By Josh Cohen, Photo by F. Delventhal, Shelterforce, March 19, 2021
Dina Levy will never forget the miserable conditions she found at a low-rise 200-unit complex in South Dallas. The management company at the for-profit Crest A Apartments barely maintained the property; leaky ceilings, bad plumbing, and peeling paint were all too common. Security was nonexistent and violence and crime were a constant problem.
Perhaps most shocking of all, the building had a snake infestation, with the reptiles slithering in through people’s apartment windows and taking up residence.
Levy is now a senior vice president at New York Homes and Community Renewal, the state’s affordable housing agency. But in 1995 she was a VISTA national service volunteer assigned to work as an organizer with the Texas Tenants Union—part of the first cohort of VISTAs funded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to organize tenants in privately owned, HUD-funded affordable housing. Levy was responsible for helping residents at Crest A Apartments form a tenants association to build the sort of “strength in numbers” power they’d need to stand up to the management company and get the safe, clean living conditions one might expect at a building subsidized by the federal government.
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