Michigan

Atlanta that have astounding statistics of death, crime, murder, theft and stories of people literally living in human waste, rot and filth.

https://www.ajc.com/news/investigations/dwellings/apartments-profits-over-tenants/

At Pavilion Place, a derelict apartment complex south of downtown Atlanta, residents contend with cockroaches and crime, doors that won’t lock and windows that won’t open, plumbing that backs up and dumpsters that overflow. They clean up when intruders defecate outside their doors. They listen at night as rats scratch inside the walls.

A continent away, in Beverly Hills, California, Pavilion Place’s owner employs a pool man and a gardener, a housekeeper and a tutor for his preschool-age children. His household expenses approach $40,000 a month. Most families at Pavilion Place earn half that much in a year.

For residents, each day at Pavilion Place represents an existential struggle. Seven people have died there in homicides since 2015, and at least 14 others have been wounded by gunfire. In 2020, four people were killed over just 59 days.

The owner faces challenges of a different magnitude. In a contentious divorce case, his wife has accused him of infidelity and financial misconduct. She is seeking half a million dollars a year in support.

Pavilion Place, constructed 56 years ago into a steep embankment above Cleveland Avenue, not far from the Atlanta airport, highlights a predatory housing system in which owners of even the most dilapidated apartment complexes prosper while residents remain trapped in homes that are unsafe, unhealthy or, often, both.

An investigation by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution identified more than 250 complexes across metro Atlanta where violent crime and dangerous living conditions combine to make apartments all but uninhabitable. The investigation found that at least three-fourths of the region’s most dangerous complexes belong to private equity firms and other remote investors, many of whom, in the absence of robust governmental oversight, prioritize earnings over their tenants’ well-being.

Pavilion Place belongs to a 52-year-old California real-estate investor named Behzad Beroukhai. Known to tenants merely as “Ben,” he built an apartment-rental business of about 30 buildings and complexes, seven of them in metro Atlanta, from an office in a cream-colored house in a residential section of Beverly Hills.

Since Beroukhai bought Pavilion Place in 2015, an already dilapidated complex has slipped even further into disrepair.

The only driveway into the complex lacks a security gate, so anyone can enter at any time. A banged-up perimeter fence can be easily breached.

Open basement doors reveal a putrid stew of trash and standing water. In some apartments, floors and ceilings are spongy with rot, so bad that one resident crashed through his kitchen floor in 2019 and had to be extricated by firefighters.

And on the playground, in a complex that 103 school-age children list as their home address, a scrap two-by-four plank served for a time as a makeshift swing seat. Now, two bare chains dangle from an overhead bar, with no seat at all.

At Pavilion Place apartments in south Atlanta, in the playground in a complex that 103 school-age children list as their home address, a scrap two-by-four plank served for a time as a makeshift swing seat. Now, two bare chains dangle from an overhead bar, with no seat at all. (Hyosub Shin /

Besides the killings and the other shootings, there have been 22 attempted or completed suicides at Pavilion Place since Beroukhai bought the property, Atlanta police records show. There have been 69 aggravated assaults. Thirty-five automobile thefts. Fifty burglaries. Four rapes. Eight sex crimes. Seventeen armed robberies — not counting an unreported one committed by two teenagers wielding a military-style assault rifle.

In an interview, Beroukhai said Pavilion Place has overcome problems he attributed to other people: employees of a property-management company, unsavory tenants he inherited from the former owner, workers who failed to resolve residents’ complaints.

But now, he said, “we are really on top of the game.”

“The property is 100% livable,” he said. “Whatever I have to do, I just do it. Better to spend the money and get the stuff fixed.”