Dozens of Burmese refugees who fled persecution in their homeland have landed in recent years in cockroach-infested Milwaukee apartments, some thick with the smell of leaking sewage and almost all unprotected by working smoke or carbon monoxide detectors.
Many of the refugees were placed in the squalid conditions by Lutheran Social Services of Wisconsin and Upper Michigan, which acknowledges it never conducted a background check on the complex’s owner, Daniel Bruckner, a Fox Point lawyer.
State and city records reviewed by the Journal Sentinel show Bruckner faces hundreds of city building code violations and four city lawsuits, owes nearly a half-million dollars in delinquent property taxes and has seven felony convictions for importing child pornography.
Lutheran Social Services was unaware of Bruckner’s code violations and legal troubles, said Natascha Malkemes, a spokeswoman for the agency.
“We should know these things,” she conceded, adding,”We have our clients’ best interests at heart for sure.”
On Friday, the agency - which is paid federal dollars to settle refugees - released a statement saying, “The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has recently made our organization aware of litigation against and a criminal record of a landlord we have worked with in the past. Because of this development, Lutheran Social Services will immediately begin looking into ways to put procedures in place to apply background check standards on all of the landlords we work with.”
In addition, the agency pledged to contact the refugees who rent from Bruckner and assist any who wish to move.
Bruckner placed the blame for most of his 443 building-code infractions at Wilson Park Garden Apartments on his tenants, especially the Burmese refugees…
…The U.S. State Department’s standard agreement with social services agencies says refugees should have “decent, safe and sanitary housing” with working smoke detectors, adequate heat and electrical fixtures, and should be “free of rodent and insect infestation” with “no detectable dangerous or unsanitary odors.”
But in interview after interview, refugees living in the apartments on S. 20th St. said they had tried for months without success to get Bruckner to fix failings in these areas…
…The cockroach problems had persisted for months, according to residents, and were evident in numerous visits by reporters to the complex.
At night, bugs came out and bit her children, explained Paw Shee during an interview two weeks ago. Shee, a 36-year-old, lives at the apartment complex with her husband, three children and an army of roaches. Sometimes the bugs crawled over her face, Shee said,
speaking through an interpreter.
When workers finally fumigated apartments on May 5, they did so while adults and young children were inside, according to the residents. Missy Henriksen, a spokeswoman for the National Pest Management Association, said manufacturers usually recommend that a spray be dry before people re-enter a room.
One floor above, Moo Nge, his wife and their five children had one of the few carbon monoxide detectors in the apartments that reporters visited. The detector was installed only after Moo Nge was rushed to the hospital in September with carbon monoxide poisoning, which family members said happened when he was cooking. The hospitalization forced him to miss work, and he lost his temp job.
On the top floor of the same building lives a woman named Mu Mu, 43, her three children and three other family members. Their refrigerator is broken. So is one of the toilets, and there is a gaping hole behind the bathtub faucet.
“We tried to call, but he did not come,” Mu Mu said when asked about the landlord…
…Malkemes acknowledged that her agency had no idea that Bruckner is a convicted felon with a history of serious building-code violations who is being sued by the city in four different lawsuits. She agreed that these issues could affect the safety of the refugees.
When asked about the cockroach infestation at the apartments, Malkemes said by email: “New arrivals come from refugee camps where they had no electricity or running water, and sometimes are not accustomed to general upkeep or how to properly store food. In these camps, refugees are often exposed to insects and this is their everyday (life).”
Non-refugees agree
Although Bruckner and his building manager blamed refugees for the cockroach problem, other tenants who are not refugees also described having infestation problems at Wilson Park Garden Apartments. Moreover, these tenants provided accounts that mirrored other hardships cited by the refugees.
Families described arriving in winter to apartments without heat, going days without working refrigerators and weeks or months without working stoves. The problems the families described are consistent with those cited in inspectors’ reports.
Despite these conditions, the non-refugee tenants were paying as much as $845 a month in rent…Read more here
Christopher Coen
Melissa Sogard
nancylee1
Oh gosh. World Relief, in my opinion one of the public’s most intransigent and problem-plagued refugee resettlement contractors, continues to spread itself out (problems including refusing to hire an interpreter because he was Muslim, partner church staff and members moving into apartment complexes with refugees to “foster deeper relationships”, alienating other partner churches and having refugee clients work without pay, and placing new refugees in other refugee clients’ homes without agreements.) The group will soon open a new office in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and may begin resettling its first group of refugees in February. A reader-submitted announcement about the office opening is found at The Oshkosh Northwestern:
