Life in a ‘Death Trap’: How Tenants Rose Up Against a Federally Funded Mega-Landlord

The separate disasters transpired roughly 180 miles away from one another, but they had one thing in common: both took place in buildings owned and managed by The Millennia Companies, an Ohio-based mega-landlord that holds a sprawling portfolio of federally subsidized affordable housing across 26 states. 

Friends, family, and neighbors of the deceased in both states were furious. According to legal complaints filed later on, tenants alerted Millennia about the gas leak in Mississippi but the company failed to fix it, and Arkansas tenants had complained to management about the smell of gas in the building just one day before the explosion. (The Arkansas Public Service Commission later investigated the site and said that it “cannot be determined that the explosion was caused by or associated with a natural gas leak.”)

To tenants, the deaths were the most drastic manifestations of the dangerous circumstances that have plagued Millennia tenants for years. That same year, hundreds of tenants at Forest Cove, a Millennia complex in Atlanta, Georgia, were forced to vacate the premises due to mold, rats, roaches, termites, snakes, rotted floors, and more. 

“Living in Forest Cove was a death trap,” 33-year-old Secoria Laney, who had to leave the apartment she lived in with her three children for almost a decade, told Motherboard.

In recent years, tenants at Millennia properties have begun to organize in hopes of improving their situation. For years, they have experienced leaking and caved-in ceilings, attempts to evict tenants with 10 days notice, and a lack of heat. Too often, they say, their requests for help have gone unanswered or been completely ignored. 

From Millennia’s perspective, the company inherited problems left by the buildings’ previous owners. After it purchased the distressed buildings “with the sole intention” of “transforming them,” the company invested tens of millions of dollars into them, but not before the deaths in Mississippi and Arkansas, according to Isys Caffey-Horne, a representative from the public relations and crisis management firm representing Millennia.

Yet tenants who spoke to Motherboard said that the problems they faced under the previous owner, the nonprofit Global Ministries Foundation, grew worse under Millennia. Building conditions further deteriorated, and management became less responsive and slower to make repairs, tenants said. (Motherboard left a voicemail with Global Ministries Foundation hoping to speak with a representative, but never heard back, and an email sent to the company’s email address bounced back.)

“Millennia has spent upwards of $50 million rehabilitating these communities alone, ensuring the residents have access to decent, safe, and sanitary housing, and the instances mentioned were all prior to comprehensive rehabilitations and due to years of neglect of the prior owner,” Caffey-Horne told Motherboard over email in response to a request for comment detailing tenants' allegations.

As of last November, Mary Lloyd, a tenant of Sunset Village, was still smelling what seemed like gas to her. Lloyd told Motherboard that she reported it to management, who told her the smell was “sewage.” 

Millennia told Motherboard that there was no gas leak in November, and any claims are "unfounded." Lloyd said that her trust in the company is so low that she's still concerned. 

“Lying and denying, that’s what I know them for,” Lloyd said.

“These people are not making it up,” said Sharon Brown, who has been advocating for Millennia tenants as part of the Millennia Resistance Campaign in her home state of Mississippi, as well as in Memphis, where she now lives. “When you have the same people having the same issues in Mississippi, Alabama, New York, Texas, Oklahoma, then it’s a problem.”

But, Brown added, “If you have a certain amount of money or stature, it don’t matter what you do to the poor.” 

Millennia should be different. Because the company receives federal subsidies to keep its rental properties affordable, Millennia falls under the regulatory purview of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD. Over the last decades, the government has decreased its reliance on traditional public housing, in which  it owns and manages buildings, in favor of a growing reliance on “Section 8” vouchers that can be used in the private market, forcing tenants to search for housing amid limited options and landlords who refuse to rent to them.

The government has another free-ish market solution that in theory should be more stable for tenants, and this is where companies like Millennia come in: private landlords own and operate buildings and receive federal subsidies to keep entire developments affordable for low-income tenants. Unlike traditional Section 8, the subsidies are tied to the building, not the tenants. Tenants don’t have to shop around for housing, but they are also at the whims of landlords who still can evict them, and owners must cobble together financing for building-wide rehabilitations. As of 2023, there were 1.2 million people living in this type of housing, a population comparable to the size of Dallas, according to HUD.

But these units are also decreasing in number, as landlords increasingly opt out of the program because it’s not profitable enough, and the aging housing stock further deteriorates, according to a 2018 HUD report.

If HUD does end a contract at developments like those Millennia owns, that subsidy is lost forever, because the federal government has stopped creating new project-based subsidies of this type. This is an undesirable outcome for tenants who still hope to live affordably in their neighborhoods.

But advocates say that the federal agency has other tools within its broad authority that could be better utilized when dealing with problematic landlords, including issuing fines, forcing the owner to replace management, and transferring subsidies to another property and owner. It took such actions against Global Ministries Foundation in 2016, when it put a court in charge of some of its properties and canceled subsidies for others. Global Ministries Foundation then sold its entire troubled Section 8 housing stock of hundreds of apartments, and HUD looked for a buyer that could assemble the needed capital to make repairs. That buyer was Millennia.

Since then, tenant organizations and housing advocates have come to believe that the agency has failed to hold Millennia accountable for failing to make those repairs, and often responded to complaints related to the company by rerouting them to regional offices, or worse. 

Bridgett Simmons, a staff attorney with National Housing Law Project, said tenants have reported conditions like mold, leaking roofs and infestations to HUD, only to have the federal agency redirect them to Millennia management instead of independently investigating. Other times, HUD has questioned the veracity of evidence provided by tenants, including photos, while taking Millennia at its word, she added.  

“HUD is failing to exercise its authority to require these owners to bring these properties back into compliance,” said Simmons.

As a result, many tenants have come to blame not just Millennia for the tragedies tenants have endured, but also HUD. “They didn't hold Millennia accountable for anything Millennia did,” Millennia tenant Laney said. “I feel like HUD was in Millennia’s pocket.” 

In particular, the deaths in Mississippi and Arkansas loom large in the minds of the company’s tenants. 

“Those deaths are on HUD as well,” said Brown, whose sister knew the Tate family. “If they had been doing what they’re supposed to be doing, that wouldn’t have happened.”

The ongoing fight to improve the lives of Millennia tenants illustrates how a crisis of oversight adds to the turmoil facing low-income housing across the country. As the federal government inks contracts with sprawling private landlords to house the poorest Americans, it has been accused of failing to hold those owners adequately accountable for hazardous and sometimes deadly conditions. 

Sarah Saadian, the senior vice president of public policy at the National Low-Income Housing Coalition, said that HUD’s inadequate oversight of  privately owned housing has long been an issue. 

In Saadian’s estimation, part of the reason is related to the lack of private-market affordable housing: If HUD either cancels a contract or pressures a landlord to do substantial rehabilitation, then it has to relocate tenants. To do that, HUD has to convert rent vouchers from a type that is tied to the apartment to one that the tenant can use anywhere. But there is little affordable housing for tenants to move to, and private landlords routinely discriminate against tenants with federal housing vouchers, making the process logistically complicated and burdensome.

HUD said it is trying to do more for tenants and recently expanded staffing to increase responsiveness to complaints, according to HUD Deputy Assistant Secretary for Multifamily Housing Ethan Handelman. 

“It is unacceptable for people to live in unsafe conditions that are detrimental to tenants' health,” Handelman told Motherboard over email.

In the case of Millennia, Handelman told Motherboard that HUD found the company mismanaged tenant security deposits and “taxpayer funds” to provide housing assistance, and the agency is now “demanding repayment of misallocated funds” and seeking financial penalties in court. 

Millennia told Motherboard that it “understands the significance of HUD’s concerns” but that it had been working with HUD since 1992 to preserve affordable housing. It said it had “no HUD findings or outstanding issues” when it first agreed to purchase the Global Ministries Foundation portfolio in 2017.

In recent decades, federal spending on housing assistance has decreased to just a fraction of what it once was, and Handelman implied the agency needs more money if it is to resolve some of the problems at properties where it has contracts. 

“HUD has requested additional funding from Congress to adequately address the long-standing need to improve conditions in HUD-assisted properties,” he said. 

But critics said the agency failed to adequately investigate Millennia’s alleged mismanagement as it took over the portfolio it inherited from Global Ministries Foundation. Merely temporarily suspending Millennia from signing new affordable housing contracts is not enough, they believe, because the company still has hundreds of existing contracts with HUD.

Forest Cove, which is privately owned and federally subsidized, has had substandard conditions for more than a decade, long before Millennia took over, the City of Atlanta said. But tenants said conditions got worse after Millennia took over.

Crystal Jones, a 38-year-old former Forest Cove resident, spent years struggling with broken appliances, rats, and a lack of heat. She put in requests for maintenance with Millennia, but when Jones checked on the status of her requests, she would find there was no record of them, she said. The situation became so dangerous that a social worker warned that her children would be removed from her care if she wasn’t able to move to a safer apartment, she said. 

Another former resident, Yolanda Tamplin, told Motherboard she and her children had to jump over broken stairs inside their apartment and that they had no working stove for at least three years. When it did work, rats would immediately come for the food if she walked away from it.

Secoria Laney said she also dealt with rats while living at Forest Cove. If she set a rat trap, she could usually catch two or three an hour, she said. More concerning to her, though, was her boarded-up windows. If there had been a fire, she would have had a hard time escaping.

When Millennia took over as the property manager of Forest Cove in 2017—it would not complete the purchase of the development outright until 2021—the company promised to do better than its predecessor, according to Tamplin. 

Millennia’s attorneys later said in a legal complaint that the company “did not intend on taking over management of the properties prior to closing on [financing] for each property,” but agreed to be a property manager at Forest Cove only because Global Ministries Foundation “walked off site.”

But when Tamplin started to call to request necessary repairs, Millennia failed to send anyone, she said. “They made all these promises and then it just got worse,” Tamplin said.  Millennia did not respond to specific questions about repair requests, but said that problems at Forest Cove were the result of actions by the city that made it hard for the company to secure financing. 

Tenants organized meetings with HUD asking for the organization to intervene, but the conversations did little to change the situation, said Foluke Nunn, an organizer with the American Friends Service Committee, a faith-based charity. 

“HUD was just kind of twiddling their thumbs,” Nunn said.

The situation became so untenable that a municipal court condemned Forest Cove in October 2021, six months after Millennia took over full ownership of the property, with the mayor promising residents would be relocated in early 2022; the state of Georgia subsequently denied Millennia’s applications for tax credits to make improvements. In its lawsuit, Millennia claims it only finalized the $38 million purchase in 2021 before having money for repairs because it wanted to relocate tenants as soon as possible and had secured the money to do so. HUD told Motherboard that it “quickly worked with the City of Atlanta to relocate residents and put an end to the dangerous conditions” at Forest Cove, including by offering federal vouchers to residents to help with relocation. (Millennia disputes this version of events. Caffey-Horne said the city of Atlanta’s “claims that it started the relocation process are belied by the facts”.) 

Tenants still living in Forest Cove were required to pay rent on the dilapidated apartments until February 2022, when some residents coordinated a rent strike and demanded relocation. 

When tenants arrived to give the company a demand letter, Millennia’s office refused to open the door, Nunn said. Instead, she said, Millennia called the police.  Millennia did not respond to a request for comment on this alleged incident.

In reaction to the city condemning Forest Cove, Millennia sued Atlanta, criticizing the city’s future plans for Forest Cove for not providing adequate Section 8 subsidies. The city countered, saying that it planned to file a class action lawsuit against the company to recover the $9.1 million in American Rescue Plan funds it spent relocating residents.

Caffey-Horne told Motherboard that Millennia’s plan had always been to temporarily relocate tenants and return them to Forest Cove after a $58 million renovation. Millennia’s lawyers similarly argued in a complaint that the company was “months, if not weeks, away from being able to relocate the Forest Cove residents” before the complex was condemned. 

But the renovation never occurred, and no one has been able to return to Forest Cove since. The development will be demolished within the next few months.

Last summer, HUD took the rare step of stopping subsidy payments to Millennia at Forest Cove, saying it would one day  transfer payments to another property that has yet to be chosen. The City of Atlanta hopes to eventually rebuild Forest Cove without Millennia’s involvement. In the meantime, the vacant apartments, still owned by Millennia, have caught fire at least four times since last October. 

In an email, Millennia put the responsibility for the failures of Forest Cove on the mayor’s office, in part because it pushed for the development to be condemned.

While relocated tenants who spoke to Motherboard said they’re glad to not be in Forest Cove, their advocates are concerned that some residents are being led to similarly distraught housing. In January, the National Housing Law Project, which advocates for Millennia tenants, sent a letter to HUD and the city of Atlanta criticizing the “rushed, chaotic and unlawful relocation of hundreds of families from their former home at Forest Cove,” which it said violated the Civil Rights Act by directing tenants to segregated, low-income neighborhoods. Many of the listed apartments offered to residents had “trash, rats, and roaches, starkly similar to their housing conditions at Forest Cove,” the nonprofit said.

In the letter, the National Housing Law Project also criticized the City of Atlanta and HUD for failing to guarantee a “right of return” to tenants displaced from Forest Cove when it is rebuilt as mixed-income housing, per the city’s plan. Nunn told Motherboard that the Thomasville Heights neighborhood is gentrifying, and residents will not be able to access the resources of the neighborhood they helped enrich. 

Publicly, Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens says he is determined to right the situation. A representative for Dickens’ office told Motherboard that the mayor “will not rest until every former Forest Cove resident that wishes to return to their community will be given the chance to do so.”

Laney said she’d like to see Forest Cove get up and running again one day if it is demolished and rebuilt. But, she added, “If it’s run by Millennia, I’d never go back.”  

After years of having individual requests for repairs ignored, tenants started to notice that similar problems surfaced again and again at Millennia properties. Hoping to find power in numbers, some tenants began to organize many of the 280 buildings across the country that make up Millennia’s HUD portfolio in an attempt to hold the company accountable. 

The resulting coalition called itself the Millennia Resistance Campaign, and has received assistance from other organizations such as the National Housing Law Project and the American Friends Service Committee. “We felt like it would be more effective to come together and speak with one voice, or at least as centralized a voice as possible,” said Nunn.

In the April 2022 letter, the coalition accused Millennia of chronically underinvesting in maintenance and said Millennia tenants made HUD aware of poor conditions as early as 2017. The coalition then demanded that HUD institute new management at Millennia, impose fines, ask a court to oversee rent payments at some of Millennia’s properties, and  stop the company from expanding its federally subsidized empire. 

On August 18, 2022, just weeks before the Mississippi gas leak deaths, Millennia CEO Frank Sinito responded by lashing out at the National Housing Law Project, which hosts Millennia Resistance Campaign materials on its website. In a letter, he accused the organization of conducting “a public campaign to spread inaccurate information” and saying that the campaign failed to mention all the repairs completed or underway at Millennia properties. 

Eight days later, HUD sent a response of its own. In a letter attributed to Handelman, HUD’s deputy assistant secretary of multifamily housing, HUD acknowledged that Millennia had fallen short of its obligations and said it had denied multiple requests from Millennia to acquire new properties. But HUD said it was hesitant to transfer properties to new ownership, as the tenants had requested, because the new owner would have to start from scratch putting together financing. Handelman suggested residents take up future complaints with regional and state offices rather than HUD’s central office, saying these lower offices could meet and speak with residents and were “familiar with local conditions and officials.”

But the tenants already knew that going through local offices would not yield results. Field offices heads often sent tenants to local contractors responsible for fielding complaints or Millennia staff, the campaign told Motherboard. Sending complaints to local branches has long been a recurring strategy among HUD officials, according to Kate Walz, associate director of litigation at National Housing Law Project. 

“No matter how many tenants die, no matter how many national class action lawsuits are filed, no matter how many Senate investigations open up or tenants organize nationally in this way, the common thread is ‘go back to the HUD field office, go talk to Millennia,’” Walz said.

The campaign had said as much in a follow-up letter sent to HUD days before the federal agency’s response. “Many of the tenants, organizers, and advocates trying to get relief and accountability report a constant ‘loop’ they are placed into,” the letter said.

In its statement to Motherboard, Millennia said that publishing an article about the problems within the company’s portfolio would be a “distraction from” the “much bigger issue” of cities “dismantling affordable housing in favor of gentrification.” Caffey-Horne, Millennia’s representative, said that Motherboard’s story would contribute to the “final chapters of Section 8 and affordable housing in America” and “the residents who will be left with few places to go will be the ones most impacted.”

But Millennia’s future in affordable housing is already precarious. In December, HUD told the nonprofit journalism outfit Atlanta Civic Circle that it had decided to temporarily prohibit Millennia from conducting any new business with the federal government, and that the agency is “taking steps” to bar the company and CEO Frank Sinito from all federal programs, including Section 8, for five years.

Brown said she wants to see Millennia get out of affordable housing for good—“I think there need to be criminal charges” related to the deaths, she said—but having someone even worse take over is a real risk. 

Technically, HUD must approve the purchaser of any Millennia property. But so far, the federal agency has taken a hands-off approach to the sale and indicated that it plans to preserve decision-making power at the regional offices, and tenants fear their concerns will continue to go on ignored, Simmons said.

Last fall, the residents were able to return to Sunset Village, where the Tates had died one year earlier. In an email, Millennia said that the apartments received a $12.8 million comprehensive rehabilitation that came out to $94,000 per unit. Millennia added that the development has an “extensive waitlist” and management is working to process applications and move-ins, although one tenant told Motherboard the complex has many vacancies because displaced tenants didn’t want to come back. 

Tenant Mary Lloyd said the company painted over mold rather than remediating it, and that the water only started working in her bathroom recently. “There are people in the building having major problems,” Lloyd said.