Evette Gilard’s skin itched so badly that it woke her one night in early 2019. When she searched her apartment, she discovered a thick rind of black mold in the threshold of her bedroom closet, and another in her hallway. There had been an apartment fire upstairs months earlier, and Gilard supposed that water damage from the firefighters had caused the mold. She knew that her little subsidized one-bedroom in Antioch, California, was not exactly a luxury condo, but now she feared for her health.
The next morning, Gilard told the property manager, who sent a maintenance man with a bleach-filled spray bottle. Knowing that bleach can spread mold on porous surfaces, she turned him away and appealed to the manager to give the problem more serious attention. Meanwhile, she was still living in the apartment, and her symptoms were getting worse. “My skin was changing, my voice was changing,” Gilard told me. “My hair was falling out.”
After weeks of getting “the run-around” from the manager, Gilard finally called Antioch’s code enforcement office. In early March, a city employee appeared and issued the landlord a violation for the mold. Only then did the manager bring in contractors to cut open the walls and remediate. “I told them, I can’t live here,” she said. “It still had that scent there. All my clothes were ruined, bed sheets, everything was ruined because the smell was in my clothes and everywhere.” After she wrote a letter to the manager’s corporate office, the company put her up in a hotel, where Gilard stayed for a month. To this day, she has chronic skin problems. “The mold issue is an everyday thing,” she said. “My skin blisters, it bleeds. It took away some of my self-confidence.”
Gilard had moved into the Casa Blanca Apartments in 2012. Her mother, sister, and sister’s five sons all lived in Antioch, a bedroom community of 117,000 people an hour’s drive east of San Francisco. When she signed her lease, the grounds of the complex—a Spanish Mission–style affair of beige stucco archways with red tiled roofing—were well landscaped and welcoming. Most importantly, the rent was low. At $745 a month, she could afford to live on her wages as a nursing assistant, even after she hurt her back on the job and went on disability insurance. She convinced her mother to move into Casa Blanca as well.
But in 2016, a new landlord, Levy Affiliated Holdings—a real-estate investment firm with a portfolio of 41 properties and a market value of more than $500 million—bought the complex and redeveloped it using the low-income housing tax credit, the federal subsidy that finances most affordable apartments for poor and working people in the United States today. When I visited Antioch in September, Gilard and her neighbors said that their living conditions deteriorated when Levy Affiliated took over from the previous owner, the Affordable Housing Development Corporation. A succession of property managers has ranged from unresponsive to aggressive; some took months to fix simple problems like broken stoves. Residents suspect that one manager had a kickback arrangement with a local towing company, since many had their cars whisked away at great expense—sometimes in the time it took to unload groceries. Today, the security gates are inoperable, and strangers routinely enter the grounds to break into cars, use drugs, and dump trash. Everyone is fed up with the overflowing garbage bins, which invite possums and raccoons.
Some tenants also accuse Levy of hardball tactics and questionable bookkeeping. Teresa Farias Lúa and Dulce Franco said that they once received three-day eviction notices when their young sons went swimming together in the complex pool, which has been cracked and off-limits for seven years. Franco, a restaurant worker, said that she also received an eviction notice because her diabetic mother, who lives with her, is not on the lease. “We cried,” Franco told me. “I said, ‘Where is she going to go?’” Management never followed through; it felt like an intimidation strategy. Management never followed through; it felt like an intimidation strategy. Risa Peoples, an in-home care provider, was assessed an outstanding balance of more than $15,000, a sum that she staunchly disputes. She is trying to resolve the issue through Legal Aid but is afraid that she will be forced to leave. “I’m stressed out. I can’t eat because of this,” Peoples said. “They could take me to court and give me an eviction.”
These indignities reached a breaking point in May 2022 when roughly 150 tenants at Casa Blanca and Delta Pines, a nearby property also owned by Levy Affiliated, received shocking rent-increase notices. In two months, Gilard’s notice read, her rent would rise from $1,125 to $1,542 per month, a 37 percent increase that would make life all but unworkable. “You just told me my rent is going up $400, but I’m living in low-income housing,” Gilard said. “How is that possible?”
Levy Affiliated is just one of many thousands of companies that have sprung up over the last four decades to maximize profits through subsidized rentals, especially by taking advantage of public money through the low-income housing tax credit, or LIHTC (pronounced “lie-tech” by industry insiders). Created in the Tax Reform Act of 1986, the LIHTC was meant to improve on the government-run public housing projects of a previous era—by largely outsourcing affordable rentals to private enterprise.
The vast majority of LIHTC housing is in the hands of large, regional corporations. And in recent years, private-equity titans like the Blackstone Group and Starwood Capital have begun snatching up affordable units as they increase their share of the rental housing market. These companies routinely inflict misery on poor tenants, who are afforded weak protections by the LIHTC program. Generally speaking, corporate landlords are more likely to raise rents and fees, create poor health conditions, and evict tenants than other types of owners. They form limited partnerships that obscure ownership, making them nearly impossible for tenants to hold accountable. In LIHTC housing specifically, these owners increase their profit margins by cutting basic services, neglecting maintenance of problems like mold and pests, and jacking up rents. Some are finding loopholes to terminate affordability requirements, leaving tenants to hash out life on the open market.
Despite these problems, government leaders from both political parties continue to back the LIHTC program as the country’s leading approach for creating low-cost rentals, enabling a beast of profiteering while doing little to tame its excesses. And at a moment when working people are struggling to make rent, Vice President Kamala Harris, as part of her campaign’s housing plan, wants to double down on this program that too often enriches landlords while making life hell for renters.
Affordable housing used to be the domain of the federal government. In the New Deal era, policymakers began funding........