In my last blog post in September, I sort of ended with a brief statement of the shut down of the Yale Park apartments and then went into a story of one of those families from YP moving in with her sister and my upstair’s neighbor, Hser Boe Paw, and how the week they moved in here, their one toilet and shower shared by 11 of them overflowed so badly that the sewage water started actually leaking into our bathroom below it.
I think this is a good place to start. As most of you know, the Yale Park apartments were run by Kay Anderson, a different landlord than ours. I don’t want to make too many of my own personal statements or opinions about the matter, but the apartments were in hideous condition. The front doors to all the apartments opened up to the outside, not a hallway, and they were too small for the frame and even when locked, you could see right through a large gap directly into people’s apartments. This obviously offered zero security but also allowed for cold winter wind to come into their homes and heavy rains to leak into living rooms and cause mold to grow under carpets. They were infested with all kinds of bugs and mice; and they even found several gas leaks. I think the weirdest thing to me about this whole situation was that Kay Anderson, himself, lived on the property. He claimed to love his tenants, and even lived in the same conditions they were faced with, yet still didn’t feel a sense of urgency to fix the hundreds of code violations. They needed to be shut down, but the evacuation process was tumultuous, sending more than a hundred people into community centers to sleep on cots in big gymnasiums for the weeks to come until the city could find them homes or new apartments. Keep in mind, these were mostly Burmese refugees, including the Karen people I love–the people whose primary problem they have faced in their lives is their homes being stripped from them and living in terrible conditions.
When this story hit Omaha on September 20, 2018, I can’t explain just how many people in our community reached out to me. It broke the hearts of Omaha at large, and people who didn’t know anything about refugees were learning about them, having empathy for them, and wanting to help. I probably had 30 people text me that day and the following days asking if I had heard the news about this vulnerable refugee community getting displaced and what they could do to help. Mission Church, Restoring Dignity and the Salvation Army were doing amazing work to gather donations of clothing, shoes, socks, tampons, pads, diapers, blankets and food for the families. We really got to see our city come together to sincerely love these people. Robbie and I felt so proud of Omaha and we felt so expectant for how the Lord would use a terrible situation like this to start bringing justice to the least of these here–a prayer we and our friends have been praying for for nearly three years now.
The same day it happened, my friend Jessy Thompson (whose cousin-in-law runs the organization Restoring Dignity who were the ones who helped empower those tenants to find their voices and stand up for themselves to see things get fixed), Day Mu, and I went to the Yale Park apartments to see if we could get information and help. There was police line wrapped around the entire perimeter of the complex. We walked over to the park across the street where many volunteers and cameramen had gathered. That’s where I spotted a little group of Karenni (not to be confused with Karen) girls I am friends with were huddled in the shade eating lunch. Marsha and Esther go to the Karenni church that meets in our church building after our morning services. They were there helping interpret for the families to understand why they needed to move out immediately. This was an emotional day for them because many families’ fathers were at work when they were told they needed to get out and the children were at school, so the mothers were rightfully concerned and confused. It was eye opening and humbling to stand there looking on at those apartments, completely emptied, knowing they were in conditions so similar to my own, not knowing what was to come in our city in the following weeks. I remember that night our friend Zach Davy came over along with Brett and Jeff and I cooked a huge meal of salmon and rice and asparagus for them and our classic group of 8 youth that are always over. We sat, prayed for the Yale Park families and then thanked God that we were all still together and able to share a meal together. We were blessed, we are blessed. I wanted them all to know Jesus wasn’t done yet though.
A few days passed and things felt chaotic. Not just at our apartments but even in our city. I ended up speaking up at a community meeting that had gathered at Yale Park (the park across the street from the evacuated apartments) with news cameras there, standing up in agreement with the city officials that Omaha needs to hold landlords accountable to taking care of their properties and their residents. I said I knew from experience in my own low-income northeast omaha apartment that giving tenants more ways to contact their landlord or voice their concerns wasn’t enough (this was one of the counter solutions one person gave), that even as a well educated woman who is confident about my rights and fluent in English and who has absolutely zero problem calling the landlord’s office multiple times a week, even I have a very difficult time getting them to take the problems seriously. We need better accountability in our city– something in place that would force landlords to care more.
That afternoon I came home and decided enough was enough. I went around to several of my neighbor’s apartments and took pictures of countless unsolved issues that had all been called about with no resolution for months. I remember Day Mu came with me and she explained to the families what I was doing and how I planned to send in all these requests with pictures in at one time; that I was going to work really hard to see these things get fixed. Several of my sweet neighbors told us how grateful they were and told me to take pictures of everything. One of the things I was most upset about was for this brand new Karen family who had just moved in that week– they were placed here from the Yale Park apartment shutdown. Here they were leaving an awful situation only to be put into a similarly bad situation. Their kitchen light fixture literally was hanging by wires and it hung there revealing a big hole in the ceiling to which I was told that mice had fallen out of the ceiling there onto their floor. They had outlets that had no covers on them (with a two year old boy living there). They had loose, broken tiles thrown over unfinished floor in their bathroom.
It pained me to think here in America we couldn’t do better for these people. I think about the countless stories I’ve heard from my neighbors about their expectation of America when they were in Thailand versus what the reality was when they arrived here. I’ve heard stories of them imagining homes with enough rooms for all their children, affordable rent with clean living spaces, and space and safe soil for beautiful gardens. But in reality, they got tight cramped apartments that had cockroaches, mice, and bedbugs when they moved in, sunken in ceilings in places where water damage was never fixed, drains that clog up with disgustingly dirty water, parking lots with no working lights for safety in the dark walking home at night, a lot to garden in that had dangerous lead in it, and very unfair prices to pay for these conditions every month (if you haven’t read my blog before–Robbie and I pay $780 a month to live here and so do our neighbors. It’s unreasonable.). I think about how many times I called this summer about various neighbor’s broken air conditioning units (with heat indexes of 100+ degrees outside) and the women from the apartment office sounding frustrated with me for asking them to come fix because in their words, “Mam, do you understand how many properties Dave owns? There is a very long list of people who need to get their A/C fixed so your neighbors will have theirs fixed, but it might not be for a couple months.” UMMM EXCUSE ME?? I pleaded that this was unacceptable every time I was told this. If Dave doesn’t have enough workers to get his tenants working A/C in July, then he is in over his head and needs to sell these properties to a person or company who can give my neighbors better quality of life. I would walk into these apartments with no air conditioning, the air so thick with heat from the sun beating in, that it was difficult to breathe.
So on that one day I sent in about 12 maintenance requests, one after the other. When you fill out a request form online (which they say is the only way they are accepting maintenance requests now), you click send and there is no way to know if it actually sent. There’s no confirmation notification that comes up on the website and no confirmation email sent to your account to let you know they received it. You click send and it just immediately reroutes you to the Paladino Development Group home page. As I began to send my thirteenth request, I had an email pop up on my phone. It was from Paladino himself. It read verbatim: “I see you sent several. I will give these out tomorrow, I will try to have Jose do it. Thanks for helping the tenants.” I couldn’t believe he actually responded. I’m sure he thought I was a person from some organization helping these people, not one of his own actual tenants, but regardless, he gave me something to hold him accountable by and sure enough Jose was out the next day starting in on the dozen issues.
One morning shortly after all this, I was teaching English and there was a knock at the door. It was a woman dressed in maintenance clothing with a clipboard and a man right behind her. I had never seen her before. Her first words to me were, “Are you the advocate I’ve heard so much about?” I’ll be honest, I felt a little awkward about it with my Karen friends next to me. That’s not exactly how I introduce myself to my neighbors. But I responded with a chuckle and told her I’m assuming you wouldn’t be talking about anybody else so yeah! I still to this day have no idea how she knew about me or who had told her which apartment I lived in. She invited herself in and told me her name was Brooke. In so many words she explained that she had been working for heartland family services and knew about the reputation that Dave Paladino had in our city. She recognize that no one was really doing much about it except complaining, so she chose to be proactive, quit her job, and start working for Dave herself to attempt to fix the problems from the inside out. I felt such relief at meeting her that I exclaimed, “You are literally the woman my friends and I have been praying for for so long now! Thank you for coming here today!”
She was sorry to have interrupted our English class but my Karen friends and I were not sorry about that at all. She proceeded to tell us that she was there to make sure that every issue started getting attention. That she planned to spend that day and that week going to every apartment in our complex and writing down every single issue that had gone unresolved in order to see to it over the next few months that things would get fixed. The man she was with was an exterminator and he was there with her to spray for cockroaches as we went around from home to home. She asked for our help. So that day we spent the next three hours going from apartment to apartment to apartment writing down every single problem that we saw. It was exhausting and saddening, even leaving Brooke with tears in her eyes at one point telling me she had no idea the conditions were this bad here and that she couldn’t believe my husband and I would choose to live alongside these people in the same conditions. On two occasions in the three hours she actually had to go out to her car to get more paper because she had literally run out of space from how many things she had written down that needed attention.
One apartment we went into, Brooke asked me to open the refrigerator door to check to see if the light in the refrigerator was working. As I opened it, much to my horror, a live mouse jumped out of the door at me, hit my stomach, fell to the ground, and scurried across the floor. I screamed and my neighbors screamed and Brooke did too! I was disgusted and terrified! As you can imagine, I was squealing and running across the floor completely frantic. It’s kind of funny to think back to it now. I think something I was so humbled by was that Brooke took scenarios like this one I just told you about and didn’t conclude that it was these people’s fault that things had gotten this bad. She was reasonable and turned to Bill and said, “What has to happen for a mouse to get into a refrigerator?” Bill responded, “Clearly this refrigerator is so old that it has holes in it. It should’ve been replaced years ago but that was probably something else that was overlooked among so many other things.” She shook her head with discouragement. She knew there was so much to be fixed.
Bill pulled the refrigerator away from the wall to try to find the hole where mice could get in. What was revealed was worse than expected. A one foot high pile of mouse droppings that we swept up only to expose two dead mice whose bodies were so stuck to the floor that even shoving the handle of a broom underneath them, they wouldn’t budge. Bill made a note to return a different day with better supplies to scrape the dead mice off the floor. Pretty awful, huh? We saw stoves that had fire hazards, mold on ceilings next to vents, front doors that don’t lock properly, bed bugs, roaches infesting kitchens and walls, unsafe outlets, and so much more. The problems seemed insurmountable but Brooke wasn’t giving up. I saw Brooke at the apartments every day for the next couple of weeks checking in on neighbors and stopping into my own apartment to ask me how things were going and if things were getting accomplished. I felt such a sense of hope even in the midst of feeling like things couldn’t get worse.
Now it was the middle of October 2018 and I had just returned home from somewhere when I spotted a channel 9 news van parked in the back parking lot. As I walked into my apartment I was stopped by the news man who asked me if I lived here and if there was a mouse problem here. Yes to both. He told me he was trying to cover the story because an American neighbor had called it in saying he had caught 12 mice in his apartment in one night and he was so sick of the problem. He wanted to draw attention to the situation but he also wanted to remain anonymous and not go on camera. The news man said that the only way they could run the story was if a neighbor was willing to talk about it. I told him yes, absolutely, we had a mouse problem. My husband and I were used to catching upwards of six mice per week. I stopped for a second and thought about how even just a couple weeks prior to that I would’ve been so eager to go on camera and complain about not only our apartments but especially our landlord. I thought about how that was an opportunity I would have jumped at for so many months. But I was in the middle of a season of feeling like there was something huge God was doing. And maybe, just maybe, our landlord deserved a second or fourth or tenth chance to make things right.
After I wrote my last blog post I had many people reach out to me telling me that they had read everything and that the stories were so beautiful—-but ironically a lot of them concluded with, “I felt really led to pray for your landlord after reading everything.” I was so taken aback by how many people told me that they were praying for Dave Paladino and his heart change because, you know, I needed to remember that Jesus loves him too. Ashamedly, I had not really thought much about praying for him in the midst of all my prayers for my neighbors. But that really changed after so many people helped me to see the necessity in that. I had been praying for Dave for about a month at the time of the news man showing up at my apartment. I knew my heart had certainly been changing, and I just couldn’t go on camera and exploit the man. I turned the journalist down after being really honest about how I would’ve loved to have done this even a month ago but that I believed that my landlord deserved another chance. The journalist laughed, wrote down his phone number, and said, “When you change your mind give me a call.” To be clear, I never called him back.
Over the last three or so months give or take, a ton of maintenance issues have been resolved. I would beg to say that more has been done to resolve issues in the last three months than in the 9 months I’d lived here before that combined. Robbie and I know the timing of it is no accident. God has been faithful to use us here to call attention and to be the backbone of this community standing up for all immigrants and refugees that receive unfair housing. It’s been great, but we are far from where we want to be. I would say on average that the maintenance requests I put in online now are probably addressed within the week; which is incredible considering in the past if it was going to be resolved at all they probably wouldn’t be paid attention to for a month if not more. And ultimately there are just issues with these buildings and specific apartments that in all honesty probably won’t be fixed ever and it’s just something we have to live with.
I think it was either the end of November or the beginning of December that I called the apartment office to ask them when our lease was up. Robbie and I were not sure because we seemed to recall when we signed the lease that it said no one could move out between the months of October and April. I wanted to be clear about that. We moved in last January and needed to know if we needed to sign another lease come January or April. Shockingly when I called, it was Dave Paladino himself who answered. I wasn’t expecting that but I recognized his voice and at that point he must’ve known who I was finally because he said, “Hey Chase! What can I help you with today?” So the important part is not really about the lease, although we did find out that the lease is not up until April funny enough, but more about what Dave said to me after that. Without any prompting he asked me why my husband and I moved in to the apartments. I was honest and told him how much we love these people and how we thought that if we moved in alongside them we could make a bigger impact than had we moved in down the street. He proceeded to tell me that what Robbie and I had done was not only helping our neighbors but was helping him run a better business and he really wanted me to know how much he appreciated it. He said he had told the people over at the Abide ministry in North Omaha about us and how he felt that they and he needed more “Rob and Chase’s” at all of his properties—people who weren’t funded by a church or organization but just motivated by Jesus to serve. You see, if you would’ve told me a couple months ago or especially a year ago that Dave Paladino would not just thank me but actually go into detail about how impactful we’ve been, I wouldn’t have believed you. There was more and more evidence all the time that Jesus was over everything and in everything and He had a greater plan here than we could’ve ever expected.
Like I said before, it’s not like suddenly everything got resolved and everything is peaches and rainbows now because that’s just simply not the truth at all. Let me be clear, there is still so much work left to be done. But what we are seeing is hope return to a community that has been taken advantage of for far too long. What we are seeing is small amounts of justice for our people. We are seeing Omaha start to care about the refugees and the foreigners. We are beginning to see our community love with the heart of Jesus. And Robbie and I will continue to fight for these things until God steers are hearts toward a separate mission, but for now this is what we will wake up every day and go to sleep every day praying for, longing for, and fighting for: Which is a fair world for people of all races, cultures, languages, backgrounds, and economic classes to receive the same treatment and for them all to get a voice to be heard and validated, safe homes to live in, and clean homes to live in.
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So in my first paragraph, I mentioned the issue of plumbing that leaked from my upstair’s neighbor’s bathroom into Robbie and my bathroom. This is an ongoing issue. Two times more, so three times total now, we have had sewage leaking for sometimes days at a time from the ceiling in our bathroom. The original time it happened, it did end up getting a temporary fix and after bleaching it and having maintenance men show up four days later (that’s four days after we asked them to) to take a look at it and they told us everything looked fine (even though I was with them the whole time and all they did was stand in the bleached clean bathroom and say it looked good and then left without actually checking into anything), we just moved on with our lives and tried not to think about it.
In early December, it happened again. The misting of some liquid on my head when I walked into my bathroom one Saturday morning was an all too familiar feeling I didn’t want to experience again. I thought, “WHY does this only happen on Saturdays when no one at Dave’s office will pick up??” So of course I texted my trusted maintenance friend, Gyung, on his day off and asked him to help me. He said he would send someone. Thankfully we can always trust him and sure enough someone was there later that day to attend to it. We were out of the apartment during most of his work so we have no idea exactly what he did but he told us he’d have to return a different day to finish the work. We had a hole in our ceiling for a few days but at least the dripping had stopped and we were able to get the bathroom clean and sanitary again.
Then in the evening on January 3, 2019, I was playing a card game on my rug with several kids from the apartment when Ler Htee Moo, one of our teenage boys, was on the couch and told me he heard dripping. I had been cooking dinner and so I told him I presumed the dripping sound to be the rice cooker which often drips steam halfway through its cook time. But he was adamant that he heard the sound coming from the bathroom. I think I actually said “NOOO not again!!!” Out loud as I and five kids ran to the bathroom to see. It was shocking. It was the worst I’d seen of it yet. A heavy flow of brownish yellow liquid was not just dripping but pouring out of creases in my bathroom ceiling. In a short amount of time, the entire floor was coated in this liquid and there were yellow brown streaks down the walls. I could have puked it was so disgusting. All of the kids and I were horrified.
I raced upstairs to Hser Boe Paw’s apartment to see what was going on in her bathroom. To my surprise, Gyung was in the apartment already correcting an unrelated maintenance issue! I felt like this must be God because there was no way had I called at 4:30pm on a weekday that they would have done anything about it that day. I would have had to wait who knows how long with this horrifying situation but Gyung was already there. He said, “Hey Chase! Do you need something?” As he saw me fly over to Her Boe Paw’s bathroom. Nothing was happening up there. He raced down the stairs with me to see mine. He put his hands on his hips, took a big deep breath and said, “Oh no. This is a big problem.” He was right.
Gyung immediately made two large holes in our ceiling and continued to work in there for the next hour to get the disgusting sewage to stop flowing. He was kind enough to wipe down our walls and most of the floor too before he left and promised to return the next morning. In that time, all the kids and I were going back and forth to their apartments to use their toilets when we needed it. I thought about how normal this stuff is to these guys, like how it didn’t freak them out at all that I had pee covering the walls and floors of my bathroom. We laugh about it, but it’s pretty sad too.
The maintenance men worked on Her Boe Paw and my bathrooms for the next full day. She and I both used Moo Paw’s apartment toilet throughout the day when we needed to go. Fortunately I had a friend in town visiting Jadee and me so I was able to be out of the house most of that day but I came home to shoddy paint jobs over plastered holes in the ceiling and the hope that this wouldn’t happen again.
Just this week, our landlord has come under fire for attempting to apply for TIF funding from the city to develop some new properties he bought in the last year. The news showed video of his time at City Hall- him getting slammed by current and former residents complaining about the way he doesn’t take care of his current properties and taking into question why he should get funding, a privilege, when maybe instead he should be getting punished. As these issues are finally coming into the light, and people are learning of his discrepancies, I have more and more hope of how God will bring justice to our people living in these conditions. It’s not a simple solution; in fact I don’t envy Dave’s position in any way, shape, or form, as I know it’s not an easy job– so I’ve changed from thinking there was just one bad person we needed to eliminate, to believing he’s not intending to be bad, he’s just very careless and thought he’d just slip through the cracks long enough to never have to be held accountable. I don’t hate the man, in fact, I think he’s probably a decent person, but even good people can do a lot harm when their eyes aren’t fixed on Jesus. He needs prayer and so do we. I’m trying to give grace where needed, and to also keeping fighting for the things we’ve been fighting for and believing in for many years now.
Robbie + Chase 