At the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority board meeting in November 2025, then-executive director Nathan Simms highlighted the progress on refreshing the aging apartments in the Young Terrace and Grandy Village public housing communities for rental.
"We've completed a total of 86 unit turn/refresh activities, 47 at Grandy, 39 at Young Terrace, just around an average cost of $6,000 per unit," he said. "We're working through that process actively."
Thirty minutes later, Simms was fired by a board vote after board members learned he had issued at least $4.3 million in no-bid contracts during a tenure lasting less than two years.
Some of those no-bid contracts, totaling up to $2 million over two years, went to contractors hired to repair and renovate public housing apartments that are long past the intended lifespan - work that may not have been done.
At the same time, Simms was dismantling NRHA's maintenance staff. He fired or laid off 22 workers in 2025. The previous year, the authority had let go of just one. Board members were kept in the dark about the contracts and the ongoing maintenance issues.
A week before Simms was fired, pipes burst when the authority turned on the boiler for the 310 units at Calvert Square. Residents were without heat for weeks as temperatures dipped. Amy Chudzinski, an NHRA commissioner, complained during a December board meeting that she was only hearing then about the October problem.
What NRHA officials call challenging repair and renovation issues have been a consistent focus of residents’ complaints at board meetings in the last year.
That ongoing crisis lays bare financial, legal, and public relations issues not easily or quickly solved.
NRHA officials, including current director Michael Clark and NRHA Board Chair Earl Fraley, refused to speak to WHRO for this story.
Empty units mean no rent now, maybe less federal money next year
NRHA is in a bind. It doesn’t have the funding to renovate all its vacant units. Those vacancies also mean NRHA is not collecting rent on those units. And leaving uninhabitable units vacant further jeopardizes some of the agency’s federal funding, which is based on occupancy rates.
“This is going to cause a cascading set of problems,” said Susan Popkin, an Urban Institute fellow who has studied public housing for decades.
The housing authority's overall occupancy rate is 87.7%, far below the Department of Housing and Urban Development's target of 96%, putting it in the red on HUD's housing dashboard. That rate has been steadily declining since December 2022.
To meet the target lease percentage, NRHA needs to occupy 163 more units, according to the dashboard. The vast majority of the roughly 270 vacancies in NRHA properties are in Young Terrace, according to a chart supplied to the board in October. The formula for the federal subsidy calculates the number of occupied units per month for a 12-month period to determine subsidies for the next fiscal year.
In April, the NRHA board authorized up to $5 million to repair and renovate Young Terrace. Michael Clark, the interim executive director, has repeatedly promised the board of commissioners that NRHA would do a better job, noting that 11 new maintenance contracts have been issued while the no-bid contracts issued under Simms have been terminated or allowed to expire.
But at public meetings, officials have said it will take more funding than NRHA has to make the units habitable.
“Congress has not allocated enough money to deal with this,” Popkin added. “It's a national problem.”
Fixing maintenance problems will cost millions NRHA says it doesn’t have
Nearly 200 of the 746 barracks-like brick units in Young Terrace, which date to 1953, are vacant. Documents obtained through a public records request show the companies that were issued no-bid contracts under Simms were paid invoices ranging from about $6,000 to $7,000 to “turn” units. But it’s not clear those repairs were adequate – or even completed.
Modernizing a unit costs NRHA between $50,000 and $85,000, according to Steve Morales, NRHA's deputy executive director and chief development officer, who laid out the situation during a joint Mayor's Housing Commission and St. Paul Advisory Committee meeting in October.
“Young Terrace is particularly challenged right now,” he said. “Our systems have been struggling for some time, and so we have issues with the cost to continuously upgrade, maintain, and turn units.”
Repairing half the vacant units in Young Terrace would cost between $7 and $8 million, he added. NRHA does not have the money.
Problems in Young Terrace and other NRHA communities built in the 1950s go back decades. The authority first began discussing redeveloping the area in 2005 and finally moved forward with the first phase, demolishing Tidewater Gardens and building new housing starting in late 2020. But the redevelopment of Young Terrace and Calvert Square is years away.
So, the authority is spending millions to repair apartments decades past their useful life that it intends to tear down and replace in the next several years. Meanwhile, residents remain in units with plumbing and other problems, including mold.
Residents and a lawyer for the Legal Aid Society of Eastern Virginia have said repeatedly that repairs are poorly done or not done at all, something they say has continued in the year since Simms was fired.
Melissa Bonfiglio, the Legal Aid lawyer who represents several tenants, said negligent repairs expose NRHA to potential liability for personal injury — and thus, could cost the agency even more money it says it doesn’t have.
Bonfiglio recently filed suit on behalf of a Young Terrace resident who was moved into an apartment that had been vacant for two years because of leaks, only to experience more leaks and dangerous mold this spring that the suit claims were not properly remediated.
Residents in Young Terrace and Calvert Square are among the most vulnerable in the city. According to information in the October board meeting packet, the vast majority of households in the two communities —- 81% — earn less than $19,800 annually.
One resident who moved into a refreshed Young Terrace unit in January told the board in March that her electrical outlets don't work, her doors were rusting, holes in the wall were not repaired, the tub spout fell off, windows were not properly installed and a shower or tub leak caused mold on kitchen cabinets a floor below.
Another resident, Latora Trent, a single mom with two children, has had more than 60 work orders for her mold-infested unit in the past three and a half years.
During a visit, she pointed to black mold under her sink. A radiator in a child's room had been disconnected during the winter and was not repaired. Maintenance workers told her it was not safe for him to sleep in the room. Water from her upstairs bathroom has been leaking into her kitchen, a common problem in Young Terrace. She's had infestations of termites and roaches.
"Always everything is halfway done," she said. NRHA has promised to move her out, but there's been no progress.
Bonfiglio sees NRHA's failures as intended to force redevelopment plans - efforts that are a year or more away. Meanwhile, residents suffer.
"There is so much mold and so many leaks because NRHA has intentionally let these properties go into disrepair. This is the product of many, many years of neglect and a failure to repair," she said.
This story is the second of two parts. Click here for part one detailing the full scope of NRHA's maintenance issues.