The Southern Towers apartment complex in Alexandria, Va., —right outside Washington, D.C.,—is like a city. It has five massive high-rise apartment buildings, along with its own bank, dry cleaners, and 7-Eleven.
Buses stream through the parking lot, constantly picking up and dropping off tenants, who use the transit system to get to work at nearby office buildings, hotels, restaurants, and nursing homes.
About 4,000 people live here. About 60% are immigrants, mostly from Africa, and a majority of the tenants are Black. Many of them work in service industries —as cooks, Uber drivers, nursing aides— jobs that have been hit especially hard by the pandemic.
Many of these residents have struggled to pay rent over the past year and been threatened with eviction.
“I live month to month. So, I don’t have money to pay rent. They take me in court,” says Mahlet Kassa, an immigrant from Ethiopia who worked at a nursing home until last March. She’s lived at Southern Towers for almost seven years.
Work dried up during pandemic
“I have two kids. I live alone. When the COVID is coming, I don’t have a babysitter and I stay home with my children,” she says, adding that she also worried about bringing the germ home if she continued to work.
Kassa received unemployment insurance and some rental assistance, but she says it was not enough to cover her $1,400 a month rent on time. So she’s had to go to court several times, including this past month, to keep from losing her home.
Sami Bourma, another tenant, who emigrated from Sudan, says he had three jobs —including one as a cook at the National Institutes of Health— to help pay for his one-bedroom apartment. But work dried up during the pandemic, leaving him months behind on rent. He too has received aid and his cooking job recently resumed part-time, but he has yet to catch up.
“Couple hours here, couple days there, but we’re still not able to cover the rent and expenses and food and supplies. Especially when you have kids home during this time, the expenses are going higher,” says the father of three.
Bert Bayou, who has been organizing the tenants with a group called African Communities Together, says many of the people in this close-knit immigrant community worry that they’ve become the latest victims in the nation’s affordable housing crisis.
Tenants especially worried about future
He says they’ve faced a flood of eviction proceedings — more than 500 by his group’s count — since last summer. While an eviction moratorium and government rental aid have kept most of them housed for now, the current moratorium is set to expire June 30.
The tenants are especially worried about what will happen to them in a few years when a new Amazon headquarters opens nearby.
“It’s very clear the idea is to renovate, to rebuild this apartment building and get rid of the African immigrant tenants from here and bring in Amazon corporate workers, where they know that those Amazon workers can pay more in rent,” Bayou says.
The owner of Southern Towers —the Los-Angeles based CIM Group— would not agree to be interviewed for this story. But in a written statement to NPR, the company says that it is “unequivocally not looking to force any residents from the property.”
CIM, which bought the complex last August for $506 million, says that many of the eviction filings were from the previous owner and that it currently has complaints against only 35 tenants. It also says it is working with these and other tenants to help them access available emergency rental assistance so they can stay in their homes.
