As Corporate Landlords Spread, a Mold Epidemic Takes Root

Sunset Ridge is divided into 26 buildings, 12 units each. From Caban’s building, Building 32, it’s a short walk past a pristine playground with a bright yellow tube slide to get to Building 26, where Sierra Michaels’ 10-year-old daughter takes constant puffs of an inhaler to keep her asthma under control. (Michaels asked to use a pseudonym for fear of retaliation from her landlord.) A few steps further is Building 22, where Maya Gamble, who also has asthma, lives with her 6-year-old daughter, who’s recently begun breathing heavily, just like her mother. Down a long asphalt driveway is Building 9, where Shaquesha (who asked that only her first name be used) lives with her three young kids; her youngest, a 1-year-old boy (who, like Gabriel, has lived in the complex his whole life), was diagnosed with asthma in February. Many of these tenants, like Michaels and her infant boy, also suffer severe, chronic allergies, all year long.

Their stories share three key components: Their conditions began or severely worsened after they moved into Sunset Ridge. Their apartments have been or are filled with mold. And their landlord has been informed about these conditions for months, and months, and months, and failed to make meaningful repairs.

“I’ve been complaining about this for so long,” Michaels told me in April. ​“At this point, I’m just like, whatever, I’ll deal with it. But when it’s affecting my kids, that’s the issue.”

While roughly 8% of all U.S. adults have asthma, the rate is double in New Haven. In 2021, the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America ranked New Haven fifth on its list of the country’s top 20 asthma capitals. Research from the Yale Global Health Justice Partnership has also shown that in New Haven’s lowest-income neighborhoods — the same neighborhoods once demarcated by racist housing policies such as redlining — asthma rates climb as high as 23%. While possible causes vary widely, from family history to air pollution, a growing body of evidence suggests housing can play a major role.

In 2015, for example, the city of New Haven declared a 301-unit complex, Church Street South, uninhabitable because of widespread mold, and the site later became the subject of a massive class action lawsuit brought against out-of-state landlord Northland Investment Corporation on behalf of nearly 1,000 former tenants. A 2018 Yale School of Medicine survey of those former tenants, which was submitted to the court for the lawsuit, revealed a staggering 37% of adults and 48% of children had physician-diagnosed asthma; 99% of those with respiratory problems said their symptoms began or worsened at Church Street South. After being demolished in 2018, the lot remains empty. The tenants have been scattered.

But the problems did not end there. I interviewed two dozen low-income tenants in New Haven — more than half of whom live or lived at Sunset Ridge — who connect their respiratory problems with their living conditions. Most say they were perfectly healthy before moving into the complex.

Housing conditions have long been linked to this country’s health crises. In 1978, as the vast majority of U.S. children showed elevated levels of lead in their blood, the federal government banned the use of lead-based paint in all residential buildings. In the half-century since, the percentage of U.S. homes putting people at risk of lead poisoning has continuously decreased.

Mold, however, has yet to receive anywhere close to the same governmental attention. While studies connecting mold, housing and health date back to at least the 1950s, mold did not appear on the federal housing inspection checklist — which is used to force landlords to resolve health and safety issues and thus determine a property’s eligibility for further public funding — until 2023. Additionally, as ProPublica and the Southern Illinoisan reported in 2018, the Department of Housing and Urban Development had long prior given passing grades to buildings with toxic mold. Consequently, mold outbreaks have historically been allowed free rein across low-income housing — from private to public, locally owned to nationally owned.

Plus, the rate of mold infestation — and all the illness it brings — is heading in the opposite direction as lead. As climate change batters coastal cities like New Haven with increasingly intense rainstorms and flooding, all that extra water ends up somewhere — often in the ceilings, walls and floorboards of tenants like Caban, who says her unit floods every time it rains. Afterward, she says, the mold arrives within days.

Now, in a worrisome trend, corporate landlords — whom research has shown have poorer maintenance records — are buying up rental housing. By the end of 2020, corporate entities like LLCs owned at least 44% of U.S. rental housing, and that number is still growing. Studies in Wisconsin and New York have shown LLC-owned properties to be less likely to be up to code and faster to deteriorate. In cities like New Haven, where nearly 75% of the population rents and half of housing was built before 1940, these increasing corporate buy-ups paired with deteriorating conditions in older buildings create the perfect storm for a public health crisis. All the tenants I spoke with live in corporate-owned buildings — Sunset Ridge was purchased by out-of-state private equity firm Capital Realty Group in July 2023 — and many receive little aid from city regulatory agencies in getting their mold infestations fixed, leaving New Haven’s lawyers, doctors and housing advocates to pool their scant resources to try to pick up the slack.

But Gabriel Caban doesn’t yet know about any of that. All he knows is that sometimes, it’s hard to breathe.

Dr. Pamela Kwittken, a pediatrician and allergist at Fair Haven Community Health Care, says she sees patients like Gabriel ​“very frequently.” When tenants breathe in allergens like mold spores, she explains, lungs become inflamed, causing airways to spasm and close, and mucus secretions increase, quickly clogging up their respiratory systems. Continuous exposure can cause chronic asthma, a disease with a wide range of severe consequences, from perpetual school absences to, for thousands every year, death.

“Technically, you’re suffocating,” Kwittken says. ​“People describe asthma as having an elephant sitting on their chest.”

Housing, says Kwittken, is what leading health agencies call a ​“social determinant of health.” Even if a tenant has asthma medication, if they live and sleep surrounded by the source of the allergen, medication can only do so much. In this way, mold remediation — which tenants typically rely on their landlords to do — becomes necessary medical care.

A 2022 study in The Lancet puts numbers to what Kwittken has observed: housing conditions drive ER visits. Analyzing more than 11,000 asthma-related ER visits by New Haven residents over four years, researchers found that ​“increased emergency department visits for asthma were strongly correlated with lower housing inspection scores.” The researchers even found that these ER visits could be used to reliably predict whether buildings would fail future housing inspections.

Capital Realty is not the only corporate landlord in New Haven whose tenants report a pattern of housing-driven asthma and allergies. I spoke with eight families in eight different buildings owned by Ocean Management, one of the largest low- income landlords in New Haven (and long a notorious subject of tenant complaints), about their health concerns. There was Shaquita Alston, a personal care assistant who says her asthma flare-ups have sent her to the ER more than 10 times during the 13 years she lived in her Ocean unit, which she says has ​“out of control” mold and roach problems. There was Rebecca Lebron, who says she watched her daughter go from congestion, to headaches, to throwing up, to the hospital as mold grew under her bedroom in her Ocean apartment. Then there was Melissa Annunziata, who said she continuously complained to Ocean about mold caused by recurring rainwater damage, until she died in the summer of 2023 — from a heart attack that her husband, Robert Walters, believes began because she couldn’t breathe.

In a written statement to In These Times, Gerald T. Giaimo, a lawyer representing Ocean Management, acknowledged previous mold-related complaints from both Alston’s and Annunziata’s apartments and the repeated complaints of water damage in Annunziata’s home, but disputed that chronic mold problems went unaddressed. (In one instance, Giaimo claimed that Annunziata and Walters only complained about mold once, in October 2022, but text messages shared with In These Times show that the couple also complained about black mold two months later, in December 2022.) Giaimo also repeatedly framed the tenants as obstacles in getting the unit’s problems addressed, charging that Alston denied maintenance workers entry to her unit and that Annunziata and Walters had caused flooding by placing a carpet over a drain basin. (“That is absolutely not true,” Walters said.) In These Times was unable to review Annunziata’s medical records, but her family says they are convinced that her living conditions played a role in her death.

When I spoke with Annunziata in late August 2023, she told me, ​“Now I’m having breathing issues because not only am I asthmatic but I’m allergic to the mold and mildew.” Earlier that year, she and Walters stopped paying rent in protest of Ocean’s neglect. In response, Ocean sent them an eviction notice. (In his statement, Giaimo wrote that Ocean tenants ​“are not allowed to withhold rent ​‘in protest’ of any condition,” emphasizing that such ​“self-help is illegal.”) We made plans for Annunziata to send me court documents as her eviction case progressed.

But then, two days after we spoke, she collapsed.

“Her breathing was really labored,” Walters told me in March, sitting on an aging gray sectional clearly meant for two as he recalled the day he had to call 911. ​“I kept looking out there [for the ambulance], telling her, ​‘I’m trying, Melissa, I’m trying.’”

A few minutes later, she was dead, at just 49 years old.

“My daughter will be outside, she’ll be fine,” says Michaels, who is currently in nursing school. ​“Comes home, nose is stuffy. Nothing is taking away her cough. I bring her to the doctors; she has asthma. Never had asthma before.”

The doctors and lawyers who meet these tenants are emphatic that the ripple effects of these ailments go beyond the body. Dr. Ada Fenick, a pediatrician who founded Yale New Haven Hospital’s Medical Legal Partnership—which connects patients with lawyers in an effort to address the social determinants affecting their health — explains that the first ripple is immediate: If a child is really sick, they aren’t going to school. In severe cases, missed school due to asthma can affect a child’s likelihood of graduating, changing their entire life’s trajectory.

The second ripple is what Fenick called ​“societal costs.” The tenants most impacted by poor housing are often also on some form of publicly subsidized health insurance like Medicaid, which fully covers asthma medications. According to one CDC study, from 2008 to 2013 asthma cost Americans more than $80 billion, about half of which goes to public insurance costs. Connecticut alone spends close to $100 million a year on asthma hospitalizations and ER visits. As Fenick says, ​“I pay for Medicaid and you pay for Medicaid.”

The third ripple is about stability.

“When my clients get sick, their parents stay home from work and a lot of them are hourly employees,” says Sarah Mervine, a housing attorney and director of the Center for Children’s Advocacy Medical Legal Partnership at Yale New Haven Health. ​“If they don’t show up to their job, they don’t get paid. I have this happen all the time, where somebody will say, ​‘My kid was hospitalized three times in a row and I lost my job because of this bad housing.’ So you can see how it’s this terrible cycle.”

Several parents at Sunset Ridge worry these ripples are moving toward their own kids. Amanda John’s 7-year-old son is smart and energetic; their living room is full of Legos. But she often wonders how continuing to live with the mold could harm him.

“What is going to happen to him in the long run?” asked John, speaking in a quiet, slightly raspy voice. ​“He’s a child. He doesn’t have a choice of where he lives.”

Eichler was a leader in this national trend: In 2021, he led Capital Realty in acquiring more than 4,400 affordable housing units — the third-highest acquisition rate of all U.S. landlords that year. As he did, reports of complaints at his buildings emerged in local media across the country. Then, in July 2023, Capital Realty added Sunset Ridge to its portfolio at a cost of $17.7 million. The company received federal assistance for the purchase through the Low Income Housing Tax Credit, through which the Department of Housing and Urban Development provides municipalities funds to incentivize the acquisition and rehabilitation of affordable housing. A conservative estimate, based on advertised rents for the building’s 312 units over one year, suggests Capital Realty now rakes in $3 million in rental income annually from Sunset Ridge tenants. In theory, Capital Realty should have a reliable war chest to facilitate the ​“redevelopment” it touts as part of its business model.

In theory.

Caban has pleaded over and over with Sunset Ridge to apply its profits to her mold problem. ​“The closet floor is full of black mold my baby has been sick for two weeks now I already reported it to the doctors,” she texted to her building super in March.

But as screenshots of Caban’s text conversation show, the super left her message ​“on read” — failing to respond. Caban says Capital Realty did nothing for months, even as her March rent disappeared into its bank account.

Capital Realty did not respond to multiple requests for comment on either the conditions at Sunset Ridge or their business practices.

“It’s hard to be a single mom,” Caban says. ​“I don’t get help from nobody. I just don’t think it’s fair that I have to live in that condition with my son. They just care about getting their money and that’s it.”

The tenants I spoke with were unanimously dissatisfied with Capital Realty’s management practices, saying that services and response time declined after the company bought Sunset Ridge (even as they say the previous management company was woefully inadequate too).

“Nothing ever gets done,” says Sabrina, another Sunset Ridge tenant who asked to use a pseudonym for fear of retaliation. Sabrina says her mom and brother had to move out of their family’s unit in one building after a rampant mold problem in the bathroom exacerbated her brother’s asthma so much that he could no longer shower in the apartment. Sabrina has since moved to another building in the complex, but says that mold soon began to grow there, too. ​“I told Capital Realty about the problems that [are] going on in my house. Nobody has fixed anything.”

John agreed: ​“If I’m like, ​‘Hey I think there’s mold, can you come look at it?’ they’ll be like, ​‘No.’ I cannot breathe in here.”

In at least one case, even informing Capital Realty that a child’s health is at risk hasn’t been enough for them to respond. Michaels’ pediatrician wrote a letter to Capital Realty Group this February, in support of Michaels’ request for remediation. ​“The chronic nature of these symptoms in all members of the family was very concerning for an allergic exposure,” the doctor wrote. ​“Mold exposure is very serious. … I hope the landlord will fix these issues for the health of this child and his family.” Michaels says she informed Capital Realty of the letter and even then the mold remained untreated.

As a condition of the federal funding Capital Realty received to purchase the building, they are required to keep Sunset Ridge in ​“decent, safe and sanitary condition.” So what Capital Realty should do when they discover that mold has permeated a home is typically an extensive mold abatement process, according to Mervine. For example, if there’s a ceiling leak, she says, a landlord ought to investigate its cause. If necessary, they should move the tenant out temporarily, preferably along with the rest of the tenants who share that roof, and put them in a hotel so the landlord can ​“tear into the roof and do something for real.” But that’s an expensive project.

Instead, tenants say, the most Capital Realty typically does is send maintenance staff in with a spray bottle and fresh paint to cover up the spots. Michaels, John, Gamble and Dalesha Adkins, a former tenant, all say they experienced this firsthand. John says maintenance even arrived with a spray bottle that prominently read ​“Not for use for the coverage of mold,” even as the maintenance employee told her it would kill it all. She ended up buying the materials needed to repair her bathtub herself.

Despite the reports of Capital Realty’s widespread failure to fix tenants’ homes, residents did note two major changes since the company’s purchase: cosmetic renovations to the exterior of the complex, like new trees and flowers; and a massive rent hike in January — as much as $400 a month in some units — despite Capital Realty’s written promise in a July 2023 letter introducing itself to tenants that rents ​“will not change.”

As Capital Realty has expanded its extractive model of housing across the country, allegations of unaddressed mold have followed. In the past three years, local outlets have covered severe mold outbreaks in Capital Realty buildings from Washington, D.C., to New Orleans to Chicago. The Chicago case — in which one tenant said management’s response to mold concerns was to give them a bottle of Fabuloso — became so notorious that in 2021 Rev. Jesse Jackson publicly endorsed residents’ calls for a rent strike.

Back in New Haven, Capital Realty seemed sensitive to the possibility of negative press.

In April, after a tenant invited me to Sunset Ridge to observe a city inspection alongside two Capital Realty maintenance workers, it was made clear that my presence wasn’t welcome. Later, as I left another tenant’s apartment, the same maintenance workers stood waiting outside the door.

“You have to go,” they told me, and hustled me toward the exit.

A few minutes after I left, it began to rain.

After months of asking Capital Realty for help, Caban called LCI in late April. The next morning, LCI dispatched an inspector to take a look. When I spoke with Caban an hour later, she sounded hopeful — public records show LCI failed the apartment for eight separate violations, including damp walls, lack of weatherproof windows and (in a phrase LCI used repeatedly in inspection reports) an order to ​“rid wall of black like substance.”

“They have three weeks,” Caban said, referring to the 21-day period LCI gives landlords to fix most violations. ​“Within those three weeks they have to come.” According to Caban, LCI told her they would schedule a reinspection, before which Capital Realty would have to fix all code violations. For Caban, it was a victory: ​“They have to come and fix everything.”

But by early July, Caban says, LCI had neither gotten back in touch nor returned to reinspect the unit. And while Capital Realty did send maintenance workers in May to replace Caban’s mold-infested kitchen floorboards, she says they failed to fix regularly leaking windows and broken washing machines next door, which still send water flooding inside her unit and have already begun rotting the new floorboards.

Had LCI returned, as they assured Sunset Ridge tenants in a public meeting this April that they routinely do, they surely would have seen that. Instead, nearly three months after Caban’s apartment failed inspection, she said her son Gabriel was still breathing in mold and had wound up in urgent care yet again. (LCI declined to answer questions specific to Caban’s case.)

Of the dozen New Haven housing attorneys I interviewed, most agreed that LCI’s failure to follow through is par for the course for the agency.

“If you’re lucky, you get in touch with someone at LCI and the inspector comes out,” says Mervine, emphasizing that LCI is woefully understaffed. ​“If you’re lucky, they write the report and you actually get a copy of it. If you’re lucky, they get it to the landlord.”

When I met with New Haven Legal Assistance’s housing unit, attorneys characterized LCI as plagued with ​“basic incompetency,” where tenants and lawyers have to ​“beg” the city for help.

Since 2020, according to LCI’s publicly available New Haven database, there have been 79 recorded housing code complaints at Sunset Ridge, and those records serve as bleak confirmation of the lawyers’ experiences. At least 46 complaints resulted in failed inspections. But it’s not clear whether any of the remaining 33 complaints resulted in passing inspections, since the majority were listed as ​“closed” (without explanation), and the remainder as ​“non-entry” (meaning the inspector couldn’t get in) or still open.

Only one inspection — a follow-up more than a month after a failure — is labeled ​“passed,” but a subsequent inspection of the same unit two weeks later is inexplicably labeled ​“3^rd fail.”

These inspections unearthed a combined 202 housing code violations. Among the failed inspections, 13 found damp, bulging or damaged ceilings; 9 found the apartment was not weatherproofed; 8 found water leaks; 7 found damp or damaged walls; 7 found old or unsanitary carpets; and 3 found molded drywall. All of these violations are hallmarks of hazardous levels of mold.

LCI consistently recorded dangerous conditions at Sunset Ridge for four years; inspections from June 2020, before Capital Realty bought the complex, and June 2024, after it took ownership, both found at least one of these violations. Yet LCI rarely returned to the units to confirm that the problems had been fixed. Only 15 of 46 complaint files with a failed inspection show that LCI came back to check, even though many of those apartments had violations, such as a water leak, that landlords are typically obligated to fix within days. Four of the 15 reinspections took place more than three months after the initial inspection, and all four occurred less than a week after LCI responded to In These Times’ request for comment on the lack of reinspections at the property.

“We come back out,” LCI promised Sunset Ridge tenants in the April public meeting. ​“We do a reinspection. Hopefully, everything is taken care of and we can close the account. If not, we’ll give [the landlord] a little nudge and come out again.”

In an email to In These Times, Lenny Speiller, director of communications for New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker, responded to a request for comment on behalf of LCI. ​“Given the nature and volume of your questions,” Speiller wrote, ​“we are unfortunately unable to answer your questions.” He also claimed that ​“the number of inspections by the Livable City Initiative (LCI) has increased by 66% year-over-year — and, in the most recent city budget, Mayor Elicker proposed and prioritized increasing the number of housing inspectors and staff.”

However, based on an LCI-provided list of all 2023 housing code complaints, no property appeared more frequently than Sunset Ridge, which, with 19 complaints, made up over 1% of all complaints that year. But still, LCI routinely failed to reinspect.

In the past, LCI has repeatedly been criticized, including for alleged mismanagement of complaints and refusing to utilize important rental licensing regulations. Until this August, LCI’s director was Arlevia Samuel, who was concurrently listed as a realtor for Coldwell Banker Real Estate, which landlords such as Ocean Management regularly hire to help with their property exchanges. Both LCI and Samuel herself were asked to comment on any potential conflict of interest, but Speiller, on behalf of LCI and Samuel, declined. In These Times found no evidence that in her private-sector role, Samuel worked directly with Ocean or other management companies involved in low-income housing in New Haven.

Shaquesha, whose 1-year-old was diagnosed with asthma in February, also called LCI in mid-April. When the agency’s inspector arrived a few days later, she invited me to observe. The inspector didn’t bring anything to write with and was in the apartment for less than 10 minutes. The inspector did, however, bring along two Capital Realty maintenance staff, reassuring her that ​“these guys are going to take care of everything” before all three left together. (Later that day, those same maintenance workers escorted me off the Sunset Ridge premises.)

Though her unit failed its inspection — yielding four different violations, including an order to ​“remove drywall with black like substance” — Shaquesha said that two months later, LCI still hadn’t followed up. She wasn’t even informed her unit had failed, since LCI only sends inspection reports to landlords. (Shortly after In These Times requested comment on Shaquesha’s case in July, LCI reinspected the unit and closed the case that same day.)

“It takes months for LCI to go there, to inspect, to issue the report, to know all the problems,” says Rae Dehal, a lawyer with New Haven Legal Assistance. ​“Sometimes there will be 16 problems and I can go into the client’s house and see [them] with my own eyes. I can see the water leak behind the wall. And LCI, for whatever reason, won’t write it down. Can you please do just the bare minimum of your job and put this in the report?”

For tenants facing a mold-driven health crisis like those at Sunset Ridge, calling LCI is especially unhelpful, as the agency cannot and will not actually identify mold.

Mervine’s clients frequently report LCI telling them, ​“We can’t come out because we don’t identify mold.” Shelly White, another Legal Aid lawyer, agreed, saying, “[LCI] really resists looking for mold. We’re convinced it’s black mold, but [the tenant] can’t get anybody to identify it or even point them in another direction.”

Speiller disputed this, writing, ​“when there is a substance that resembles mold, LCI inspectors issue a housing code violation for the landlord to take corrective action within 21 days, after which LCI then reinspects the property to ensure compliance. If the violation is not addressed, LCI then takes additional enforcement action as necessary, including engaging the state’s attorney to take the landlord to housing court.”

Yet additional testimony from Sunset Ridge tenants suggests that LCI inspectors are either untrained or unwilling to assess persistent mold problems. In April, after Michaels’ son’s pediatrician had connected the family’s health problems with the mold in their apartment, Michaels called LCI and asked them to inspect her unit. She was told nobody would come because the mold wasn’t visible to the naked eye. Meanwhile, Caban says LCI told her not to clean any of the mold to ensure the inspector wouldn’t miss it.

While they waited, Caban and her son continued to breathe it in.

But no similar mandates to protect tenants from mold have been enacted.

The lack of laws around mold abatement and the perceived reticence of government agencies like LCI to identify it become significant obstacles when housing lawyers like White and Dehal take landlords to court to demonstrate to a judge that mold is the root of their clients’ health conditions.

“We can’t prove it,” White says. ​“There’s no way to prove it.”

The problem these lawyers are facing has gained national attention. In 2023, U.S. Reps. Joe Courtney (D-Conn.) and Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio) and Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) introduced the Healthy at Home Act, which would set clear ​“quality requirements” for mold in all federally subsidized housing and housing construction while mandating federal research and eventual standards-setting on mold, which could then be applied to the entire private housing market.

The bill was inspired by a complex much like Sunset Ridge: Branford Manor, a 442-unit complex in Groton, Conn., that is also owned by a massive private equity real estate firm and which tenants alleged in a recent class action lawsuit was riddled with mold. Courtney met the building’s tenants in early 2023 as they were pursuing the lawsuit.

“Tenants sounded a call for action,” Courtney says. ​“This problem has to be looked at much more comprehensively.”

The legislation Courtney drafted in response to that meeting draws heavily from the lead-paint standards enacted for all residential buildings in the 1970s and ​’80s. In the decades since those reforms, the average amount of lead in the U.S. population’s blood has declined by more than 93%.

The real estate lobby, unsurprisingly, opposes the new bill. But, as Courtney noted, that lobby opposed lead reform too. Now, nearly 50 years later, there’s ​“no debate anymore about the need to remediate lead paint.” Given that rising global temperatures will exacerbate mold issues, Courtney added, the bill is also a necessary response to climate change.

In the bill’s current form, however, it would take at least six years for mold standards to be enacted in a way that affects complexes like Branford Manor and Sunset Ridge (allowing three years for research, and three more to set the standards). And that’s assuming the bill becomes law, which Courtney says is unlikely until next year at the earliest, if ever.

But their capacity is thin and money is tight. Mervine says there are thousands of cases that could be referred to her at any given time, and she’s the only permanent housing-focused attorney on staff, making the MLP’s aid more of a golden ticket than a guarantee. Despite having a much larger housing staff, New Haven Legal Assistance is also often overwhelmed by sheer call volume and has to turn people away.

Caban was one of them. ​“They’re not receiving any calls at the moment,” she recalled being told.

Failing option one, Caban could find help from a civil rights attorney, like David Rosen in New Haven. Over the past decade, Rosen’s firm has spearheaded two massive class action lawsuits on behalf of tenants at complexes — New Haven’s now-demolished Church Street South, and Groton’s Branford Manor (which inspired the Healthy at Home bill) — marred by the same conditions Caban can’t escape. Both cases resulted in settlements of more than $12 million for the tenants, with some payouts to individual tenants climbing to over $20,000 — a life-changing sum for many.

But these cases take time, particularly if landlords downplay the indisputable impacts of mold on tenant health. It took more than four years from Rosen’s first filing in the Church Street South case — where the defense’s expert witness claimed, despite dozens of studies to the contrary, there is ​“no demonstrated connection” between mold and respiratory conditions — to reach a settlement.

Rosen’s firm is also seemingly the only firm in the country regularly taking on these lawsuits, even though, Rosen says, nearly any large low-income building in America likely has a case.

“Nobody has paid much attention to it,” Rosen says. ​“It’s insidious.”

So, Caban is still waiting.

Another option, according to conventional wisdom, is to move. Michaels’ pediatrician told her that was her family’s best option. A majority of the tenants interviewed at Sunset Ridge said they were looking for new apartments; some had already left. But finding low-income housing, let alone low-income housing that’s well maintained, is no easy feat, not to mention the costs and logistics of moving that tenants must manage along the way.

So far, Caban has stayed put.

“Even if I was to move out, there’s somebody else that’s going to move in there,” Caban says. ​“The same way I didn’t know there was hazards, they’re not gonna know there’s hazards in there. I don’t think that’s fair to another person either.”

For some, the only serious answer is building new, affordable housing — and lots of it — to simultaneously lower rents and improve living conditions. But others warn this response just hits the snooze button on the alarm of a failed housing market; someone still has to own that housing, a landlord like Capital Realty could still snatch it up, and, without proper maintenance, the mold could soon return. Some doctors, like Kwittken, suggest requiring all buildings like Sunset Ridge to become mixed-income, to encourage more ​“responsible” management, reflecting the cynical yet well-established reality that poor tenants’ complaints are easier for the likes of Capital Realty to ignore.

Because ultimately, that’s who Caban, Gabriel and countless other low-income tenants at Sunset Ridge and across the nation are waiting on: their landlords. Everything else, as Mervine puts it, is just a subsidy for the corporate owners. While Capital Realty profits, the burden of tenant care falls to understaffed healthcare providers and housing code agencies. While Capital Realty profits, medical-legal partnerships and legal aid programs and class action lawsuits appear to give a select few tenants a fighting chance.

“A lot of these big landlords could afford [to fix the mold],” Mervine says. ​“They would just have no profit. But we so believe in the American Dream, and as I always say, as long as we call them ​‘lords,’ they’re always going to have the law better serve them.”

As long as corporate landlords can profit from business as usual, there will always be another Beatriz and Gabriel Caban.

At 8:45 p.m. one night in late June, there’s a stop in the rain that has been falling all day at Sunset Ridge. Puddles grow around the playground in front of Building 32, water rushes into the rusty storm drain outside Building 26, and pools of water reach six inches deep in the lot outside Building 9 — mere steps from the basement units, where the soaked windows are only two inches above the dirt.

Tenants arriving home for the night don’t mill about — the rain has only stopped for a moment. So they hurry inside, into the homes Capital Realty and the city are required to keep safe, where the mold is already beginning to grow again.

Fact-checking provided by Aina Marzia.