Crystal Towers residents are living in a deteriorating building. On Monday, they begged Winston-Salem city leaders for help.

Featured photo: Crystal Towers resident Samuel Grier stands in front of the building (photo by Jerry Cooper)

Gwendolyn Hay, 80, has lived in Crystal Towers for 18 years. The low-income housing building owned and managed by the Housing Authority of Winston-Salem has deteriorated over the last several years, with residents raising concerns over broken elevators, leaking laundry machines and pests. The 11-story building is home to more than 200 elderly and disabled residents. With both elevators breaking down constantly over the last couple of years, residents have often had to climb several flights of stairs. 

“We’re trying to survive,” Hay said at Monday’s Winston-Salem city council meeting where she and fellow residents spoke out during the public comment period about new problems arising in their building.

In 2018, HAWS announced that they would sell the building, but after mounting pressure from residents who would be displaced by the move, Mayor Allen Joines offered city funding for repairs.

Joines told TCB in 2023 that the amount of funding discussed was “in the range of $2 million.” However, the city was still waiting on HAWS to “make an official request.” 

To this day, residents say they haven’t seen a penny of that promised city money infused into their building.

And HAWS won’t ask for the money until a “needs assessment” that was started in October is finished, involving resident meetings, design scope and cost estimates. According to the organization, it was expected to be completed in January. This will be the building’s third needs assessment in less than a decade, and it cost HAWS $205,000. Both of the building’s elevator cars are finally operational — replacement of both cars started in September 2023.

“…Mayor Joines, you promised to help us, we need you,” Hay pleaded during the council meeting.

The building has continued to deteriorate, particularly the plumbing — which is posing multiple dangers to residents including electrical and slip hazards and mold.

One recent video taken by a resident shows water dripping from a closet ceiling onto their clothes. Water pools on residents’ floors, bubbles in their ceilings and drips below their sinks.

A press release from Housing Justice Now — a tenant advocacy group that works closely with Crystal Towers’ residents — announced that 106 residents signed a petition demanding that the building’s plumbing be fixed; 70 percent of those residents have reported that they have plumbing issues in their apartments, according to the release.

Dan Rose, an organizer with the group, said that HAWS “doesn’t appear to care about the residents’ health or their safety — certainly not their plumbing. We’re asking you to help.”

(Disclosure: Rose has contributed to TCB in the past.)

Mekaann Evans, an organizer with Housing Justice Now, stated in the organization’s press release that they have problems breathing when they visit the building. 

“Imagine what it does to your lungs to live there,” Evans asked.

It has gotten so bad that the president of the building’s residents’ council, Michael Douglas, called for HAWS’ executive director Kevin Cheshire to resign during Monday’s council meeting.

“It’s time for Kevin Cheshire to step down,” Douglas said.

Other issues at the building include fire risks. The building, which was built in 1970 and began welcoming tenants in 1972, doesn’t have sprinklers due to a lack of regulation during that time period. Douglas and other residents explained that they don’t have fire extinguishers.

Multiple fires over the last year have forced residents to evacuate. During the meeting, residents remembered their friend Abraham Woods, who lived on the second floor of Crystal Towers. They say he was hospitalized after a fire occurred at the building on Jan. 25. Woods died at Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist Hospital on Feb. 1 at the age of 66. According to his death certificate, his cause of death was cardiopulmonary arrest as well as diffuse hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy, which is brain damage that can occur due to carbon monoxide poisoning from smoke inhalation. 

Woods was beloved by those who knew him and was known as a “comrade, friend, neighbor” by the building’s tenant union Crystal Towers United, of which Woods was a member.

“Nobody had to die,” Douglas said. “When you go to bed tonight, think about him.”

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