ATLANTA — Dozens of people are living in terrible conditions in metro apartments, and code enforcement is struggling to do anything about it.
Channel 2’s Dave Huddleston spent three months looking into frustrations within Atlanta's City Code Enforcement and the reason many officers feel they can't help these people.
Huddleston learned code enforcement is like a shell game. Officers can't keep up with shady owners who transfer titles in the blink of an eye, instantly killing court cases. That means tenants are left with no recourse.
"It's really upsetting," said tenant Shonya Whitmore.
She told Huddleston she has lived at an apartment complex on Lindsay Street in Northwest Atlanta for six months. She says in that time, she has had three different landlords, and none of the toilets in the complex have running water.
"It's like a sewage problem. They need to snake it, and they haven't done that," Whitmore said.
Another tenant, who didn't want to be identified, told Huddleston she has water in the kitchen but showed him where rats chewed through the plastic pipe. She also showed him where her window broke. The owner put the new pane in backward and now it won't open because the expanding foam insulation sealed it shut.
Whitmore walked Huddleston to the complex's unsecured mailboxes, where the mail carrier refuses to deliver the mail.
"Nobody wants to do nothing," Whitmore complained. "She just wants to get her money. She just wants to get paid."
Whitmore is talking about Yael Aflalo, a woman who has owned multiple properties off-and-on across metro Atlanta. Huddleston found her living in a 4,200 square foot house in Sandy Springs that is valued at more than $500,000.
Huddleston questioned Aflalo at Atlanta's Municipal Court, where she showed up on one of her numerous code violations that include infractions on Lindsay Street, on Sunset Avenue and several other properties in northwest Atlanta.
Tim Coleman lived at a unit on Sunset for two years. He told Huddleston he moved out after promises to fix the apartment weren't kept.
"The heat was never fixed," Coleman said.
A father, who lives at Sunset now with his two children, didn't want to give us his name or show his face because he's afraid he'll lose the one apartment he can afford. Still, he said, this spring, the sewage system at the complex backed up, and the front yard was covered with feces.
"It went on for five months, to the point, we had to call in the police," he said.
Huddleston went back to court as Aflalo faced a second round of code violations, but the judge quickly learned Aflalo doesn't officially own the properties anymore -- at least on paper.
Huddleston searched property records and found she transferred titles on 13 properties she did own to Eitham Homes.
Huddleston found Alfalo still is part of the leadership group in those businesses.
Tenants at some of those 13 properties admitted to Huddleston that Aflalo still is the person who shows up to collect their rent.
"When someone continues to transfer ownership in different hands, we keep having to start over in code enforcement, which delays the process, which already is a lengthy process," Atlanta police Maj. Barry Shaw said.
Shaw is the director of code enforcement. He said many of Atlanta's worst housing offenders register the problem property under a corporation or their spouses or child's name.
Huddleston confronted Aflalo outside of court. She told him tenants themselves are causing many of the problems in their units. She claimed Atlanta's Code Enforcement wrote tickets so the city can make money.
"Don't come on me," she said. "I'm not the mayor. I didn't build that neighborhood. I'm trying to make it better."
Tenants, like Whitmore, say they are stuck in the middle of it all.
"I've been here six months. Y’all don't know what these people have done to me,” she said.
WSBTV
