Renting to Housing Choice tenants requires that landlords pass not one, but two inspections: one from the city, and another from the housing authority.
"With Section 8 you have another set of eyes, so you have the city inspectors from the building division, but then you also have these inspectors from the housing authority, conducting Housing Quality Standard (HQS) inspections," explains Molly Metzger, a professor at Washington University who researches vouchers. "The idea behind the additional inspection is to prevent spending federal dollars on slumlord properties."
HQS inspections are performed to ensure "minimum health and safety" of the unit, says Cheryl Lovell, executive director of the St. Louis Housing Authority. Basic security is required: doors, windows, locks, smoke detectors, fire escapes. But inspections are strictly visual. "So if there is not peeling, cracking or chipping paint, that is the end of the inquiry," Lovell says. "There are landlords that know what they have to do as a minimum, and they do that."
Still, the goal is not to reject units and their landlords, but to work with them.
Speaking to the initial inspection, Lovell says, "A fair number of them fail." Landlords are given chances to address problems, and if they do, applications are approved — and funds start flowing. Up until the second-year inspection, she says, it is then on the tenant to alert the Housing Authority if negotiations for repairs are not successful.
Some tenants, though, say they fear complaining — they don't want to upset their landlord, risking retaliation or the loss of their voucher.
Lovell agrees that tenants might be in compromising situations that make it risky for them to call for support. But she says the housing authority has no responsibility to these tenants unless they call.
She takes a deep breath. "We used to do annual inspections, but with the new budget we've had to change." She adds, "Well, really, it has been like this since 2013" — referring to sequestration cuts to domestic spending that went into effect in March 2013. HUD, the source of housing authority funds, absorbed a disproportionate amount of cuts. The sequestration knocked $1.4 billion off the Housing Choice Voucher program.
"And we haven't even seen the budget for fiscal year 2018," Lovell notes. Those numbers, and the promise of even steeper cuts under President Donald Trump, seem to have the director worried.
Asked directly, Lovell would not comment on Cooper's performance as landlord.
As for the city, it requires all rental properties to pass inspection. But two years ago, it eliminated the requirement for an additional set of inspections for properties applying to host voucher holders.
After hearing that landlords were rejecting voucher holders to avoid the extra inspection, making it harder for low-income tenants to find good housing, a 2015 bill approved by the Board of Aldermen removed that additional hoop. (The bill was championed by Metzger and Alderwoman Christine Ingrassia.)
Now city inspections treat Housing Choice properties like any other rental. Whenever utilities change names, a Housing Conservation Inspection is triggered.
But inspections do not always ensure safe, habitable homes. Many residents, city officials and developers agree: City inspectors' work can vary widely. Beyond that, if violations are found, only the landlord is informed; the housing authority is not copied on violations in units occupied by voucher holders, says Mary Davis, secretary of the building commissioner.
Even if the building division finds violations, they do not directly threaten the landlord's stream of rent checks from the housing authority.
In 1967, more than 60 public housing tenants, primarily black women, picketed in front of the St. Louis Housing Authority, demanding policy changes, lower rent and better services.
At that time, the local housing authority did not base rent prices on income, but on the unit's square feet. Mothers who were unable to work full-time routinely could not afford their rent. The protesters' demands also arose from the housing authority's failure to address rodent infestations, lack of heating, poor infrastructure and widespread exposure to lead.
One of those residents was Jean King, a young mother, who refused to move from public housing until the inequality was addressed.
"Somebody's got to do something — I'm ready to go!" King said at an early meeting of tenants. After the meeting, King was elected president of the newly formed Citywide Rent Strike Committee.
After further organizing, in February 1969, public housing tenants began what would become the nation's longest, largest and most successful rent strike to date. Tenants demanded rent no more than 25 percent of their income, improved building maintenance and greater representation on the housing authority's board of commissioners.
By the fall of 1969, more than 2,400 tenants had withheld more than $600,000 in rent. The strike drove the St. Louis Housing Authority to near-bankruptcy.
"When we get our demands, the housing authority will get its money. And not a minute before," Jean King told reporters.
After nine months, the rent strike wore down Mayor Alfonso Cervantes and the housing authority. They agreed to the tenants' demands.
King went on to testify to the U.S. Senate, recommending that rent for publicly assisted housing be income-based. Her suggestions were included in the Brooke Amendment of the Housing Act of 1969, which limited rent to 25 percent of income. Federal subsidies for public housing were increased nationwide.
Decades have passed since the historic strike of St. Louis, yet few channels exist to hold landlords accountable. Keeping tenants safe from slumlords often conveniently falls just outside the jurisdiction of the housing authority, just outside the building division, and just outside the health department. Amanda Colón-Smith, who works with Dutchtown South, calls the issue "under-investigated, or, under-prosecuted."
Yet if housing conditions are to be addressed, Colón-Smith asserts, "The tenants have to be the center of the conversation, not just the properties... the actual people that live there."
She says, "It's not a short-term thing, it's a long-term thing. You have a whole community that has to grow up, experiencing problems that [these landlords] bring into the neighborhood."
"The tenants have to be the center of the conversation, not just the properties... the actual people that live there."
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Today, the city's enforcement mechanism fails to address large-scale neglectful landlords and protect tenant health, notes Alderwoman Ingrassia. "The fines of up to $500 are not incentivizing upkeep or investment in the area. It's either pocket change, part of an owner's business model, or they avoid paying it."
Enforcement of building stock conditions has long been a problem. In 1969 tenants successfully pushed for a citywide ordinance, requiring landlords to remove lead paint. However, the Real Estate Board of Metropolitan St. Louis refused to comply, gambling that the city would not prioritize funding. Later that year the mayor agreed, calling the ordinance "unenforceable" and citing a budget deficit.
Like Ingrassia, Alderwoman Spencer believes there is room to improve.
"We have to figure out how to empower the neighborhood to make the most of these properties," Spencer says. Given the funds, Spencer would invest in tenants' rights education and outreach. "It's a problem of resource allocation; we need to allocate money to take care of this."
In the city's balkanized system, each of its 28 wards are allotted equal resources for inspections and staff to deal with property. That means wards like Spencer's, which includes Dutchtown and other areas with a high number of underinvested properties, are stretched thinner than wards with high homeownership rates. "It is a system designed to fail," Spencer says.
Both Spencer and Cohn advocate for a "coordinated effort by the city" to deal with landlords like Cooper. "But inevitably things like policing become the priority over the building division," Cohn notes.
"This is an instance of a pervasive problem in St. Louis city," adds Martin.
Some local developers on the south side have offered one idea: They've attempted in some cases to buy properties from problematic landlords, including Cooper. But they worry that only gives him more money to increase his holdings on other blocks.
And a change in ownership is not a solution in and of itself. Often developers, elected officials and neighbors call for landlords to increase practices like tenant screening, instituting credit checks and application fees, reviewing eviction histories or arrest records. These same practices, however, would deny many of Cooper's current tenants housing. To Burleigh, promoting these practices is in effect saying, "'For all these people that are being taken advantage of, what we really want is for them to just to go away.'"
Over time, screening practices can have a systemic change on a neighborhood's complexion, income level and access to resources, whether intended or not. Recently, south-side neighborhoods like Tower Grove South and Shaw have seen large decreases in their black populations after instituting stabilization practices, census data shows.
"In this way we move poverty around our city. They blight one area, moving people to the next," says Colón-Smith. "If we don't focus on wealth-building — quality rentals, rebuilt credit, low-income homeownership — for families that are being taken advantage of, I don't see how we are really looking at systemic poverty."
Alderman Dan Guenther, who represents the ninth ward, worries about what would happen if the city tried to take a heavier hand with Cooper. He says, "I'm concerned for the residents potentially displaced if the city were to respond by boarding up all his buildings at once."
For Cooper, the concerns are different.
At the tax sale, he tells a reporter, "The city is a horrible place to live, absolutely, the city is so messed up. And nobody wants to do anything to straighten it up, unfortunately... It's sad."
Still, the city seems to have made him a lot of money. Projecting considerable returns and no shortage of low-income tenants, this year Nathan Cooper celebrates ten years of property ownership in the city. Cooper's model of concentration — of being a master of one area, no matter how horrible he finds it — has served him well.
How well it's served anyone other than Cooper, of course, is a question many people in the city are talking about these days.
"I'm concerned about the actual families who are here now, and I think the whole rest of the city should be concerned too," says Colón-Smith. "Folks got to live somewhere. And if you've got multiple evictions, where you going to live?"
She pauses. "We got to live together in this city."
