Elderly, disabled, housing agency tenants have no AC. They demand city takes action.

Like many residents in Indianapolis Housing Agency buildings, Regina Anderson, 63, woke up drenched in sweat Monday night. The air conditioning in her Millikan on Mass apartment had been broken since at least the end of May. Now, the city was in the grip of a dangerous heat wave that has swept into 100-degree temperatures.

Anderson suffers from a mast cell disorder, which means her body cannot easily regulate heat. High temperatures trigger vomiting and diarrhea, which has made living in the building without working AC during these hot days a nightmare.

Monday night she was so hot that she vomited.

“They are treating us like the trash we pick up on the sidewalk,” she told IndyStar Tuesday.

A blood cancer survivor, she pays $487 rent a month from her social security disability check.

Many apartments at Barton Tower and Millikan on Mass, two of IHA’s largest properties, had no working air conditioning this week, according to eight tenants interviewed by IndyStar.

Barton Tower tenant association president Michael Booth said the whole building lost air conditioning overnight. Some tenants had already been dealing with problems with their individual air conditioning units for the past few months.

But Marcia Lewis, IHA interim executive director, told IndyStar that only some units lost air conditioning. She said the maintenance staff heard about it late Monday and came Tuesday morning to fix it.

The staff “found the shut off valve for the water for the chillers turned off and the water low. They were surprised because it should not have been like that," Lewis said.

Vice President of the Barton Tower tenant association, Nina Himes, said there have been only about five days in May and June when the air conditioning in her unit worked, and even then, it would sometimes shut off unexpectedly.

The air conditioning issue is the latest crisis in a long history of mismanagement by an agency that thousands of low-income, disabled, and elderly residents depend on for housing. IndyStar published a story about the deep-rooted financial mistakes the agency has made since at least 2019.

More: As Indy housing agency faces financial crisis, residents suffer the brunt of its neglect.

The agency is down to four maintenance staff for 1,600 units, Lewis said at the agency’s board of commissioners public meeting Tuesday. The agency should have at least one maintenance staff for every 75 units, Lewis previously told IndyStar, creating a shortage of 17 staff.

The agency received more than 40 calls for broken air conditioning last week, Lewis said.

Residents are desperate for answers and frustrated by what they see as “lies” and false promises from the agency and its maintenance staff.

Lewis did not respond to IndyStar questions about the root of the air conditioning problems nor did she provide a clear timeline for when the maintenance problems would be resolved.

Anderson said that after her air conditioning went out, she reported the problem and the Millikan on Mass property manager told her maintenance would come at 3.30pm Monday. She waited four hours for them to show. They never did.

“This ain’t fair, and I’m not a woman who complains,” Anderson said, tears welling in her eyes.

Residents desperate for answers press mayor, city, to intervene

More than 50 residents showed up at the agency’s public meeting Tuesday to demand answers and accountability.

“I don’t think IHA knows what they are doing,” Michael Booth, the president of the Barton Tower tenants association, told IndyStar. “There are people on oxygen here, people with heart problems. This is not right....What if someone dies in here?"

Booth said he is trying to turn his own apartment into a cooling center, setting up fans, in the absence of any emergency maintenance response.

Booth said he thinks the mayor is responsible for coming up with another solution.

The mayor appoints the agency's executive director as well as five members of the board of commissioners, and the city-county council approves it.

The situation is so bad that the Fair Housing Center of Central Indiana wrote an open letter to the mayor on June 13, signed by 24 community organizations.

Among other demands, the letter said the city should immediately begin to recruit a new IHA director to provide leadership stability and assist IHA residents in obtaining funds to organize a tenant union, if so desired by residents.

When asked Tuesday by IndyStar about the problems at the housing agency properties and for a response to the letter, Mayor Joe Hogsett wrote in an emailed statement to IndyStar, "The decades-long, systemic issues plaguing the Indianapolis Housing Agency did not appear overnight, and unfortunately, they will not be remedied overnight—but the conditions that far too many residents face are simply unacceptable."

Hogsett said that this week he will ask the Metropolitan Development Commission to support a fiscal request that will allow the agency to jumpstart efforts to address the backlog of maintenance requests and public health concerns.

New agency executive director searches for solutions

Residents are upset and frustrated with how the agency has been managed for years, and so is its interim executive director, Lewis. She stepped up in January after her predecessor, John Hall, resigned two months short of his contract ending. Her task has been nothing short of crisis management.

“Please please please forgive me,” Lewis said at Tuesday’s public meeting. “Because I said this to the staff, I’ve said this before. I wish I’d been here. I don't think I’m God’s gift to America….but I would have done better than this.”

“I can’t fix what has been a mess for years,” she said. Lewis said she walked several properties last week and was “embarrassed at how people who look like me are being treated.

“I’m sorry. But I’m one person.”

She has appealed to the city for funds to hire more maintenance staff, she said. This week, the city granted $250,000 for the agency to hire more personnel, Lewis announced at the public meeting.

The agency currently owns 16 sites and manages 14 of them. Lewis has detailed a plan for the agency to sell its ownership stake in some buildings and transition to third-party property management. She emphasized at the meeting that no resident will have to move or have the rent raised.

“We are not doing a good job at managing the properties so we are bringing in new property managers,” she said. “IHA is getting out of the mix.”

As the agency begins the months-long process of digging itself out of financial disaster, residents may not be able to wait.

Anderson loves her home. It is adorned with plants and photos of her children, one of whom is a bishop. But on Tuesday afternoon as temperatures reached 97 degrees, it was unlivable.

Two maintenance staff visited her fifth-floor apartment, but did not fix her AC unit. She is looking for another place to stay in the meantime.

She wiped sweat dripping from her brow.

“I have nowhere else to go," she said.

Contact IndyStar reporter Ko Lyn Cheang at kcheang@indystar.com or 317-903-7071. Follow her on Twitter: @kolyn_cheang.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Indianapolis Housing Agency: Tenants suffer no AC in heat wave