Property manager of contaminated apartments terminates contact with Bayshore developer
Lincoln Property Management has cut ties with the developers of the troubled luxury Lydell Apartments at Bayshore after residents were forced to evacuate from six apartments which are contaminated with ten times the safe limit of a cancer-causing chemical.
The property management team said that it terminated its contract with Dallas-based Cypress Equities July 20 after the Journal Sentinel reported on the evacuations at the site. Tenants of the other 25 to 30 occupied units in the building also will be relocated.
Residents have said that Lincoln Property Management “has minimized the issue,” “did not tell the full truth,” and did not want news of the evacuation “to be in the press.”
“They keep telling us that the city is blowing this out of proportion, but this feels a lot more serious than they are making it seem,” resident Selamani Ngaruko told the Journal Sentinel.
Lincoln Property Management claims it was unaware of any issues with the building until June and that responsibility for the environmental safety of the building lies with Cypress Equities.
"Lincoln Residential was unaware of the presence of TCE or the testing requirements until a June visit from the health department," a Lincoln spokesperson said in a statement. "As a result, Lincoln Residential has terminated its agreement with Cypress Equities."
Cypress Equities has not responded to a request for comment.
Residents were forced to evacuate from Lydell’s Building 3 on Bayshore’s campus, which is also being developed by Cypress Equities, after more than a month of emergency cleanup failed to lower the level of trichloroethylene, or TCE to acceptable levels.
The emergency cleanup effort began after Lydell developers provided data to the state on June 2 which showed that a more-than-one-year cleanup effort to remove TCE contamination had failed. This testing was supposed to occur before residents moved in, but developers chose not to test until three weeks after the first tenants arrived.
Cypress Equities provided test data for Building 3 on June 2, two months after the first residents moved in. This data showed that some parts of the building had 100 times the state’s residential limit of 2.1 micrograms per cubic meter for TCE.
Residents of the building were first informed by Lincoln Property Management that there was an issue on June 14, two days after state and local agencies became aware of elevated TCE levels and residency at the site.
Previous reporting by the Journal Sentinel has laid out how Lincoln Property Management told residents incorrect information about the site including that the developer had carried out testing during construction. The complex is being built on a former landfill.
No such data exists and both Lincoln Property Management and Cypress Equities have not responded to multiple requests by the Journal Sentinel for this data.
Lincoln Property Management was also instructed by North Shore Health Department Health Official Becky Rowland in mid-June to not move in any new residents to the building. Despite the directive, tenants Alondra Terry and Kristopher Alexander were allowed to move in on June 30.
Terry told the Journal Sentinel that she was told “there was a problem the second after I got my keys, but they said it was not a big deal.”
The North Shore Health Department and the state’s Department of Natural Resources also ordered Lincoln Property Management to install air purifiers in the entire building to filter out TCE.
According to resident Anna Lagoe, Lincoln Property Management employees told her that the purifier was “more for Canadian wildfire smoke than TCE.”
Lincoln Property Management staff will remain on-site for the next 30 days assisting residents in moving out of the building. The developer plans to move the residents of the remaining 25-30 units out in the next month.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Bayshore apartment manager cuts ties with development after TCE found
