Healthy Homes

Your landlord is required by law to provide heat and utilities like hot water in cold weather. Here’s how to make sure that happens.

The Giving Grove, a nonprofit that works with residents of under-resourced communities to grow orchards, will translate their educational gardening materials into 12 different languages. Non-English speaking communities face barriers to accessing the free fruit and nuts because information has been printed only in English.

The legislation applies to outages longer than 12 hours. Another measure directs the city manager to create an emergency response plan for life-threatening tenant conditions.

Tenants in the Cloverleaf Apartment complex reported major leaks, mold, pest infestations and a chronic lack of hot water or air conditioning. The landlord can no longer own property in Missouri for 10 years.

At an affordable housing apartment complex near Kansas City's sport stadiums, tenants have lived through uninhabitable conditions for years. Plus: Real estate company VineBrook Homes is snatching up homes around the Midwest and in Kansas City at a rapid pace, but tenants are crying foul.

Stonegate Meadows offers affordable units to low-income families and accepts Section 8 housing vouchers. But city records and a lawsuit show how Stonegate has allowed tenants to live in squalor for years.

Seven plaintiffs have joined a class action lawsuit against Stonegate Meadows, a low-income apartment complex on East 42nd Street, alleging that the property owners refused to address "uninhabitable conditions" — including problems with black mold, rodent infestations and sewage backup.