Senior East Bay tenants’ battle: Cockroaches, water leaks, maintenance problems
Bonnie McCord, 83, of Oakley, would put on her rubber gloves every evening and spend hours meticulously scrubbing her apartment, hoping to get rid of the cockroaches that would scamper across her floors, in her cupboards, on her walls, and across her arms as she sat in her recliner.
“I was washing everything, mopping the floors before going to bed, wiping everything down with Clorox because their poop looks like pepper,” she explained. “You have to wipe it away because you can’t see it.”
The resilient pests, however, would be back the next morning in armies, infesting her Oakley apartment.
“They’re everywhere. They’re hiding in the furniture. “They’re in the appliances, including the refrigerator, stove, microwave, and dishwasher,” McCord explained. “Even the shower curtain.”
Exhausted, the retired widow said she finally threw in the towel about a month ago and agreed to temporarily stay with a friend downstairs while professional exterminators treated her home and she rested before continuing the roach battle, which has now lasted nearly a year.
McCord is just one of many seniors at the complex who have complained about cockroaches, some of whom spoke at this week’s council meeting. They do, however, have issues with leaking pipes, overflowing toilets, filthy stairwells and hallways, maintenance delays, and a lack of security in some areas of the 208-unit senior complex, which is part of a larger complex with hundreds of other apartments for families known as The Oaks.
McCord pays $1,116 for her tiny one-bedroom at The Commons at Oaks Grove, but she says she has fallen behind on rent due to medical bills and storage unit costs piling up as she has had to relocate many of her belongings. She promises to repay it all.
McCord said she repeatedly complained to management about the roaches, and they recently began professionally exterminating her apartment; however, when she returned to retrieve clothes last week, the locks had been changed — apparently because the apartment is still uninhabitable.
This newspaper made calls and sent emails to the local property manager’s office and the corporate office of WinnResidential, which manages all of The Oaks’ apartment buildings. A spokesman for the Corporation for Better Housing of Los Angeles, which is a limited managing partner, said the company was “disappointed this matter has become sensationalized by misinformation.”
“The obligation to provide safe and habitable living conditions for all of our residents is a commitment we take seriously,” said Erin Mathias in an email. “Because this is a legal matter, we will not be commenting any further on the misinformation of facts presented on social media or to others.”
Mathias provided no further explanation, and the nonprofit’s lawyers did not return repeated phone calls.
According to Danielle Navarro, Oakley assistant city manager, The Oaks apartment buildings are owned by various limited partnerships and all have scheduled maintenance, some of which is dictated by resident needs.
According to Navarro, the city’s code enforcement division received 20 complaints about The Oaks in the last year, three of which resulted in cases. According to McCord, the pest control company asked for an extra week last week to place traps with a fogger and gel in her apartment and planned to be on-site twice monthly to track the source of the roaches.
Oakley City Councilwoman Shannon Shaw recently paid a visit to the complex after community activist Mike Dupray posted a video about McCord’s cockroaches on Facebook.
Shaw, who manages senior housing in Pittsburg, said she noticed some issues and shared her knowledge and resources with tenants.
“The smell was something less than desirable the moment you walked in,” she said of Building 59. “The first thing I noticed was a complete lack of maintenance.”
The Corporation for Better Housing was awarded funding in 2006 to build the housing in stages through the federal Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program, which requires a certain number of units to be set aside for low-income households. The properties are inspected every three years for the first 15 years as part of the LIHTC program.
However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, some inspections were completed through file audits rather than on-site visits, according to Joe DeAnda, communications director at the California State Treasurer’s Office, which oversees such inspections. Building 59 was last inspected physically in 2019, followed by a file audit in 2022, and is now on a seven-year inspection cycle. The state will conduct a physical inspection soon because it is now aware of the problems, he said.
McCord’s nightmares began shortly after her husband died last year, she claims, citing two “floods” caused by an overflowing toilet and kitchen sink that caused problems she “never would have imagined.”
“After that, the cockroaches just came,” she explained.
Last year, McCord moved to a different apartment for a month while maintenance checked for leaks, repainted her apartment, replaced baseboards and a window, and installed new flooring.
According to McCord, they never discovered the source of the original water leak. But the roaches had tracked her down.
“I lived with the mess for a year,” she said, adding that she eventually packed, cleaned, and sterilized the majority of her belongings and rented out two storage units. Some furniture, such as her two infested recliners, will have to be discarded.
When a professional exterminator came to her apartment last year and again this month, McCord saw some hope, but when maintenance bombed her apartment to kill the roaches, she had to tell them to stop because it irritated her lungs.
Polly Seabury, 58, says she experienced similar issues in another building when pipes in an apartment above her burst, flooding her apartment ankle-deep.
“They didn’t even walk in my door, and I was telling them all my furniture was messed up,” the former tenant said of the management.
Micki Nicol, 75, who lives in a nearby senior building in the same complex, said roaches are “an ongoing problem,” exacerbated by untreated water leaks and nests.
“I have reams of emails that I sent to management,” she said of the maintenance issues.
The laundry room’s drains are constantly backing up, and the filthy garbage chute attracts roaches, according to Nicol.
“We’re not asking for anything out of the ordinary, nothing that should be considered normal management and care of these buildings,” she explained.
Nicol, on the other hand, stated that she is now trapped. “I can’t afford to move,” she admitted.
Jackie Rider considers herself fortunate to have lived in the same building as McCord but was later offered a different lower-cost apartment in the same complex.
Even though she’s been waiting for refrigerator handles since April, she says the building is better maintained than her previous one.
Rider recalled the pantry fly infestation and roaches in her old building’s community room, which is still visible today, where residents would gather for weekly coffee and crafts and occasional potlucks. “We were promised these things when we first moved in,” she explained. “We were supposed to have a gym, but we don’t have one.” We were supposed to have security, but the gate never works correctly.”
During her visit to the complex, Shaw also observed potential fire safety hazards such as a trash chute door that was so filthy that it was stuck open, non-functioning emergency backup lighting, and common-area issues such as missing screens, water damage on laundry room walls, and the absence of security cameras in one building despite the presence of cameras in others.
Shaw stated that all of the residents she visited complained about not being able to get things fixed.
The councilwoman has notified the city and others, and code enforcement will return to inspect the property before McCord moves back in.
“My idea is to get as many eyes on this as possible in order to get our seniors safe and decent housing,” she explained.
The lack of maintenance, according to Dupray, is even more difficult to swallow given the upcoming rent increases in October.
“They have no choice but to stay in the same place, but their rents are rising and nothing is being done,” he explained.
Meanwhile, McCord stated that she is hoping for a different, lower-cost apartment.
“I never imagined I’d be living like this,” she said.
