Corinne Hicks and her two children moved into a hotel this summer from her mold-infested Young Terrace public housing apartment. With Halloween approaching, they’re still waiting for a clean renovated unit to become available.
The Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority provides Walmart gift cards to buy food, but Hicks can’t cook in the hotel; the room has no kitchen. She lost her remote job for a phone center and can’t get a new one because the hotel's Wi-Fi is not secure. Getting around is tough, since her car broke down earlier in the summer and she can’t afford repairs. The hotel room has only two beds so her two-year-old sleeps with her.
Hicks, 34, moved into Young Terrace, a community of blocky brick rectangles built in 1953 that is decades past its expected life, in 2017. Issues with the aging unit began soon after.
The problems are widespread without fast or easy solutions for the housing authority, which says it doesn’t have the funds to modernize the 200 vacant units in Young Terrace. A proposed redevelopment of the area won’t start for another year or more.
Meanwhile, living conditions continue to deteriorate for residents like Hicks.
Residents say mold, leaks, maintenance issues have persisted for years
Sewage flowed into Hicks’ sink in 2018. Pipes burst in 2020. Black stains grew on the railing upstairs. NRHA maintenance wiped them clean. Three months later, the stain was back. When her toilet backed up in 2023, NRHA repaired it. Workers told her the dark bathroom spots were "just dirt." NRHA dispatched more workers to replace the bathroom tile, infested with mold, the next year.
Her kitchen sink started leaking in January of this year. A contractor fixed the sink and told her she needed major plumbing work. White tape covering an open pipe under her sink turned grey with mold. Maintenance workers just replaced it with new tape.
They also removed moldy upper kitchen cabinets and installed new ones. But that just covered up the problem, mirroring how repairs to many Young Terrace units have gone in recent years.
During a visit to her empty unit recently, she opened the newly-installed cabinets to show the dark stain on the wall behind: Mold.
In March, Hicks purchased a mold test kit online. It came back positive in her kitchen and bathroom.
In May, she had her doctor run a blood test for mold. Positive, she said. She worries that she will have to discard her possessions, still in the apartment, including her dead mother's prized Washington football memorabilia.
"If I have to get rid of that, that would break my heart," she said.
In August, the authority finally moved her into a hotel.
Her story, like her unit, is one of many in Young Terrace: wracked by maintenance issues for years and now infested with black mold.
In September, another resident sued NRHA in Norfolk Circuit Court for negligent repairs leading to leaks and mold, endangering her and her children, including one with sickle cell anemia. A lawyer for the Legal Aid Society of Eastern Virginia, who represents the person in that suit and several other residents, said she has to send letters before NRHA makes repairs.
Nearly 200 of the 746 units in Young Terrace are vacant, an increase of 30 since The Virginian-Pilot first reported about repair issues in April. The vacancies mean NRHA's overall occupancy rate is 87%, far below the Department of Housing and Urban Development target rate of 96%, threatening federal funding.
In response to a question during a housing commission meeting in October,Steve Morales, NRHA's deputy executive director and chief development officer, said modernizing a unit costs $50,000 to $85,000. "If we're looking to repair 100 units, that's anywhere between $7 and $8 million," he added. "We just don't receive that kind of funding."
Nearly a year after the NRHA board fired executive director Nathan Simms and six months after it approved $5 million in emergency funds for repairs and renovations in Young Terrace, residents and the Legal Aid Society lawyer who represents several of them say negligent or incomplete repairs continue to plague the community.
Many describe similar issues: second-floor bathrooms leak into kitchens below, kitchen cabinets infested with black mold are replaced, but the mold on the wall behind them was not remediated, windows boarded up rather than replaced. In one unit, the radiator in a child's bedroom had been disconnected since the winter because it was unsafe, according to a tenant.
The maintenance problems leading to dangerous living conditions in Young Terrace and other aging NRHA properties have been ongoing for years. There are plans, not yet fully funded, to tear down Young Terrace and Calvert Square and build mixed-income housing starting in the next few years.
While those plans slowly move forward, some residents are enduring squalor created by a seemingly never ending cycle of repairs.
Public records show nearly 18,000 work orders for Young Terrace from Jan. 1, 2023, through this April. About a quarter of those were for leaks or plumbing problems. Residents report maintenance workers attempt to remove mold by spraying bleach, which the Environmental Protection Agency does not recommend.
Melissa Bonfiglio, the Legal Aid lawyer who filed one suit and numerous complaints on behalf of residents, said the authority could no longer blame maintenance failures on Simms. "He may have been a convenient scapegoat for a period of time," she said at an October board meeting, "but where we are now is that there is a failure on NRHA's part, which extends all the way up to the highest level of NRHA."
"NRHA has to do better,” she added. “At this point, it is not indifference; it is intentional."
Michael Clark, who has been NRHA's interim executive director since December, reiterated during the meeting that he's committed to improving maintenance, noting the $5 million authorized in April resulted in 11 new maintenance contracts. He added that it might be time for more "bold steps" and, if necessary, to “move on” from some of the contracted companies.
Clark, Morales and NRHA Board Chair Earl Fraley declined interview requests made in person and by email.
NRHA faces litigation over living conditions
Last month, Bonfiglio filed suit on behalf of Michelle Brown, another Young Terrace resident. Brown and her four children, including one with sickle cell anemia, moved into a Young Terrace apartment in December 2025 after the heating failed in her Calvert Square apartment.
The apartment had been renovated by two companies, K-Kontractors of Norfolk and Trifecta Development Group of Georgia, according to documents obtained through a public records request. Each was given a no-bid contract for $250,000 annually by Simms.
A February email, also from a records request, showed numerous repairs on 15 Young Terrace and Calvert Square units were not completed by Trifecta. That contract was terminated in late January. The others either expired or were terminated by NRHA in April.
The lawsuit alleges the apartment had been vacant for two years before Brown moved in because of leaks, requiring NRHA to replace kitchen countertops and cabinets. This spring, Brown reported renewed leaks and mold. Maintenance workers sprayed what smelled like a bleach solution, failing to remediate the mold as required by state law, according to the suit.
"After that, it got bad," Brown said in an interview, the mold, and leaks worsening.
Bonfiglio emailed NRHA a second letter from a sickle cell nurse at the Children's Hospital of the Kings Daughter warning the mold and water damage could lead to a disease flare-up. In August, NRHA moved Brown and her four children into a hotel room with two beds and no kitchen. Each night, she said in an interview, the children rotate who sleeps on the floor.
NRHA replaced her upper kitchen cabinets later that month, but there was mold still visible below. An independent consultant hired by Bonfiglio found heavy mold spore presence in the kitchen during an inspection a few days later. Brown was there.
"When I turned the water on upstairs," she said, "it was raining downstairs (in the kitchen). They took off the old moldy cabinets and just put new cabinets up without fixing the leak."
Meanwhile, Hicks and her two children are still waiting for a new home.
Earlier this month, NRHA said it had an apartment ready. Invoices obtained through a public records request show the authority paid more than $79,000 for renovations since the last tenant moved out. It was also one of 12 apartments tested for mold between late July and early October.
Hicks inspected it along with Bonfiglio. Everything looked great. Then they turned on the kitchen faucet. Water began backing up on the other side of the double sink. A maintenance worker checked the pipes.
"Immediately, I could smell the sewage," Hicks said.
"I want to get out of this hotel, but I don't have any faith in anything that NRHA is doing," she added. "It just doesn't seem like anyone's checking behind each other. Nobody knows what they're doing, and there's just no sense of urgency."
This story is the first of two parts. Check back Monday for more on how the NRHA's maintenance issues became so overwhelming and how hundreds of vacant units could endanger some of the housing authority's federal funding.