HENRICO COUNTY, Va. — The Henrico County Board of Supervisors has requested a meeting with the head of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to discuss ongoing problems at Essex Village — a HUD-subsidized apartment complex.
“Our frustration over the ongoing issues in Essex Village has reached a point where we believe the only way to resolve them is for a meeting to occur with you,” the board wrote in a letter dated October 19th to HUD Secretary Dr. Ben Carson.
A recent series of CBS 6 Problem Solvers investigations uncovered unsafe living conditions at the Section 8 complex in eastern Henrico County, as well as other properties in the area managed by a company called PK Management.
PK Management receives millions of taxpayer dollars from HUD annually to subsidize the rent of residents at their complexes.
“We seek your personal involvement and help in rectifying what is clearly a waste of taxpayer dollars, a historically apathetic HUD inspection process, a broken system of direct subsidies, and ownership that is getting wealthy from those federal subsidies while residents reside in unacceptable conditions,” the board wrote to Carson.
Ben Carson (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)
In response to the letter, HUD sent an email to County Manager John Vithoulkas requesting that he fill out a “secretary meeting request form.”
HUD’s Advisor to Intergovernmental Relations said in the email that once they received the form they would make sure it got to the secretary’s scheduling team for review.
