When Andrea Polk brought her newborn baby home this summer, running their apartment’s central air conditioning caused the furnace to leak and flood the living room on the first floor.
But the cool air didn’t reach the second floor, where her family sleeps. She has four other children, ages 4, 10, 17 and 18.
They have lived at Greystone Apartments, a federally-subsidized apartment complex off of Missouri Avenue in Cahokia Heights, for almost five years. The air only worked reliably for the first two and a half years, Polk said.
Over the winter, while she was still pregnant, Polk said she ran the oven to try to keep the apartment warm because the heat didn’t work either.
The stove caught fire one day in the spring. The property manager replaced the burned appliance before Polk returned from the hospital. But black soot still coated the walls and ceiling of the kitchen. Damaged cabinets were removed but not replaced.
Nearby windows got the same treatment. They remained boarded up after they were broken two years earlier.
Polk and other Greystone tenants say their complaints about leaks, mold, crime and multiple summers without adequate air conditioning have gone largely unanswered — even as the property went into receivership this year during a foreclosure proceeding.
Owner Moshe “Mark” Silber, a real estate investor from New York, is accused of defaulting on the mortgage and is currently serving a federal prison sentence for his part in a loan fraud scheme. He couldn’t be reached for comment through his attorneys.
Polk said the conditions in her apartment make her feel stressed. She was paying to stay in hotel rooms until her savings ran out recently.
“It got to the point where I was like, ‘We have no choice but to go back in this house,’” Polk said. “Every day I stay here, I say ‘I don’t like being here. I don’t feel like I’m at home.’”
Former Greystone tenant Cierra Pawnell said being there felt more like living in an abandoned apartment. She said water leaked in her unit, too, flooding the lower level, making the tiles in the floor come loose and breeding mold.
The central air conditioning routinely went out or wasn’t strong enough to cool the entire home in the summertime, according to Pawnell, who lived there for seven years before leaving in July.
Pawnell has asthma and said she was experiencing migraines and chest pains when she was in the apartment. She thinks it was from the heat and mold. Pawnell said she wanted to leave to protect her children, ages 1, 2, 14 and 18.
“That was traumatizing, and I said I never want to live like that again,” Pawnell said.
Another tenant, Theresa Pitts, said the heat triggers her seizures, and the air conditioning hasn’t worked for two or three years in the apartment where she lives with her children, ages 9 and 17.
Sierra Smith said her apartment at Greystone got as hot as 93 degrees during a recent heat wave. The heat caused her 14-year-old daughter, who has asthma, to get nosebleeds, she said.
One tenant, Linda Eiland, filed a lawsuit to get repairs for herself and her children, ages 5, 10 and 18. A judge ruled in her favor in March, but she said some of the problems have returned, like broken air conditioning in their townhouse.
Because of the receivership, Eiland is also waiting for repayment of $9,643 as part of the judgment.
Her complaint states that the amount covers the rent she paid when her unit had leaks, mold and no hot water or air conditioning. Eiland’s rent was $936 and she paid a subsidized amount: $449. The award also covers the cost of buying a new oven herself when hers broke and she said management failed to replace it.
Who is running Greystone Apartments?
In property records, Greystone’s owner is listed as a limited-liability company with a New York address called Greystone Apts LLC. It purchased the large property with a total of 148 low-income apartments on June 15, 2022, for $5.6 million.
The person behind the LLC is Moshe “Mark” Silber, according to business records and criminal and civil court cases over his real estate dealings in Illinois, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
Silber pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud affecting a financial institution in July 2024 and was sentenced to two and a half years in prison in March. He was accused of using a stolen identity to buy an apartment complex in Cincinnati at market rate, then faking a sale for more money to a co-conspirator so he could get a larger loan based on that inflated price. He kept the excess funds for himself, the criminal complaint alleged.
Silber also faces criminal charges of theft related to his real estate business in Pennsylvania. He is accused of diverting rent money from another federally-subsidized apartment complex, Mon View Heights Apartments, to other businesses while Mon View Heights tenants complained about needed repairs and security for their homes. They reported leaks, mold, sewage backups, insect infestations and crime at the complex.
Silber’s lawyer Tina Miller said during his preliminary hearing in Pennsylvania that he denies the allegations against him there. She argued that many of the problems at Mon View Heights occurred or worsened after Silber had to stop managing the property because of the federal case against him, according to reporting by WESA, Pittsburgh’s public radio station.
“Things just fell apart after the federal investigation started,” Miller said at the hearing.
She couldn’t immediately be reached for further comment.
While his criminal cases were happening, a bank accused Greystone Apts LLC and Silber of defaulting on the mortgage for Greystone Apartments in St. Clair County Circuit Court. Payment was due July 10, 2024, one day after Silber’s arrest and guilty plea on federal charges.
As a result of the bank’s lawsuit seeking foreclosure, Greystone has been run by a court-appointed receiver and new property management company since March.
St. Clair County Associate Judge Stacy Campbell ruled July 31 that the bank can sell the Greystone complex at auction to recoup the money it says it’s owed after no one from Greystone Apts LLC had appeared in court or responded to the lawsuit.
The court-appointed receiver, Matt Mason from Hilco Real Estate LLC, didn’t respond to a request for comment about what the upcoming property sale will mean for tenants. But court records include a list of “pre-identified” buyers whose websites state they work in either real estate investment or affordable housing development.
The company that Mason hired to manage the property since March 26, Elmington Property Management, issued a statement in response to the BND’s inquiries about ongoing tenant complaints.
“Upon taking over the management of the Greystone Apartments in late March of this year, we found that there were a number of unaddressed maintenance issues and unfulfilled work orders left over from the previous manager,” the company stated.
“In the four months we have managed the community we have worked diligently to address all these issues on behalf of our residents. While we are still not complete in these efforts, we are committed to continuing to do what is necessary to finish the job.”
Mason reported to the court in March that a total of 37 work orders were open when they took over the property.
Tenants at other rental properties that Elmington manages have complained about the company in recent years, according to news reports. Elmington didn’t offer a response to their allegations when contacted by the BND or other news organizations.
- At Lafayette Landing and Arden Landing in Tennessee, tenants said that their water was being shut off for nonpayment even though the utility was included in the rent.
- At Hobson Flats in Tennessee, tenants complained about a lack of maintenance.
- At Eden at Watersedge in Tennessee and at Legacy at Westwind in Mississippi, tenants said their complaints about the conditions in the apartments were going unanswered.
‘We should not have to live like this’
Greystone tenant Twanna White said in a late July interview that she had been using a wet vacuum to remove water from her living room about five times a day because of the amount leaking from her furnace while the air conditioning ran.
The leaking had been happening for a month. White said her 11-year-old son slipped in the water and fell once. She worried about falling, too, if she were to come downstairs at night when it’s more difficult to see a pool of water on the floor.
At the same time, she said the electrical outlets on one wall of her apartment stopped working and she had cockroaches and sewage backups in her home from issues in neighboring units.
White detailed the problems in a recent Cahokia Heights Code Enforcement complaint form, which she shared with the BND. The form includes a space to explain what action had been taken. She answered with one word: “None.”
Code enforcement officials didn’t respond to a request for comment about the total amount of tenant complaints or code violations at Greystone. The BND submitted a public records request for that information.
Another tenant, U.S. Marine Corps veteran Undray Kilpatrick, said leaks have damaged the floors and ceilings of his apartment at Greystone. In July, his air conditioning was out and he said his stove and refrigerator had been broken for about a month.
He was using an air fryer or barbecuing to cook for his kids, ages 7 and 9.
“Y’all supposed to replace these things and fix these things,” Kilpatrick said. “If I wanted to deal with rehabbing the damages, I would have bought a house, you know?”
Tenant Lakeisha Abdullah said her air conditioning, stove and refrigerator were also broken in July. She was going to her sister’s house to cook for her children, ages 13, 14, 15 and 19.
Beyond what’s happening inside the apartments, White said she believes Greystone officials also need to address the shootings that happen there. She said she was shot in the parking lot while she was driving to the store one day in 2022. Two of the bullets remain lodged near her sciatic nerve and she’s still going to physical therapy because of it, she said.
Tenant Marlayjah Guy said shootings concern her, too. Guy has a 10-year-old daughter, and she said they left their last apartment to get away from gun violence.
“I don’t want to lose my child,” she said. “A 12-year-old just got shot out there.”
This year, a 12-year-old was hit by a stray bullet and a 19-year-old was killed in separate shootings at Greystone Apartments.
The 12-year-old child was injured in an apartment when a bullet came through the wall around 6 p.m. Monday, July 14.
Quan Vaughn, 19, was fatally shot around 5 a.m. Sunday, June 15, in the 300 block of Greystone Drive, where he lived. Two men from East St. Louis and Washington Park were charged with first-degree murder in his death.
“We should not have to live like this,” White said. “… I have a job, but I’m not rich. I’m living here because I can’t afford to pay big rents somewhere else.”
Eiland, the tenant who sued Greystone’s owner, expressed the same feeling.
“People say, ‘Well, why don’t you move?’” Eiland said. “If it was that easy for me to move, I would have moved.”
Editor's note: This story was originally published by the Belleville News-Democrat. Lexi Cortes is a reporter for the BND, a news partner of St. Louis Public Radio.
