Legal Aid of North Carolina settles housing discrimination complaints with several apartment complexes, including two in Forsyth County.
The Legal Aid’s Fair Housing Project filed the complaints with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, saying that the five apartment complexes were not accessible to people who have disabilities. That, the complaints alleged, made the apartment complexes out of compliance with the federal Fair Housing Act.
The companies the complaints were filed against were BSC Holdings, Inc.; Chamberlain Place Apartments, LLC; Granite Ridge Investments, LLC; Robinhood Court Apartment Homes, LLC; Lafayette Landing Apartments and Villas, LLC; Brightwood Crossing Apartments, LLC; Salem Commercial Contracting, LLC; dBF Associates, Architects, Inc.; Windsor Contracting, LLC; and Erskine-Smith Architecture, PLLC.
The Fair Housing Project filed the complaints with HUD in 2017 after the agency performed what it called accessibility testing, which uncovered the alleged violations, according to the news release.
The Fair Housing Project found alleged violations of the Fair Housing Act accessibility requirements in individual ground floor units and in common and public use areas, the news release said. The companies denied the allegations, Legal Aid officials said.
But all the parties to the complaint entered into a conciliation agreement that HUD approved on Oct. 5. The companies agreed to $1.3 million in modifications on 325 ground floor units and in the common areas.
The modifications include providing accessible routes to certain buildings within the apartment units, replacing hardware on entrance doors and on interior doors, retrofitting kitchens, bathrooms and other areas of the apartment complexes to make them more accessible to people with disabilities, reassigning mailboxes and making changes in access to playgrounds, pool areas, volleyball and tennis courts, dog parks and other recreation areas.
Also, the builders, employees of the apartment complexes’ builders, architects and owners will undergo training on relevant sections of the Fair Housing Act and Americans with Disabilities Act.
“Accessible housing is an essential means of ensuring that people with disabilities are able to fully participate in the community,” Jeffrey Dillman, co-director of the Fair Housing Project, said in a statement. “Designers and builders must ensure that housing meets these modest federal accessibility requirements, in addition to state and local codes.”
Source: journalnow.com
Accessibility