JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – Jacksonville Mayor Lenny Curry will have his requested face-to-face meeting Wednesday with the secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Curry wants to discuss deplorable living conditions at the Eureka Gardens and Washington Heights housing complexes -- conditions the I-TEAM exposed seven months ago.
I-TEAM investigator Lynnsey Gardner will fly to Washington, D.C., Wednesday to cover the mayor's visit with HUD Secretary Julian Castro.
Ahead of the trip, the I-TEAM visited with tenants at Eureka Gardens, who cheered on the mayor's efforts to improve their living conditions.
Grandmother Cerella Williams let the I-TEAM into her home, where we found heavy mold covering the family bathroom.
“They put like paint over it. We have a leak from time to time,” Williams said. “My grand babies, we try to keep it as clean as we possibly can for the kids and call the rental office.”
Her granddaughters, ages 4 and 6, are big fans of the Disney movie “Frozen.” Their baby brother is just one year old.
Williams' daughter is a single mother who works at a nearby nursing home.
She's hopeful the family can one day find a home anywhere but Eureka Gardens.
“They just need to be torn down and regroup, because this is like pathetic and this is contagious to inhale it and kids to bathe in it,” Williams said. “All we can do is accept it until they do something further.
“The living standards, it’s ridiculous here, the crime rate,” Williams said.
A recent mold report found mold spores in 70 percent of the apartments at Eureka Gardens.
Williams said she is hopeful Curry will get results for her family and hundreds of others when he meets with Castro on Wednesday.
“I think that is a great idea as far as him flying out to take care of the situation, and he does have my vote,” Williams said.
Her neighbor, Karami Hamilton, hopes for one outcome: The Rev. Richard Hamlet and his Global Ministries Foundation, which owns the property, get booted.
“All these complaints and you never go see about these properties? You don’t care,” Hamilton said. “You're getting what you want -- money. Money is the root of all evil, and people do a lot of stuff for money, and it’s sad. It’s sad.”
GMF receives $6 million a year in taxpayer money to run Eureka Gardens.
Next door to Hamilton, walls were ripped out for mold remediation and wires were exposed where a 10-month-old baby plays. His mother was using bottled water for his bottles for fear of lead contamination from the apartment's pipes.
The unit next to that had all of its walls torn out -- the kitchen, bedroom, even the bathroom -- to get rid of more mold.
Hamilton, a mother of a young son, said she feels like Curry and other city leaders are showing they care by following through on promises made during a code enforcement sweep last October, where more than 300 code violations were found and are still being repaired by Global Ministries.
“I think that Legal Aid cares, that HUD cares, that news people care,” Hamilton said. “(It) makes me feel good that we’re not alone, just because we’re in low income. We’re not alone. People who live in homes and pay mortgages every month care more about how we live than this man does.”