Tenants continue to face bad conditions at Jones Walker Apartments

Tenants at the Jones Walker Apartments continue to hear disappointing news at the place they call home.

“Is there a particular area that you’ve noticed more than others that has an issue?” John Scarry said, an air quality assessor.

“The kitchen because it came back and did patchwork on the bottom of the cabinets,” Helen Crowley said, the apartment tenant.

Scarry is testing what Crowley feared the most at her Jones Walker Apartment in Fort Myers.

Scarry placed a small black device with an appearance similar to a 1990’s brick cell phone on the bottom of a cabinet. “Beep, beep!” the instrument rang. The sounds emitting form the device indicated there are high levels of moisture and mold.

“See that’s moisture,” Scarry said.

Since the Department of Urban Housing and Development put pressure on the owners to repair these rundown moldy apartments, Crowley said, maintenance came out but mostly performed patchwork — quick fixes.

“They put a piece of 2 x ford down here to hold it up and it has so much damage,” Scarry said. “You pull those cabinets out I would probably almost assume that there is significant growth behind it.”

But it is not just the kitchen.

“What’s underlying those building materials,” Scarry said, “may just be as shady as the craft of the work that went into the project.”

Scarry said the air ventilation in this apartment is not enough to keep mold from growing.

“Definitely need to get a hold of the relative humidity in here,” Scarry said. “It exceeds the threshold of acceptability. What you see on the surface is probably just the tip of the iceberg.”

Still, management said it is a project that will take some time.