Does the City of Fort Worth have no one in the city government, no agency, which looks out for tenant's rights and which investigates reported wrongdoing by property owners?
The Dallas/Fort Worth Renter Alliance has been focused on the questionable practices of the owner of Fort Worth's Havenwood Apartments, as detailed on this blog.
Questionable Havenwood practices such as changing water billing companies, without notice, and with each change resulting in higher bills, more than doubling in a year, along with adding a garbage disposal fee, a natural gas water heating fee, an alarm fee.
All these fees have been added at the same time the rents have increased by almost $100 in some cases.
Does the City of Fort Worth not monitor the practices of out of state property owners operating in Fort Worth? Havenwood residents have requested, as per the law, as stated by TCEQ, billing records to check for the legitimacy of the doubling of the water fees. No records providing this information has been provided.
Back in late 2014 the City of Fort did nothing about another apartment owner's outrageous mistreatment of tenants. Residents of Fort Worth's Parkview Village were given eviction notices with 30 days to vacate the premises. These notices showed up on resident's doors, with no prior warning, or explanation. No help was offered, by either the city or the owner.
You can read about this Fort Worth abuse of human rights in an article in Fort Worth Weekly titled
Get Out.
The Durango Texas blog also wrote about this abuse in
Fort Worth Shrugs Its Shoulders While Hundreds Of Citizens Are Given 30 Day Eviction Notices.
The city government of most towns in America would not allow abuses such as that which is happening to the residents of the Havenwood Apartments, such abuses would be seen as institutionalized thievery, or white collar crime.
As for the arbitrary 30 day evictions of the residents of Parkview Village, we suspect many city governments in America would have pursued criminal charges against the property owner perpetrator in an instance such as this.
