Pests. Mold. A child’s death. Here’s why Independence Towers still passes city inspections

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Pest infestations. Chronic plumbing problems causing water damage and mold. No heating and air conditioning. Gaping holes in ceilings and walls, filled with exposed rusty pipes and other hazards. Fire damage. Broken appliances. Faulty window latches, in part to blame for a toddler falling to his death.

The problems at Independence Towers apartments have been well documented, and city officials in Independence have said they’re well aware of the living conditions residents have endured at the high-rise complex on Jennings Road.

But despite court battles and public activism highlighting tenant complaints, the building passed it’s latest city inspection in 2023.

As housing advocates and attorneys told The Star, the city of Independence could be doing more to ensure distressed tenants aren’t left in peril. One obvious answer? Independence city council members have the power to revise their Rental Ready program to require deeper inspections and provide for stronger enforcement options, according to Giana Chiala, attorney with the Heartland Center for Jobs and Freedom.

“As far as resources go, it’s a matter of cities prioritizing what’s important,” Chiala said. “It is important to protect tenants health and safety, and I think cities can do fine jobs at inspections.”

But it’s a job Independence mayor Rory Rowland admits the city has failed to do properly, leaving tenants in untenable situations.

“Their sinks don’t work, their toilets don’t work, their showers don’t work, it’s just very difficult living conditions for them, and my heart breaks for them,” Rowland told The Star.

The Rental Ready Program, first enacted in 2017 to safeguard tenants, has clear faults in its inspection system, allowing a building with multiple serious issues to pass with perfect scores, as critics have been contending and some city officials now concede. And while officials are aware of the program’s faults and have the power to enact changes to keep Independence tenants safe, some instead insist their hands are tied.

A troubled history

The admission from the city’s top elected official comes after years of mounting maintenance issues at Independence Towers, months of protests and activism and several tragic incidents.

In March, some building residents joined a renters’ union organized by KC Tenants, spurred on in part by their serious pest problems and sporadic access to hot water, heating and air conditioning.

Two months later, residents protested against management company FTW Investments, which oversaw Independence Towers at the time. FTW and co-founder Parker Webb were ousted in May by order of a Jackson County judge for violating their loan agreement, and a new company, Trigild, Inc., was appointed by the court to manage the troubled property.

Then, tragedy struck. In June, Destiny R. Kley, 22, allegedly confessed to setting an arson fire in her kitchen, displacing 27 residents across three floors of the building.

Six weeks later, a 3-year-old Tidus Bass was found lying on the grass outside the building , unconscious but breathing, and was rushed to a hospital where he later died. He had fallen from an unsecured window on the eighth floor, authorities said.

The boy’s father, Moses Bass, and his girlfriend, Destiny Lee Randle, face felony child endangerment in the case, but allege they’d been asking the building management to fix the broken window for a year.

Troubles persist with a new court-appointed management company, Trigild, Inc., at the helm, which tenants say hasn’t communicated with them since their first meeting in June. And as tenants fight to join a lawsuit against the property owner, they remain stuck in unsafe living conditions that were stamped as meeting city standards through the Rental Ready Program.

Inadequate inspection process

The Rental Ready Program, enacted in Independence in June 2017, was created to ensure minimum standards for the interior of residential buildings, according to the program’s website. Buildings are inspected every two years.

Independence Towers passed each aspect of their last inspection in Dec. 2023, despite the litany of documented issues in the building.

The program is required to inspect 10% of all rental units. It requires all properties to be licensed and pass a health and safety inspection every two years, according to the program’s website.

At Independence Towers, the property has 130 units, meaning 13 were observed. The inspection assessed nine basic aspects of the building, including functioning smoke detectors, secure handrails, a visible street address, exposed electrical wires, a functional drainage system, at least one carbon monoxide detector per unit, an exit, a circuit breaker within six feet of water sources and functioning furnaces and water heaters.

Tenants, though, don’t have a functioning HVAC system — they rely on window units to cool their apartments. They also live with exposed wiring and drainage issues throughout the building. When the fire happened, tenants recalled someone having to scream there was a fire because the alarms didn’t work. Trigild has since said the fire alarm system has been fixed, according to Justin Stein with KC Tenants.

On Sept. 3, U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver II, Missouri’s fifth district representative, visited Independence Towers , seeing firsthand the broken, damaged, fire-scarred conditions tenants there call home. He listened to tenants talk about their steep energy bills caused by their window units, as well as their plumbing problems.

“Some of it is worse than your words, I don’t know how I’m going to describe it to people, “ Cleaver said at the time.

Still, the building passed the city inspection.

The building also passed inspection despite two active cases in units, 111 and 112, which have been labeled as “unsafe to occupy” since Jan. 1, 2023 because of holes in walls and ceilings, according to the city of Independence. No permits have been submitted to fix the issues, according to the city, and no formal complaints for Independence Towers have been filed.

‘We have to look at that system’

Independence Mayor Rory Rowland has visited the building twice, and agreed that the tenants are caught in a difficult situation.

“I don’t know how this got rated as high as it did,” he said of the building’s inspection rating.

In fact, Independence Towers isn’t the only building whose city inspection score seems to contrast deeply with the reality of living conditions. At a city council meeting Monday, Brent Schondelmeyer, a local resident and former Star reporter in the 1980s, said he examined 3,300 inspection scores from May 2022 to May 2023. Of those, he said 99.2% received a perfect score. He said he recently did the same search with current data, and said that the scores were very similar.

Schondelmeyer recently retired from the Local Investment Commission , a nonprofit organization, and was involved in the adoption of the Healthy Homes Ordinance in Kansas City and around for the early formation of KC Tenants.

“My concern is the Rental Ready program is not working as some had hoped and intended,” he told city council members. Schondelmeyer noted there hasn’t been a thorough review of the program by the city since its adoption, and he believes there needs to be a thoughtful review, not a quick fix.

“We have to look at that system and find out why they’re ranked that high and what’s happening with the inspectors,” Rowland echoed in an interview with The Star. “I wanna look at all of it.”

One potential conflict? Third party inspectors who rate the properties are paid by the property owner, a component Rowland said he plans to consider addressing as he and the city work to make changes to the Rental Ready program. He did not provide specifics as to what would be changed, or the timeline of when a new or revised program would be enacted.

“I wish the mayor’s office came with a magic wand that I could just go click and those problems were gone,” he said. “ Unfortunately, in the real world, we have constraints with budgets and all of those kinds of things that occur, I just can’t do that.”

Rowland said he would love for a responsible developer to take over the building, and for an engineer to write up a report on what would be done to get the building back together, but he stressed that for ethical reasons he can’t be the one to make the phone calls. He said that responsibility lies with the Chamber of Commerce and community development team.

‘No tenant will ever complain with homelessness as the price’

All along, city officials have stressed the need for tenants to file formal complaints as the first step required for the city to address housing issues. Officials say that since they haven’t yet received one from Independence Towers— that effectively ties their hands, preventing them from intervening.

The problem faced by tenants is the inaccessibility of the complaint-filing process, and their fear that the city — which has turned a blind eye to their issues, allowing the building to pass inspections despite clear safety hazards — will do nothing to address their complaints and ensure management makes the building safe and livable. Or, even worse, that they might be displaced if the building were found to be unsafe.

Chiala, the Heartland Center for Jobs and Freedom attorney, said in a statement that tenants are told they can only file a complaint in person to the Community Development Department — but said there’s no email, portal access or phone number to submit remotely, alienating those with disabilities, senior citizens or those without a license.

“Most egregiously, the complaint form tells tenants that they will likely be evicted by the city they are complaining to,” Chiala said, after reading the complaint form, which said the city can label a building as unsafe to occupy and vacate it immediately.

“No tenant will ever complain with homelessness as the price,” Chiala said.

Chiala read over Rental Ready’s landlord-tenant complaint form, and also noted instructions were vague. The form fails to explicitly report infestations, which, according to Chiala, is one of the most common and unsafe problems tenants face. Rather, a tenant would have to list it under “other,” she said.

Another obstacle is that tenants say they don’t have copies of their leases, which has to be turned in with a copy of the tenant’s driver’s license, according to the Rental Ready Program website. Chiala said it’s common for residents in lower-income apartments to have verbal leases, or to not receive a copy of a written lease.

Tom Scannell, Director of Community Development for Independence, said residents can use government identification and proof of residency like a utility bill if they don’t have a copy of their lease. He also noted a copy of the form can be found online under the city’s Rental Ready program page.

“We can only enforce the rules and regulations and processes that we have in place. If there are tenants that would like to file a complaint for items that are wrong in their unit, they can reach out to city staff,” Scannell previously told The Star. “Once we have the complaint form, the city can then step in to follow the process to ensure that those units are safe and livable.”

However, according to the city’s landlord and tenant guide, the enforcement process is court dependent. Tenants would have to find a lawyer to argue on their behalf, and Kansas City real estate lawyer Mark Roy said that finding someone to represent lower-income tenants is very difficult.

“In general, there really aren’t many remedies for tenants in the law,” Roy said. “And they’re so marginalized. The last thing (low-income) tenants have is the time to spend (money) arguing, going to court and attorney fees.”

Stein said the union has not pushed to file complaints to the city because they believe there isn’t a lot the city can do with enforcement. Rowland said the city’s option is to evict all residents, which they don’t want to do because it would displace everyone.

Stein said in a statement that city leadership had been helpful in pressuring Parker Webb to restore hot water, and getting Trigild to provide portable AC units.

Though not perfect, Chiala said the Kansas City’s Healthy Homes inspection program is easier to navigate and includes more components for inspectors to access, doesn’t require a photo ID to file a complaint, and has several avenues besides going in-person to file a complaint to make it more accessible.

As of Sept. 16 , a Jackson County judge is considering if residents will be allowed to participate in a lawsuit against the property owner. In that same hearing in a Jackson County court Monday, attorneys for Trigild and Fannie Mae said they would support dropping the lawsuit in favor of selling the Independence high-rise to someone else.

Unionized residents will vote at the end of the month on whether to begin a rent strike on Oct. 1.

Previous reporting by The Star’s Ilana Arougheti was used in this article.