Article Courtesy of The Tampa Bay Times
By Christopher O'Donnell
Published November 5 , 2016
TAMPA — Sulfurous fumes seep from the walls of Valentine
Hendrix's home, slowly attacking her appliances and light fixtures, her
lungs and sinuses.
It's been that way for almost nine years.
In 2008, Hendrix's family was one of 12 poor black families encouraged by
the Tampa Housing Authority to become first-time home buyers in east Tampa.
With down payment help from federal and city grants, they took out mortgages
for new homes that cost up to $175,000.
But the homes were
built with tainted Chinese drywall, the same material that
marred an estimated 100,000 U.S. homes built during last
decade's boom and bust. Within months, light fixtures and
wall sockets stopped working. Air-conditioning units kept
breaking down.
The toll was human, too, with residents complaining of
headaches, rashes, nosebleeds and breathing difficulties.
After the problems came to light, the developer and the
Housing Authority argued over who was responsible. They
still disagree today. Meanwhile, a class-action lawsuit
against the Chinese drywall manufacturer has stalled.
With no help in sight, eight of the 12 families eventually
walked away from their homes, their credit ratings ruined.
The rest remain, stuck making hefty mortgage payments on
virtually worthless homes, still fearing for their health
and future.
Hendrix, 51, is one of them, working two jobs to afford her
$800 monthly payment.
She rides the bus to Tampa General Hospital for an
eight-hour shift as a therapy rehab technician. Twice a
week, she scrambles across the bridge from Davis Islands to
a second job at an assisted living facility where her shift
doesn't end until 11 p.m.
All that hard work and eight years of payments have gotten
her to this:
She still owes $79,000
on her two-bedroom bungalow.
The home is valued at just $6,000.
But she won't give up on the place where her grandchildren
learned to walk and where she wants to bring her 90-year-old
mother to live out her days. |
|
Valentine Hendrix, 51, looks at a patched up hole in
the drywall of her bathroom on Oct. 12, 2016, where a towel rack
used to hang. Almost nine years ago, Hendrix, of Tampa, received a
first-time homeowners grant from the Tampa Housing Authority and
bought a house on E 31st Avenue. What she didn't know was that the
house was made with tainted Chinese drywall, which marred thousands
of homes built toward the end of the real estate boom. Months after
she moved in, Hendrix's electrical sockets and light fixtures broke,
and her A/C unit malfunctioned. Now, she works two jobs to pay her
roughly $800 a month mortgage. She still owes about $79,000 on the
house, but because of the drywall the house is valued at just
$6,000.
|
So Hendrix stays, living without air conditioning, without a working stove,
without hope that things will get better.
"Sometimes I cry. I got to work; I got to keep paying this mortgage, paying
these bills," she said. "This is I what I worked hard for. I'm not going to
walk away from my house."
• • •
The home in east Tampa's Belmont Heights neighborhood should have been a
second act for Hendrix, one made up of grandchildren and retirement plans
after raising four children as a single mother.
Most of her life was spent in Central Park Village, a blighted public
housing project within sight of the shiny skyscrapers of downtown Tampa.
She was already pregnant with her first child, Tara, when she graduated from
Robinson High School. She juggled motherhood and classes while studying for
a criminal justice degree at Hillsborough Community College. Then her
father died of cancer.
She left home but didn't go far — an apartment in the same housing project,
where she had three more children.
So she worked and raised her kids, imagining one day living in a home where
noise from adjoining apartments didn't intrude, a place with its own yard
and space to breathe.
Most of her kids were already grown before she got that chance through a
home ownership program offered by the Housing Authority. It was aimed at
public housing residents who, like her, had a history of steady employment.
She took the mandatory twice-weekly classes in finance and home maintenance
and qualified for a $52,500 grant from the city of Tampa and a $30,000
federal grant. To make up the rest of the $165,000 asking price for the home
on E 31st Avenue, she took out an $89,000 mortgage.
She owed more money than she could picture but, finally, the roof over her
head was her own. She said it felt special when she turned the key in the
door for the first time.
But she was opening the door to a real estate crash and a housing health
disaster, all wrapped into a home built by a company that had already gone
bankrupt.
• • •
In most regards, the Belmont Heights project was a success.
Funded through a $35 million federal Hope VI grant, it replaced College Hill
Homes and Ponce de Leon Courts, two aging and dilapidated public housing
complexes. Crime in the area fell and the project won awards from the
American Association of Architects, among others.
The inclusion of single-family homes amid more than 800 low-rent and Section
8 apartments was meant to give residents a stake in their community. The 12
homes were built on three different streets but close together. They had
small front porches and angular columns.
In all, almost $900,000 in tax dollars helped pay for the homes built with
toxic walls.
The Housing Authority hired Michaels Development Co. as master developer of
the project, leasing the land to the New Jersey company.
Michaels built the apartments but bid out construction of the single-family
homes to Banner Homes of Florida, a small family company operating out of an
office on Busch Boulevard.
Banner's main drywall supplier was Clearwater company Black Bear Gypsum,
said Dennis Mead, a Banner employee whose son David Mead owned the firm.
At the time, many suppliers had turned to Chinese manufacturers to keep up
with the huge demand created by the housing boom and two busy hurricane
seasons, said Will Spates, principal of Indoor Environmental Technologies, a
Clearwater company that has inspected hundreds of homes for toxic drywall.
No one was aware then of the sulfur emissions that blackened and corroded
copper coils and wiring and played havoc with smoke alarms.
As many as 30,000 Florida homes may have been affected, Spates said.
Banner Homes would likely have been found liable in court for using tainted
drywall, as happened to other home builders.
But that hope vanished for Hendrix and her neighbors in bizarre
circumstances.
In May 2007, Mead sold a controlling interest in his company to James
Harvey, a 64-year-old investor. Harvey installed his girlfriend, Martina
Hood, a 30-year-old Russian-born real estate agent, as company president and
fired the Meads.
Months later, Banner filed for bankruptcy, long before any of the residents
were aware of the toxic drywall. In the years that followed, both Harvey and
his girlfriend died, Hood after a leap from her 29th-floor SkyPoint condo in
downtown Tampa.
David Mead left the construction field to become a missionary pilot. He did
not return calls for comment.
"Banner Homes is rather an unpleasant memory for him the way it ended," said
his father, Dennis Mead.
Most of the eight abandoned homes have been snapped up at cut-rate prices by
developers who have rehabbed them and rented them out.
At least three of them are used as Section 8 housing. That means taxpayers
paid to build the homes and are now helping to pay the rent.
• • •
Tonia Grant was so excited to be moving into her own home in Belmont
Heights, she doodled designs on how she would lay out her furniture.
In 2008, with down payment assistance from the government, she took out an
$83,000 mortgage on a three-bedroom, two-bathroom home just four doors down
from Hendrix.
"I knew I would put my couch here, my TV here. I had it all drawn out," she
said. "That was the happiest packing I ever did in my life."
She first heard about the Chinese drywall from one of her neighbors a few
months after moving in. Then her air conditioning unit broke.
She began to suffer from headaches and would leave the windows open to get
fresh air. She had to pay for frequent repairs to the air conditioner
because of corrosion of its copper coils.
She lost her job as a data entry specialist for the city of Tampa because
she kept getting sick, she said. It was when one of her mirrors turned black
that she decided she had to leave her home.
"That's when I got scared," she said. "If it's doing this to the mirror,
turning it black inside, what is it doing to me and my kids?"
After five years of paying her mortgage, she let her home go into
foreclosure. Her credit rating went from good to terrible.
Now 45, Grant is trying to rebuild her life. She lives in an apartment in
Riverview and works at the Amazon warehouse in Ruskin.
"I thought that was my last chance to be a homeowner and it was gone, it was
completely gone, and all the work and money I had put into it to make it the
way I wanted was thrown out the window," she said.
Walking away from her home was equally traumatic for Diane Hicks, who works
as a cardiac monitor technician at Tampa General.
Inspectors found that 90 percent of her home was built with toxic drywall.
Her sinuses were often irritated and she had shortness of breath. Later, she
had an operation to have 3 inches of intestine removed. It was black, she
said.
After she moved out in 2010, the city of Tampa wrote to her saying she would
have to pay back the $55,000 in down payment assistance since she did not
stay there for at least five years.
She was able to persuade them to drop that, but moving out resulted in her
filing for bankruptcy and the repossession of her car, she said.
Now 61, she still wants to one day own a home.
It seems a distant dream.
"I ran into depression because of that house," Hicks said. "I still haven't
got my life back. I still haven't recovered."
• • •
While the public and private sector worked together on the Belmont Heights
project, neither wants to own the Chinese drywall problem.
Emails show that the Housing Authority knew about problems with the drywall
in 2011. That year, it wrote a letter to Michaels saying that as master
developer it should accept responsibility, a position chief operating
officer Leroy Moore maintains to this day.
"We didn't sell the homes. We didn't build the homes," Moore said. "If
there's more we could have done, I'd like someone to look at that and tell
us where."
But Michaels has refused to get involved, arguing that Banner Homes should
be liable. Michaels employs 1,800 people and manages 360 rental communities
nationwide.
"We are sympathetic to these homeowners," said Laura Zaner, vice president
of marketing. "We believe there is pending litigation against the
responsible parties — Banner Homes and the Chinese drywall provider.
Michaels has no involvement in this situation other than the initial land
development."
Officials at the city of Tampa, which contributed toward the down-payment
grants, heard about the drywall issue but said they were not contacted for
help.
Five years after the problem came to light, the Housing Authority this
summer decided to assist the four remaining families in applying for an
owner-occupier rehab grant that the city administers.
It was the first contact most of the families had with the authority for
several years and came only after local black activist Connie Burton
repeatedly raised the plight of the families at a Housing Authority board
meeting.
The grant is unlikely to be enough. The city has received almost 300
applications for the $1 million pot, and the maximum individual award is
$40,000.
The four families will get priority, officials said, but builders estimate
replacing drywall throughout a home could cost up to $70,000.
"I'm not going to speculate on whether we've done enough," said Thom
Snelling, city director of planning and development. "We're doing as much as
we're able to."
The residents' last hope for full compensation seems to lie in the courts.
They are among 4,000 plaintiffs in a case filed in a Louisiana federal court
against Taishan Gypsum Co., the state-owned Chinese drywall manufacturer.
A federal judge has ruled in the plaintiff's favor and banned the company
from working in the United States. But China's Ministry of Justice has
refused to recognize the court's jurisdiction over Chinese companies.
The legal stalemate could last for years, said Arnold Levin, a lawyer with
Levin Fishbein Sedran & Berman and lead counsel for the plaintiffs.
Burton, the activist, put most of the blame on the Housing Authority. It let
the residents down by not pursuing compensation from Michaels, she said.
She plans to keep pushing awareness of their plight until someone steps up
to help the last four families.
"These people believed in that process, and they were betrayed and led
astray," she said.
|