How One Organization Is Standing Up for Tenants in Minneapolis

"On September 9, Monique Carrillo, a 44-year-old lifelong Minneapolis resident, took part in a vigil held on the sprawling, immaculate lawn of local landlord and Apartment Shop LLC owner, Stephen Frenz. Tenants carried signs and shared stories about how their lives had been negatively affected by renting from the Apartment Shop.

“He turned his sprinklers on us,” Carrillo, who now refers to herself as an Apartment Shop “survivor” after moving out of one of Frenz’s dozens of rental properties in April, told Rewire about the protest. “He doesn’t understand … the type of stuff we deal with [when] living in his apartments. We’re not leaving because of sprinklers. We’ve had to live like this,” Carrillo said.

To illustrate her point, Carrillo shared a story from the year she spent in an Apartment Shop building in Minneapolis’ Corcoran neighborhood. “One day I was laying in bed and heard water running, but I was the only one home. I went into the kitchen and water was backing up into the sink and [falling] out onto the floor. There was so much water that I had to use blankets to clean it up—I couldn’t just use towels.”

Repairing the sink—for which Carrillo says she had called requesting repairs on multiple previous occasions—led to the discovery of black mold while replacing her water-damaged kitchen cabinets, finally providing Carrillo with a reason for why she had been experiencing poor health since moving in. Carrillo shared with Rewire documentation about the process that appeared to corroborate her story about the black mold. According to Carrillo, the repairman that Apartment Shop eventually sent dealt with the mold by spraying white paint primer on it before replacing the cabinets. “I read the can and it didn’t say anything about killing mold,” she noted..."

Continue reading