The Biden administration has given a multi-million-dollar grant intended to "empower tenants" to a nonprofit that's been repeatedly accused of operating dilapidated, dangerous housing complexes in Los Angeles.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) says its $10 million Tenant Education and Outreach (TEO) grant will enable tenants in HUD-subsidized housing "to more effectively engage with property managers and owners to help sustain safe, decent, and affordable housing."
On Thursday, HUD announced that $10 million will be jointly awarded to the AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF) and the Massachusetts Alliance of HUD Tenants.
Over the next two years, these two groups will distribute this money to 30 tenant advocacy organizations to help them in their own efforts to "work productively with property management, hold management accountable for property conditions, improve management and oversight of these multifamily properties, and advocate to preserve affordability."
AHF, originally a healthcare nonprofit that operates pharmacies for AIDS patients, has been taking an increasingly active role in housing—and courting immense amounts of controversy along the way.
Beginning in 2017, it started buying up residential hotels in Los Angeles' Skid Row, with the goal of rehabilitating them and renting them out at low, unsubsidized rates.
Michael Weinstein, the head of the foundation, argued this was a cheaper, faster way of housing people than building new affordable housing units.
But since acquiring those residential hotels, AHF has been the subject of numerous lawsuits from tenants, and investigations from media outlets, over living conditions on its properties.
A detailed Los Angeles Times investigation published in November 2023 reported a number of issues at AHF-owned properties, including apartments infested with cockroaches, exploding radiators, water shut-offs so regular that tenants had to defecate in wastebaskets, violent crime and drug dealing left unaddressed, and months-long elevator shut-offs that left disabled tenants stuck on upper floors or forced to sleep in the lobby.
While many of these problems are common at residential hotels on Skid Row, AHF-managed properties were more frequently hit with code complaints and emergency calls than similar properties, reported the Times.
A former AHF employee described the living conditions at foundation properties as "inhumane."
Tenant lawsuits against the foundation claim it's failed to improve conditions at the hotels it has taken over, and that it's just another "slumlord in a long line of slumlords."
HUD's Notice of Funding Opportunity for the TEO grant says that owners and managers of "multifamily assisted housing" are ineligible for the grant award.
Presumably, that provision is to prevent any conflict of interest that giving tenant advocacy funds to landlords would create.
But with the Biden Administration's TEO award to AHF, the foundation will be responsible for awarding taxpayer dollars to tenant advocacy groups to fight against the kinds of living conditions that are reportedly widespread at AHF's own properties.
HUD said in an emailed statement that "AIDS Healthcare Foundation is part of a team that applied for these awards. The team is not only eligible, but the best qualified applicant."
The Times summed up the foundation's foray into non-subsidized housing this way: "A well-funded organization struggling with the contradictions and burdens of simultaneously trying to serve as tenant advocates and provide non-subsidized housing in Skid Row without prior experience in the field."
The Biden administration's grant to AHF would seem to heighten those contradictions.
UPDATE: This article has been updated to include a statement from HUD.
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