Apartment tenants living near Bachman Lake are seeing improvements to their living conditions after almost a year of working to get property managers to fix deteriorating building conditions by petitioning the City to enforce code compliance.
Families living in some of the apartments in the area had been dealing with broken air-conditioning systems, pest infestations, and dilapidated structures. They claimed they felt ignored by the city, according to The Dallas Morning News.
Some said the process for reporting code violations was convoluted, and Spanish-only speakers faced a unique barrier to communicating with City employees. Fed-up tenants eventually organized with Bachman Lake Together, Lumin Education, and Dallas Area Interfaith to get something done.
Guadalupe Arista, a 33-year-old mother of two, said some of her issues, such as water leaks in her bathroom, began to get fixed only after she and other advocates petitioned the City of Dallas Department of Code Compliance.
“After the meetings with the city, the [property] manager solved some of my requests faster than they used to,” she told DMN. “They knew I was involved with the city and the housing organizations, and I think that’s why they fixed some things.”
However, some tenants remain frustrated with the process.
Claudia Cruz, 38, told DMN that the slow process of completing repairs is discouraging and that her property manager may retaliate against her for reporting a violation.
Property standards are governed by Chapter 27 of the Dallas City Code, which mandates that all residential buildings are safe and sanitary for tenants. Enforcement of the code is ultimately the responsibility of City Manager T.C. Broadnax, whose operations have previously resulted in delays in other City departments.
Property owners are required to maintain functioning air conditioning systems “capable of maintaining a room temperature of at least 15 degrees cooler than the outside temperature, but in no event higher than 85° F.”
If a code violation for nonfunctioning air conditioning is identified by City staff, property managers have 24 hours to fix it before a citation is issued. However, some tenants claim the window is too long.
Arista told DMN she reported problems with her air conditioning last week, but her property manager allegedly procrastinated repairing it because of the 24-hour window.
“Don Victor told me he couldn’t do anything about it because the law says they have 24 hours to fix it, so we had to wait and bear for one day with the extreme heat,” she said.
Tenants and the aforementioned community organizations met with the City’s code compliance department in May in an effort to change some of the rules. However, no progress was made in amending Chapter 27.
The Dallas Express reached out to the City of Dallas, but officials were not immediately available for comment.
While summer heat scorches Dallas, code compliance inspectors are responding to hundreds of reports concerning broken HVAC units, as previously reported by The Dallas Express.