Charita Goshay: Conditions at Victory Square Apartments qualify as criminal

The late, great New York Daily News columnist Jimmy Breslin said it best:

"The poor can never be made to suffer enough."

But you don't have to look to New York City to see powerless people suffering.

The Victory Square Apartments complex in Canton will do.

For months — years, really — tenants there endured dismal conditions, from infestations and black mold to exposed wires to nonfunctioning plumbing to downright dangerous structural conditions.

In mid-August, the Canton Building Department found 124 code violations in roughly 30 units, yet Victory Square inexplicably passed an inspection done by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development on Aug. 1.

The abuse only ended because fed-up tenants stopped being afraid of being evicted, organized themselves and contacted the Canton Repository's Kelli Weir, whose jaw-dropping report exposed the chronic problems.

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Toothless orders to fix and repair Victory Square have gone unheeded. Follow-up inspections by the city have found that little, if any, repairs have been done.

Alison Koher, owner of Awesome A's Cleaning Service, who was asked by the property manager in August to provide a cleaning quote for some of the vacant units in the complex, told Weir the conditions were some of the worst she's ever seen, adding that she thinks the complex is too far gone to be saved.

HUD's written response to explain how Victory Square passed its Aug. 1 inspection only makes sense if you're fluent in gobbledygook.

These days, if a dog was found in such conditions, the public would be up in arms and its owner would be slapped with charges. Complaints by Victory Square tenants, who were taken advantage of because it was what they could afford, were ignored for years.

That's because, in our culture, we view poverty as a moral failure.

Sometimes, life waylays us with detours not of our own making: Death, sickness, unemployment, family crises.

You can do everything right, and things still can go horribly wrong.

In other cases, poverty is indeed a result of bad choices. If you fail to acquire a marketable skill, or if you drop out of high school or have kids you really can't afford with an irresponsible partner, chances are you will experience a life of struggle and underemployment.

That said, even the poor have a right to safe and decent living conditions. Nothing justifies what has been found at Victory Square, an island of despair in a neighborhood already beset by loss and lack.

At the end of the day, Victory Square broke faith with its tenants, and with you, the taxpayer, for not fulfilling its contractual obligation to provide safe housing.

Meanwhile, the Rev. Don Ackerman and Gino Haynes of the nonprofit Canton for All People have been helping the tenants find new housing. HUD has been promising tenants for months that it will give them vouchers to move to safer housing, but tenants still are waiting.

As corporate landlords gobble up properties in communities like Pac-Man, cities have struggled to hold them accountable. Victory Square has been passed around like a chain letter. Built under HUD in 1975 to house people displaced by urban renewal — which is another whole story — Victory Square's latest owner is Troy Green, president of Green Victory Square in New York.

Green, by the way, has been permanently banned from owning or managing rental properties in New York state because of egregious and repeated violations.

The city of Canton, which has fined Green Victory Square more than $65,000 for continued failed inspections, has threatened to file a civil lawsuit to have a court-appointed receiver take over the property if the deficiencies aren't fixed by mid-February.

No one can fault the city for its due diligence, but frankly, Green needs to be criminally charged.

There's precedent. The city jailed a chronically negligent landlord in 2015.

Because HUD has ended its $30,000 monthly subsidy to Green Victory Square, and will no longer do business with the company in Canton, Green Victory Square really has little incentive to undertake the expensive needed repairs.

A spokeswoman for the company said they're in talks with the city to formulate a plan to move forward, but no more discussion needs to be had with a company that has been willful in its neglect of residents.

It can't be said too many times: A community is only as good as what it tolerates.

Charita M. Goshay is a Canton Repository staff writer and member of the editorial board. Reach her at 330-580-8313 or charita.goshay@cantonrep.com. On Twitter: @cgoshayREP

This article originally appeared on The Repository: Victory Square Apartments conditions border on criminal, Goshay writes