which would create a tenant union framework.

Cruz said the main leverage the renters have to bring Butler to the negotiating table is withholding rent. Under a law passed last session, the amount tenants can deduct from rent for repairs they make increased from $125 to $500.

Rent strikes are not novel in Rhode Island. In 1990, a federal court approved an agreement between the Providence Housing Authority and tenants at two of its properties, Hartford Park and Manton Heights, following a 34-month rent strike over bad conditions. A total of $600,000 in rent was accumulated in an escrow account, as researched by The Public's Radio.

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Reach reporter Wheeler Cowperthwaite at wcowperthwaite@providencejournal.com or follow him on Twitter @WheelerReporter.

This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Elmwood Realty tenants in Broad Street apartments unionize against landlord