MEMPHIS, Tenn. — City code enforcement visited a South Memphis apartment complex after residents claimed they’ve gone months without trash pickup, leaving garbage pilled up all over the property.
Code enforcement gave them a 48-hour deadline to clean up the mess. The city says they checked the property again Friday morning, but the trash was still there.
Now property management has been ordered to appear in Shelby County Environmental Court.
Apartments in disrepair, renters in need of help, but getting no answer from management. It’s a situation that State. Rep. Dwayne Thompson (D-Cordova) says Shelby County tenants face all too often.
“A lot of them [are] out of town investment companies that were almost impossible to find any contact information on,” Rep. Thompson said, describing his efforts to locate property owners while working on a past project.
So the District 96 representative is introducing a bill to give the people of Shelby County direct access to their landlords and property owners.
“They register their name, their their current address, not a P.O. box, but an actual street address, and their phone number, or their agent’s, with the county,” Thompson explained.
Current Tennessee law only allows a landlord registry if a county has a consolidated, metropolitan government and more than 500,000 residents.
House Bill 34 would remove the government clause.
“Especially [for] low-income tenants, [who] have no way of getting ahold of this person,” Rep. Thompson said. “This bill should help alleviate all those problems.”
Problems like the ones at Latham Heights apartments, where residents say garbage has pilled up for nearly six months, with a landlord they say is almost unreachable.
“Don’t have her new number,” said one anonymous tenant. “She changed her number on us. She just come over when she still collect rent from the one’s she still collect rent from and she don’t do nothing else.”
One woman (who also did not wish to be identified) says she is still waiting for help nearly eight months after her apartment caught fire.
“My apartment burned down in April,” she said. “The landlord, or the people that she works for, haven’t contacted me, haven't wrote a letter to me, haven’t tried to make any other accommodations.”
That landlord declined to comment and ABC24 cannot find contact information for Memphis Partners NY LLC, based in Brooklyn, New York.
Rep. Thompson says his bill is not meant to be anti-landlord.
“It is simply an anti-irresponsible landlord bill,” he explained. “I think most landlords are good, their tenants know how to get in touch with them.”
The lawmaker says HB 34 is already getting support from Shelby County renters, as well as colleagues from both sides of the aisle in the Tennessee General Assembly.
“This is something that simply protects in fact, hundreds of thousands of our residents here in Shelby County,” he said. “And hopefully prevents some of the abusive situations that we’ve seen lately.”
Rep. Thompson will present HB 34 before the Tennessee General Assembly when the 2023 session begins on Tuesday.