Executive Towers boasts a gym, a swimming pool and heated underground parking. Built in 1963 by the country’s top contructor of luxury apartments, its excellent access to Ohio’s downtown Toledo and the neighborhoods beyond made it an attractive place to live.
It was for all of these reasons and more that Kwiona Sprott moved into Executive Towers with her teenage son last July, paying $851 a month.
“I was excited to move here because they said they had a gym, a swimming pool, laundry, a vending machine room; it’s less than a mile from my job and the school my son plays football for,” she says.
But today, it’s fallen far from grace. The balconies across its 12 stories are rusted orange, as is much of the side of the entryway facade. Its parking lot is a sea of ice and crushed snow days after a major snowstorm.
Inside, it’s worse.
Sprott, who works at a group home for people with developmental disabilities, says the six months since moving in have been a nightmare. None of the equipment in the gym works, she says, and the pool is unusable. But more concerning is leaking water from air conditioners and radiators, which ponded in the middle of the dining room and her son’s bedroom. The wet carpet has not been replaced.
“There’s mold smells coming from the radiators,” she says.
The property, which includes more than 140 units, is owned by M1M6 Executive Towers Holdings LLC, which has mailing addresses in Indiana and Colorado. The limited liability company is linked to corporations including Monarch Investment and Management Group, which has been accused of illegally charging fees from tenants at properties it owns in Minnesota.
The Guardian reached out to several property management and ownership companies with properties in Toledo but didn’t receive a response.
At a time when home ownership has never been harder to reach for working class Americans, international and out-of-state investors have descended on Toledo, Ohio, an unadorned regional city on the shore of Lake Erie, to buy up homes en masse, a trend that’s pricing out local residents such as Sprott.
More than 3,000 Lucas county properties have been bought by LLCs in countries as far away as Saudi Arabia, Australia and Israel.
Last April, the Wall Street Journal called Toledo a “ground zero” for Wall Street property investors. In December, it was ranked as the fourth-best housing market in the country for 2026 by Realtor.com, with its median house price jumping 13.1% year over year, a rate far higher than other cities.
But for locals, Toledo has gone from an affordable, relatively safe place to raise a family, to an inflated investment property destination. Its experiences typify the wider housing crisis facing smaller US cities, something that’s become increasingly pronounced during and following the Covid-19 pandemic, and which saw many property investors priced out of expensive, coastal cities.
Like many industrial US cities, Toledo was hit hard by the Great Recession of 2008. Tens of thousands of automotive and manufacturing jobs have been eliminated over the past 20 years. As the jobs disappeared, residents left too, resulting in thousands of the city’s homes lying empty for years.
Today, the median household income in Toledo is $49,724, more than $30,000 below the national rate.
With an owner-occupied housing rate of just over 53%, Toledo lags far behind similarly-sized cities around the country.
All the while, the number of unhoused individuals in Toledo’s Lucas county continues to rise, with shelters reporting full capacity during recent Arctic weather.
“[Residents] continue to hear that we have the hottest housing market for two years in a row, but they are struggling to make it, and for many, home ownership isn’t a reality,” says Theresa Gadus, a Toledo city councilmember.
“Toledoans have seen their rent increase 43% since 2021. Our unhoused population has doubled in that time. The increasing gap between wages and rent has made the American Dream unattainable for most of my residents.”
For Noah Woods, a staff attorney at the Fair Housing Center in Toledo, out-of-state property investors and speculators such as those that own Executive Towers have made matters much worse. The number of times the Fair Housing Center has had to litigate against property companies on behalf of tenants has increased from 20 in 2023 to 74 last year.
One company, SFR3, which owns and operates property company American Ave, has a tranche of LLCs that have been used to buy more than 100 properties in Toledo, according to the Lucas county auditor’s real estate information system.
“We’ve seen a lot that they rely on automated systems to, I think, reduce overheads. But then those systems are completely ineffective,” says Woods. Tenants, he says, will sometimes get an unexpected charge, which can lead to fees in the hundreds of dollars if left unpaid.
“The tenants are faced with being forced to pay that amount, or risk getting an eviction because they can’t get a hold of a live person. That’s a quick one-way ticket to eviction court.”
Sprott, whose family was among the thousands of sharecroppers who traveled north from Alabama during the Great Migration more than a century ago, says she reached out to Denizen Management, the company managing the property, asking for them to attend to the water leaking onto the carpet in her apartment.
In January, she and other residents of Executive Towers took Denizen Management to court for its alleged failure to fix issues related to water penetration.
On top of that, Sprott’s monthly water bill has rocketed to upwards of $200 a month.
“My bill keeps escalating – up by $50 every month. I don’t make that much money; there’s all these extra fees. It eats away at my paycheck,” she says.
Sprott says she left her previous residence last year because of its owner’s unwillingness to fix broken items in the home.
“But it’s hard to find a decent place with the amenities that I was promised in this neighborhood, that’s close to my job. I don’t drive [so] I kind of need to stay here.”
This is the first in a two-part investigation into how housing in the US’s most affordable cities is increasingly out of reach for working residents. In part two, we investigate the investors pricing out working-class Toledo residents.
