New group zeroes in on Detroit tenants' concerns
Leonard N. Fleming/ The Detroit News
Photos: William Colston
Detroit —The passion of Jerome McGowen as he spoke about publicly subsidized housing motivated more than 100 people to rise to their feet from the pews of St. Aloysius Church.
"Stand up if you've ever been ignored by the landlord in your building," the public housing activist said, as, one-by-one, people in the mostly elderly crowd shot up.
"Stand up if your building is not handicap-accessible. Stand up if you are ready for things to change."
Things are changing in Detroit public housing as the first United Tenants Council of Councils meeting convened Thursday at the stately downtown church. The group hopes to be a voice for tenants who receive housing assistance through the federal government's Section 8 program.
The new council is a citywide coalition of separate Section 8 housing tenant councils. Detroit has at least 87 Section 8 properties privately owned and publicly subsidized, the organization said.
Molly Sweeney, an organizer for Thursday's meeting who works with the Harriet Tubman Center, said the group wants to make sure "there are tenants who are holding the HUD (U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development) office accountable in the city of Detroit."
"It's also to give tenants the training and the tools to actually be able to know what policies are in place to protect them and what rights they have to speak out when their landlords are doing something that is wrong," she said.
The movement began in earnest two years ago after a bedbug epidemic in Section 8 buildings in the city. That prompted tenants to make lists of demands to building owners and the City Council this year to pass an ordinance requiring landlords to promptly remove bedbugs or face fines.
Thursday's meeting attracted city officials including Councilman Kwame Kenyatta and aides to City Council President Charles Pugh.
One goal of the meeting was to try to negotiate a visit to the city in 2012 from Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan.
Steven Leggat, chief of the project maintenance division of the city Buildings, Safety Engineering and Environmental Department, which administers and enforces maintenance of buildings, told the gathering his office takes every complaint seriously and will work closely with the new group.
"We respond quickly to all complaints, and we sort them out later. We don't care where they come from, we don't care who places them," Leggat said. "Property maintenance is a huge issue for the city and for the tenants. It's a job, but it's also kind of a mission."
