Leaks, mold, cold, sewage plague Anchorage apartments after California landlord took over

Mike Feign was fed up.

“This is the one where that pipe burst,” he said, pointing at a unit in Romig Court, the apartment complex at the edge of Anchorage’s Spenard neighborhood where he’d lived for six years.

During a tour of the property in January, Feign pulled up a video he’d taken on his phone a few weeks earlier. It showed water and steam pouring out of a busted pipe into a vacant apartment. That morning, Feign had rushed over to see if he could stop the flood.

“There was no deadbolt on the door,” he recalled.

Unable to turn it off, he made frantic calls as water pooled in the hallway outside the empty unit. When the Anchorage Fire Department eventually arrived, Feign said, they couldn’t get ahold of anyone in charge of the property or from Red Tail Residential, which owns it. Firefighters had to tear through walls and break into the locked utility room to find a shutoff valve, Feign said.

None of that, he said, was surprising. It fit a pattern in Red Tail’s ownership described by renters, in which small maintenance issues are ignored until they escalate into major problems that land on tenants’ backs.

“I might put in a maintenance request, but it’ll be like two months, six weeks before I see anybody here to do anything about it,” said Feign.

In 2022, midway through his tenancy, the out-of-state property company headquartered in Southern California bought the property, along with several others in Anchorage. After that — according to Feign and other tenants — conditions have gotten worse for the people living there.

Documents obtained through a public records request to the Municipality of Anchorage mirror many of the residents’ complaints, including city building inspectors’ frustrations about substandard living conditions and the company’s slow approach to fixing them.

Through its president, Red Tail said it takes residents’ maintenance requests seriously and promptly tries to fix them.

Feign cataloged various problems from the last few years: a persistent sinkhole that had been ineptly repaired several times; the apartment where the occupants had weekly drunken fights that brought police out; raw sewage flowing out of a rotted pipe in a crawlspace; and the washing machines that kept fouling clothes because frozen water lines filled the drums with rancid water.

“I think we might have a water leak,” Feign said as a plume of steam rose out of the laundry room into the cold January air.

Inside was a half-inch of warm standing water.

Feign sploshed through the steam and past a waterlogged laundry basket to check a valve.

He took out his phone and dialed Red Tail’s maintenance line.

“Good afternoon, Romig Apartments,” said a polite voice on the other end.

“Our laundry room is flooded. There is, like, hot water leaking from one of the lines on the washing machine, and this thing is full of water,” Feign said.

“Thank you for letting us know, we’ll be there soon,” the voice replied after a pause. Then it hung up.

“That’s the most they’ve answered the phone since I’ve been here,” said Feign, who meticulously documents his interactions with the company.

Red Tail had recently given Feign notice that he had to move out. He and his partner were paying $1,000 a month for their two-bedroom, barely more than when they moved in under the old landlord in 2019. He suspects that in addition to being annoyed with his complaints, the company wanted to push out legacy tenants so it can increase rents.

He walked over to the apartment of Bob Mentzer, 72, who has lived in various units at Romig for almost 30 years and used to be the property’s maintenance man.

“I had a leak under the sink and what the maintenance here did was give me a box of parts,” said Mentzer, his long gray beard swaying as he shook his head in disapproval.

Even as the quality of maintenance and building conditions has deteriorated, the costs charged to tenants have risen.

Up until recently, Mentzer said, the rent for his tidy first-floor apartment was $900 a month, which included utilities — a below-market-rate amount that was a holdover from what he’d worked out years ago with the previous owner. With little notice, he said, Red Tail raised the monthly cost to $1,475, closer to normal rental rates in Anchorage. It does not include utility costs like the old arrangement did. In December, his total bill was $1,627, a 55% increase from what he’d been paying for years, which he said is unsustainable on his Social Security and modest VA benefits.

“That’s more than we can actually afford,” Mentzer said. “Nobody will afford to live here.”

‘Dart boards’ for the company

Red Tail came to Anchorage around 2022, buying up six multifamily properties that year. Those include Romig Court, along with King’s Court in Fairview, the Nicole Apartments in Spenard, a set of townhomes in Bayshore and two apartment complexes in Eagle River. Since then, the company has expanded into other smaller towns in Alaska, including Kodiak, Palmer and North Pole, among others. Though it is far from the biggest owner of multifamily apartments in the state, it now operates around 600 units, according to the company.

One of the consistent complaints about the company from tenants and Anchorage building inspectors is that Red Tail’s Anchorage staff is spread extremely thin, and turns over so fast that it can be hard to know whom to call when there’s an issue.

Mike and Teana Huber, a married couple in their 50s, had managed commercial properties and apartments together for more than two decades when Red Tail hired them in California a few years ago. Property management used to be a very “mom and pop” line of work built on personal relationships, Mike said.

“The industry has moved away from that, quite a bit,” he added.

The couple spoke at an Anchorage Starbucks during a break from their weekend gig driving Uber passengers. They were dressed the same, both in gray athletic tops, jeans, glasses and identical hiking shoes, and they would finish each other’s sentences without a trace of annoyance.

Red Tail kept the couple on a property it acquired in Solvang, California, then moved them briefly to Alabama. In the fall of 2023, they drove to Alaska to manage the company’s apartments in Anchorage.

It did not go well.

Much of the Hubers’ experience managing buildings was with lower-income tenants, and they were clear-eyed about the challenges that come along with that corner of the real estate industry.

They were blasé recounting some of the problematic tenants at Red Tail’s Anchorage properties, like the “meth family with the dogs” that cut holes between rooms, or the guy who pulled a gun on a maintenance man. But the biggest issue during their tenure was the company itself and the abysmal state of the buildings, which they said Red Tail bought “sight unseen” without sufficient inspection.

“They were all very distressed to begin with,” Mike said of the physical properties. “It was just a disaster.”

They saw the boiler system fail at Romig in fall 2024, leaving dozens of tenants to heat their homes with electric space heaters for months as Anchorage temperatures dropped to around zero degrees in early winter. Water leaks and a ringing fire alarm were daily occurrences at King’s Court. Basic safety upgrades at Nicole Apartments dragged on for months because the decision-makers at Red Tail refused to approve a contractor, according to communications between municipal building inspectors and the company obtained through a public records request.

It was “penny pinching,” Mike recalled, which led to more costly systems failures and repairs when, for example, a pipe in an unheated vacant unit would burst or city inspectors would issue fines for busted electrical panels.

“It ended up costing so much because of the delays that corporate would cause because they wouldn’t sign off on things. They would approve a bid but then rescind it, then they would start questioning every little detail,” Mike said. “We were doing everything that we had authority to do. They like to play that blame game, though, where it’s pushed down to the lower people. The higher people never see any consequence of it.”

Tenants would come to Teana with questions about new charges on their bills, or late fees on payments made on time, or repair requests that hadn’t gotten a response.

She described the couple’s role as the “dart board” for the company, catching all of the angry barbs from residents.

“Another way of them trying to maximize (profits) is having fewer staff,” Mike said.

A record of complaints

Formal complaints from tenants filed with the Municipality of Anchorage about Red Tail, obtained through a public records request, confirm much of what the Hubers described from their tenure, as well as accounts from Feign, Metzer and multiple other former tenants. Though there is evidence of problems with the properties dating back to before Red Tail bought them, the frequency and intensity of the complaints increased under the company’s ownership.

“Rat poop, orange water (sewer or rust), no heat, black mold, unsafe electrical conditions, unsanitary conditions. Landlord refuses to move us, we have 2 small children and the apartment is not livable. Was supposed to come in, never did. We are being told we are stuck with it,” wrote one Romig tenant on March 2024, their name redacted from the records.

Another complainant contacted the city in February 2023 regarding the Nicole Apartments: “This building … is infested with bed bugs and mice. When I went out to the building there were no working lights in the hallway, broken fixtures such as heating/cooling ventilators, open mailboxes, wet floors in the hallway. The building appears run down, unsanitary, it appears like a ‘slum lord’ building.”

In the summer of 2023, an environmental remediation contractor submitted a report to Red Tail that it described as “highly confidential.” They’d sent away samples of material from under one of the Romig buildings. The report, obtained through a public records request, confirmed the presence of asbestos and flagged other health problems.

“During the inspection, several observations were made that raised concerns about potential mold issues in the apartment buildings, in addition to the asbestos sampling. These observations included the presence of black fuzzy material on the lower siding and window frames of the building,” the contractor wrote in the report, obtained through public records.

For months stretching from 2023 into 2024, city building inspectors received official complaints from Romig tenants about a terrible “sewage smell” permeating their homes. Eventually, it was determined a moldering pipe had been leaching raw sewage into the crawlspace below the building. In a redacted complaint from August 2023 filed with the city, a “sewer leak under the building (that) is causing raw sewage smells and mold issues. We have requested repairs since May to no avail.” That November, a Romig tenant contacted the municipality to ask if the sewage smell in their apartment “poses a health risk.”

The cesspool was beneath Feign’s first-floor apartment, and for months, he said, the unit smelled like an open latrine.

“It’s never acceptable for that to be the case,” Red Tail President JD Carbone said about the sewage leak during a phone interview in April. “From our team’s perspective and the culture of our company, we will never accept that.”

Carbone said he could not comment on individual tenant complaints, but said that when issues arise the company immediately begins trying to resolve them, and has spent over $8 million fixing up properties in its Alaska portfolio. Rent increases — especially for tenants who have been in apartments for a long time — are one of the “economic realities” that go along with the company’s role as a landlord contending with all kinds of inflationary pressures and rising costs, he said.

In the case of the failed boilers at Romig, he said, the building’s deferred maintenance and the difficulty in securing replacement equipment caused heating problems to drag on longer than they should have.

“What would take a day in the Lower 48 took several weeks in Romig’s case,” Carbone said. “We try to replace things proactively when we are able to.”

There were issues with retaining maintenance staff, he said, but that has been a broader challenge driven by economic trends more than by management decisions.

“The industry as a whole, across the entire country, is facing a shortage of maintenance professionals, and has been for a couple of years,” Carbone said. “In places like Alaska, the same professionals that might work in maintenance also work on the oil rigs. So it is a challenge across the country that we deal with. There was higher turnover in Alaska than we would have liked. I wouldn’t say it was abnormal.”

Limited local options

Among multifamily apartment owners in Alaska, Red Tail is a big player, and getting bigger. But even smaller buildings and operators are enmeshed in the same problem set: old structures, absentee landlords, little accountability when they fail their tenants.

The Municipality of Anchorage has a housing shortage driven by deteriorating stock, an anemic pace of construction and rising prices for existing homes. That makes city officials reluctant to take actions against landlords and property owners if it could mean displacing tenants.

“That’s been our battle, trying to figure out what we can do that’s effective against the landlord,” said Scott Campbell, chief of inspections for the city’s Development Services. “The Romig Court apartments are just one of a myriad.”

City inspectors have gone out to Romig and some of Red Tail’s other properties repeatedly, posting notices about the lack of heat and safety problems. They can issue fines, Campbell said, but his office has neither the staffing nor the legal authority to penalize most multifamily landlords short of ordering a building to vacate, which would put renters out on the street.

“Where are we gonna put all those people? We don’t have enough housing,” Campbell said in an April interview. “I feel like some of the tenants expect more out of us. But we’re doing everything we can.”

So meager are options for affordable rental units in Anchorage that earlier this year, as the municipality was helping Western Alaska residents displaced by ex-Typhoon Halong last October, some storm evacuees in the city were moved into Romig Court despite its poor track record with municipal inspectors.

Though the Anchorage Assembly passed a measure last fall making landlords liable for costs if tenants have to relocate to different accommodations, many property owners do just enough to stay ahead of the conditions that would trigger it, according to Lucas Cleek, a building inspector with the municipality.

“The people like Red Tail, that’s their business model,” Cleek said. “Keep (properties) afloat with minimal budget and try to recoup as much money as they can out of these buildings that are at the end of their lifespan.”

Part of the problem, Cleek and Campbell said, was that the state’s constitution affords landlords a lot of protections, with relatively few for tenants. As those are state rules, the city is limited in the steps it can take. But, they added, there is no state office specifically dedicated to handling complaints about violations of Alaska’s Landlord-Tenant Act.

“For me it just comes back to the housing supply issue,” said Anchorage Assembly Vice Chair Daniel Volland, who represents the part of town covering Romig Court and many other neighborhoods filled with deteriorating multifamily housing stock.

While he’s in favor of refining local rules to add sharper penalties for “out-of-state, checked-out landlords,” Volland views those measures as essentially Band-Aids amid a critical shortage in affordable houses and apartments that give residents better options to move into.

“We do have tools through code enforcement,” Volland said, adding that the problems arise from how long many of the formal processes take. “They’re required to be reported, sometimes multiple times.”

The Assembly and Mayor Suzanne LaFrance’s administration have approved a raft of measures intended to incentivize new housing construction, including multifamily stock, Volland said. But, he added, a lot of the powers that could make a difference for Red Tail’s tenants reside with state and federal authorities.

Longtime resident Mentzer said he hoped to find a way to stay at Romig, but was unsure how he would afford moving somewhere else in Anchorage given the relative scarcity of affordable housing options.

“If we go, it’s gonna be out of state,” he said as one of his cats strutted past.

For weeks, Feign and his partner struggled to find a new apartment for themselves, two dogs and a cat ahead of their March move-out order. Options were sparse, and where they did exist, they were expensive, shabby and wouldn’t take pets.

“We just could not find any place,” Feign said recently.

At one point, his partner almost flew to Arizona to crash with family. Feign would have couch surfed for a few months, he said. He was enrolled in a degree program at UAA, and didn’t want to leave before his coursework wrapped up for the semester. At another point, a friend offered a run-down RV if they could get it unburied from the snow and fixed up.

“We really didn’t want to move into an RV in February,” Feign said.

He’s pursuing legal action against Red Tail with the help of Alaska Legal Services Corp., a local nonprofit, hoping to recover around $6,000 for the months he paid full rent while dealing with sewer smells and no heat or hot water.

At the last minute, Feign and his partner secured an apartment. They are paying more for less compared to what they had at Romig: a one-bedroom in a rough part of downtown behind a dive bar, which costs them $1,300 a month.

At least, he said, the owners live on site and respond to problems quickly.