Well it's only been a month and already I'm being told that some Heritage House refugees who were placed in rental properties by the Interactive Resource Center and Beth McKee-Hugler's Greensboro Housing Coalition were unable to afford their more expensive rents and have moved out or are about to move out of the houses and apartments they were placed in.
Beth never did answer my question from July 24th.
Two of these refugees are crashing under the roof of another Heritage House refugee. Others are simply staying where they were put without paying the rent until eviction comes knowing they'll need every penny they can hang on to just to survive.
Something no one from the City thought about was the squatters. With water and electricity in every unit and many units abandoned by their owners, Heritage House was the perfect place for squatters. No matter how you feel about squatters they exist and some of the people living in Heritage House had no other means but to squat. Putting them in another rented property and forgetting about them didn't solve the problem. Now you have a landlord who trusted the City and isn't getting paid September's rent as well as another person, possibly even an entire family, soon to be on the street. Multiply that by 177 units-- the number of condos at Heritage House.
That's not how problems are solved.
Add to that the fact that I'm only in touch with a small percentage of the over 400 people known to live at Heritage House and one can't help but wonder, How big is this problem? And why isn't the Greensboro City Council talking about it?
Mark my word, before all is said and done, Heritage House will be the biggest scandal to hit Greensboro since the 1979 Klan-Nazi shootings and while no one has died that I know of it will have directly affected a lot more people.
