Apartment Health Crisis: Unchecked Conditions Emerge Without Ongoing Enforcement

The kitchen sink in Terrieon Murphy's apartment wouldn't stop flooding.

The water spilled onto the floor, working its way beneath the tile until it bubbled up. Murphy couldn't keep up with the damage and resulting mold, and she had no luck getting maintenance to fix the problem.

“It made me feel uncomfortable,” she said.

Murphy, 24, reported the issues to the Marion County Public Health Department — just as so many of her neighbors at the eastside Hubbard Gardens apartment complex have done.

Health and Hospital Corp., a municipal corporation that runs the health department, filed a lawsuit in June to get Hubbard Gardens to fix Murphy's unit. One responsibility of the agency is making sure homes are habitable.

But the lawsuit didn't solve the problem.

Because once the property manager moved Murphy to a different unit two months later, Health and Hospital dropped the case.

The reason? No one was living there anymore, according to court documents.

On one hand, Murphy wanted out of the mold-infested apartment where the floor squished beneath her feet.

But the move also demonstrates what some housing advocates and city-county councilors say is a failure in the way Marion County's health agency enforces requirements for safe housing.

Advocates and councilors have called for Health and Hospital to take more action. But even within the agency, there appears to be different understandings of what's allowed and what's not.

"That's not us doing that," said Dana Reed Wise, the county health department's environmental bureau chief. "It's the court telling us to."

“I'm not comfortable here,” said 22-year-old Ashanti Jake, who has a 5-year-old daughter and reported her own problems to the health department.

All across Hubbard Gardens, apartments are in bad shape with mold, leaks and broken windows. Some of the units have people living in them, and some are vacant.

Conditions became so bad at the apartments that Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita filed a lawsuit against the complex's owners last year. The owners argued in response that the attorney general lacks standing for many of the allegations. The case is ongoing.

The lawsuit built on a long list of Health and Hospital cases at the complex. The health agency filed 89 cases in less than two years. Of those, 19 were dismissed because the units had become vacant.

Health and Hospital has two full-time attorneys, spokesperson Joel Weyrauch said. And each attorney is handling 700 or more cases at any given time.

"Keeping vacant units on the docket really gums up the system," Weyrauch said.

There are times when the health agency does keep cases open even after the unit is vacant, but Weyrauch said that's reserved for cases where the threat extends to the public – such as asbestos coming off the siding of a property.

"But not every case is that cut and dry," he said.

Weyrauch also said Health and Hospital has unsuccessfully advocated for changes to state law that would explicitly allow cases to remain open when the unit is vacant. As it stands now, he said, attorneys need to make an argument that there's an immediate threat to public health.

Two Indianapolis attorneys have questioned the idea that state law prevents the health agency from following through with an enforcement case after the tenant leaves. Adam Mueller, executive director of the Indiana Justice Project, and Fran Quigley, a professor at the Indiana University McKinney School of Law, wrote in a legal analysis that closing cases leaves the community with no remedy for health hazards.

Instead, they wrote, the health agency "creates a cycle of non-remedy and perpetually dangerous conditions."

Renters like Murphy will continue scrubbing the mold and keeping their kids out of abandoned apartments at Hubbard Gardens, where residents told that cycle is plain to see as their units deteriorate.