Review History for lxtrr

Spinnaker Reach Apartments


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lxtrr

Resident ā€¢ 2011 - 2012

11/23/2013

Brief update on some of the internal politicking which the JaxHA has been embroiled in since the Great Recession started. Those tenants receiving disability who are either using a voucher or on the waiting list for one should be aware that the housing crisis created a situation where the JaxHA could no longer follow the HUD rule that requires it to prioritize the disabled for Section 8, because of the enormous backlog of families waiting for vouchers. In the absence of an agreement between HUD and the Disability Rights Advocates to temporarily prioritize families over the disabled until the economy improves sufficiently, the JaxHA is left with no choice but to use the case workers and the slumlords under its jurisdiction to relentlessly harass the disabled into conduct that can be used as a pretext for banning them from the Program. As of this year, the JaxHA has become aggressive enough in pursuing this policy that case workers will no longer visit with beneficiaries being targeted for it without a co-worker being present -- both to provide witness if the harassment is successful and also for protection in the event that it is. I did my best to get JALA's Housing Discrimination Division to facilitate an outreach between the Disability Rights Advocates and HUD, but bureaucrats only ever care about covering their own backs (at best), so the situation will have to run its own course now -- meaning that the JaxHA's policy is bound to start having fatal consequences at some point. Addendum 7/12/2013: The key to understanding the endless political intrigue surrounding the Housing Authorities is that the whole purpose of their existence is the inability of municipal employees to organize on a national level, as federal employees customarily do, which is what makes it possible for HUD to avoid fully compensating Housing Authorities for doing the same work as HUD employees. The key to rectifying the situation for the Housing Authorities, therefore, is to establish an Underground National Housing Authority Union without HUD or the municipalities ever being able to obtain proof that it exists -- although you can rest assured that it does and that all concerned parties do know about it. Since everything the UNHAU does has to be kept secret at all times, the only effective means for it to protest the collective disenfranchisement of the Housing Authorities is to essentially take it out on HUD beneficiaries at every possible opportunity in an effort to indirectly twist HUD's arm, so to speak. The disabled individuals which the JaxHA now has to force out of the Section 8 Program to make room for families are a perfect target for this abuse, as the most disenfranchised segment of a group -- low-income minorities -- that is historically the most disenfranchised within the nation. Although there can be no doubting that this is indeed the most effective way for the UNHAU to protest the collective disenfranchisement of the Housing Authorities, it is my hope that the local UNHAU members will see fit to follow the pointers I have provided on how to make full use of the internet as the perfect vehicle for organizing an underground movement of any kind, thereby eliminating the need for the Housing Authorities to effectively take their collective disenfranchisement out on those even more disenfranchised than they are through the UNHAU. For if truth be told, for as long as this remains the UNHAU's best effort, the Housing Authorities deserve far worse than to be as disenfranchised as they are. More to the point, by taking this approach, the UNHAU plays right into the hands of HUD by forfeiting the moral high ground -- the one advantage Housing Authorities can have over HUD, since HUD employees are always going to be better educated than Housing Authority employees, on the whole -- and with it the right to protest being oppressed by HUD, along with the potential for making any significant gains in its dealings with HUD. Codicil, 8/1/2013: Anyone looking to JALA for assistance with the JaxHA should be mindful of the fact that HUD funds Legal Aid wherever it can (as it does with JALA) and then prohibits anyone else from handling legal issues involving HUD precisely so that HUD beneficiaries will have no recourse against the nation's Housing Authorities, in order to ensure that the PHAs are relegated to scrounging around for whatever extra crumbs they can secure for themselves through the systematic abuse of HUD beneficiaries, like rats trapped in a maze. Update, 4/15/2013: Re-posting my reviews (but only for the properties I've resided at) detailing the misconduct of the local authorities, as Apartmentratings.com is telling the BBB that its deletion of my original account without warning had nothing to do with being paid to do so, but rather that many of my reviews were exactly the same and therefore constituted spamming. Tenants should beware that Apartmentratings.com is under no obligation whatsoever to refuse compensation from a landlord for having a tenant's account and/or unfavorable review deleted, and is therefore in the business of defrauding tenants, since all of its revenue comes from tenants -- whether it be through the landlords (who get all of their revenue from tenants) or the advertisers (who gear their ads towards tenants at Apartmentratings.com). It is my hope that Apartmentratings.com will become a non-profit or not-for-profit organization through the support of the various tenant associations throughout the nation and with the help of the BBB, so that it can be an advocate of tenants instead of landlords. It turns out that my problems with the JaxHA basically represent a labor dispute, stemming from the fact that Housing Authorities do the same work as HUD employees without being compensated on the same level of HUD employees. All throughout the nation, Housing Authorities exploit the fact that they exist to enforce the true purpose HUD was created for -- to ensure that the Civil Rights Act would never amount to anything more than a continuation of Europe's centuries-long heritage of compensating those of non-European-descent as fully as is necessary to enlist their active participation in the exploitation and degradation of their own cultures -- by relentlessly harassing tenants at every possible opportunity (regardless of whether or not they participate in any HUD Programs), ostensibly to do their job and at the same time express their resentment over not being full-fledged HUD employees (with all the security and benefits that go with being federal employees), but really as a means to rectify the situation by ferreting out tenants who want to see HUD fully comply with the Civil Rights Act through the elimination of the Housing Authorities (as opposed to serving as landlord to citizens of this nation by proxy through the Housing Authorities in violation of the Civil Rights Act). Now that I have fully advised the relevant federal and city authorities (HUD, the DOJ, the JHRC and COJ General Counsel) of the JaxHA's ambitions, perhaps the JaxHA will see fit to not involve tenants in its labor disputes any longer and find a way to resolve its differences with HUD on its own, just like everyone else who has a dispute with their employer. Those who are concerned that the privatization of HUD s properties in order to fully comply with the Civil Rights Act would destabilize the housing industry -- and the economy, by extension -- at a time when the nation (and the world, by extension) can least afford it should bear in mind that the Great Recession was actually brought about by this nation's inability to fully comply with the Civil Rights Act. In other words, it was caused by the private sector turning subprime lending -- a financial policy espoused by the federal government as a means to alleviate the effects of discriminatory lending -- into a means to further discriminatory lending by extending credit solely according to race and source of income (i.e., to those of European-descent who were gainfully employed). It is far from a coincidence that the failure of this policy destabilized the economy of the entire world, since this world is founded on the premise that it is possible for those of non-European-descent to fully participate in Western-European culture. This nation represents the ultimate expression of that promise, so if it cannot live up to it, the world is inevitably going to unravel at the seams. Hard to believe the new Office Staff could be any worse than the dope-peddling thugs they were brought in to replace, but that most certainly seems to be the case, based on recent reviews. Update (8/03/2012): Good news for all prospective residents and all those who have posted negative reviews here within the past year or so, as I confirmed when I went to turn in my keys the day before yesterday that there has been a top-to-bottom purge of the hoodlum Office Staff at Spinnaker Reach. Haven't gotten any details and don't intend to (I am pretty sure it took place sometime during this Summer), as any change has to be for the better, since the old Office Staff represented the worst collection of thugs I have ever encountered as a tenant. Too late to be of any help to me personally, but, as the old saying goes: "Better late than never". I guess this means I change my review back to a tentative recommendation again (as it was originally), but I will keep my original reviews posted, just in case all is not what it seems with the new Staff. Update (7/29/2012): The key issue with these income-restricted properties is whether or not the local Housing Authorities serve as a waiver of HUD's Sovereign Immunity, without which no Federal Agency can be sued. In the absence of any such waiver, it is unconstitutional for HUD to own all of the properties that it does throughout the Nation, since this constitutes a Federal Agency serving as landlord and therefore an automatic violation of its tenants' Civil Rights. Local Legal Aid entities (which very often receive funding through HUD, just like the Housing Authorities themselves, as is the case with JALA) are not under any circumstances going to sue a landlord (or the Housing Authorities, by extension) on behalf of a tenant; at best, they will defend a tenant against being sued for eviction. This means that the only effective legal recourse tenants have against landlords (and the Housing Authorities, by extension) through Legal Aid is to defend against being sued by them, so that the Housing Authorities do not serve as a waiver of HUD's Sovereign Immunity. The best example of this would have to be the JaxHA itself, which neither HUD nor any City/State Agency will admit to having any authority over, has never been sued by anyone (showcase.duvalclerk.com) and whose Representatives openly accept payoffs to engage in all manner of misconduct on a regular basis with utter impunity. So long as Housing Authorities exist, they serve only one purpose: to perpetuate the illusion of serving as a waiver of HUD's Sovereign Immunity, thereby reinforcing the disenfranchisement of low-income minorities. For those of you who are always anxious to know why there is so much crime in these HUD developments and those properties subsidized through HUD throughout the Nation, here is your answer. Without an effective waiver of HUD's Sovereign Immunity in place, HUD properties (and, to a lesser extent, income-restricted properties) have more in common with prisons than they do with conventional rental properties. After all, why obey the laws of this or any other nation if you have no opportunity to ever become anything more than a citizen on paper only? The only solution, of course, is for HUD's properties to be privatized. Update (7/17/2012): It turns out that HUD is behind all of my problems with Spinnaker Reach, as HUD has been using Spinnaker Reach to retaliate against me for reporting its complicity in the retaliatory conduct of a previous landlord of mine back in 2004. At the time I moved to Spinnaker Reach, the Office Staff was engaged in a number of violations which I naively reported to the JaxHA (in order to protect myself from HUD), thereby giving HUD the leverage it needed to further retaliate against me for reporting its complicity in helping my old landlord to retaliate against me for reporting a termite problem at my first apartment here in Jax to the BBB back in '04. The ultimate aim of HUD has been to keep me from reporting the vast levels of corruption within HUD that stem from the simple fact that it is illegal for a Federal Agency to serve as a landlord to a Citizen of this Nation and what it says about the validity of the Civil Rights movement that it is allowed to occur. Since civilians can't sue a Federal Agency, anytime one serves as landlord, it constitutes an automatic violation of the most basic Civil Rights of the Agency's tenants, as Landlord-Tenant Law simply cannot apply in such a circumstance. In effect, a rental property owned by the Federal Government functions more like a prison than a conventional rental property -- which, of course, is why HUD's rental properties tend to be so overrun with crime. This issue is especially problematic given that HUD's tenants are primarily low-income minorities, so that HUD serving as their landlord constitutes active and willful participation on the part of the Federal Government in reinforcing the disenfranchisement of low-income minorities. More to the point, the only way that it can be legal for a Federal Agency to serve as landlord to low-income minorities is if low-income minorities are Citizens of this Nation on paper only. It is the illegality and immorality of a Federal Agency serving as a landlord which lies at the root of the vast levels of corruption within HUD, and other Federal Agencies which have oversight of HUD (i.e., the Department of Justice) are keenly aware of it and could not care less. I have been reporting this issue to the Director of the DOJ's Civil Rights Division for more than 3 years now and have not received a single comment from her regarding this matter once in all that time. Just today, I got an email from a very prominent member of the DOJ's National Black Prosecutor's Association (the Director of the NBPA's Eastern Region) telling me not to send her any more info regarding the matter. The ACLU has not even acknowledged any of the messages & inquiries I have sent it regarding the matter. The only way to clean up the ever-growing corruption within HUD because of the illegality of the Federal Government being a landlord to its Citizens is to privatize all of HUD's properties, so that HUD is relegated to providing support services when it comes to housing, as any Federal Agency should be when it comes to any issue that directly affects civilians (which is why civilians can't sue a Federal Agency). For clarity's sake, I include my previous review from a few months ago and its predecessor. 4/9/2012: Income-Restricted=Slum: For the edification of the uninitiated -- those of you who may be judging Spinnaker Reach in terms of how well-maintained it is rather than the fact that it is income-restricted -- any such rental property is technically a slum, invariably managed by slumlord, with everything that renting from a slumlord entails. I myself had hopes that I had lucked out with Spinnaker Reach and finally managed to find an affordable & decent rental property not owned or managed by a slumlord, based primarily on the physical condition of the Property and the fact that it is managed by a BBB-Accredited Business, Royal American (www.royal-american.net). Having been a tenant (on my own) for 13 years at 5 different rental properties, though, I am always able to gauge before I even move to a property how long I am going to be there and sensed that I would be at Spinnaker Reach for only one year. So when I moved in and it all seemed too good to be true, I just sat back and waited to see what the catch would turn out to be. I didn't have long to wait, as during my very first weekend, I heard a steady stream of extremely loud banging throughout a movie I was watching early on a Sunday afternoon. I couldn't actually tell where it was coming from at first, until it stopped after the movie ended and I realized that it must have been from the neighboring tenants in protest to my watching the movie. I got some earphones the next day and tentatively hoped that would be the end of it, until I got a visit from the downstairs tenant early the following month. He said that he was unaccustomed to having an upstairs tenant, that the walls were "tissue-thin" and that he could hear me coughing and walking on my carpet (in slippers). I immediately suspected that I was being made an unwilling participant in tenement politics in some manner or other, and e-mailed the Property Manager that very day to indicate as much (she told me at the time that she had received no noise complaints about me), in order to make certain that I had a record of future developments as the situation continued to unfold. Sure enough, the situation continued to get progressively worse, as the downstairs tenant -- who turned out to be a Property grounds worker (it was his mildly mentally handicapped kid brother who had knocked on my door that day) -- continued to bang on the ceiling at every possible opportunity, ostensibly to protest my being a noisy tenant (a charge I had never had made against me at any of my previous apartments, most of which were not on the first floor), but really as a means for the Office to extort me into paying the market rent for my apartment, a felony to extort me into paying the market rent for my apartment, a felony offense for an income-restricted rental property. No matter how often I reported the issue to the Property Manager, the situation continued to get worse, until I was finally forced to start involving outside Agencies -- starting with HUD, the Sheriff's Office & the Comcast Security Assurance Division -- in response to the Property Manager actually showing up at my apartment at the end of the year to allege that I had hacked into the Office Network (a very plausible allegation, since I studied Electrical Engineering as an undergrad, have been building my own systems for more than 10 years and have spent the majority of that time as a Linux user). I suspected from the beginning that this was a ruse by the Office to aid and cover for the conduct of the downstairs tenant/staffer, so I told the Sheriff's Office, HUD & Comcast about an incident at the very end of my second month in the apartment where he had screamed profanities at me through my front door at about midnight (an offense worthy of automatic eviction, according to clause 33-e of the lease), pointing out that in my experience only drug addicts engage in such conduct (to this day, I have never actually met him). The Property Manager was forced to finally admit that the downstairs tenant was an employee and that I was not behind the alleged intrusion into the Office Network (naturally, the Property Manager never did produce the e-mail she claimed to have received from Comcast alleging the intrusion by me -- although I requested it repeatedly, both before and after she acknowledged that I was not the culprit). From there, the situation continued to escalate, as I started to report the problem to Royal-American -- whereupon the Property Manager took her efforts to cover for her co-worker to the level of charging me with being in violation of my lease for being a noisy tenant (completely contradicting what she had told me when I first brought her co-worker's harassment to her attention) -- so I went to Florida Consumer Affairs (www.800helpfla.com) and the BBB (www.bbb.org) for assistance. With the intervention of the BBB (which I secured by telling them that this is a sales/advertising issue, since the BBB does not handle Landlord/Tenant issues in connection with its Accredited Businesses), I was finally able to arrange -- after my 7th month in the apartment -- to have the downstairs tenant/staffer and his brother temporarily room with other tenants separately until my lease expires (having determined that I am not prey, Spinnaker Reach has not issued me a Renewal Notice -- and if they did wish to renew the lease, I would have demanded very heavy compensation for being harassed as relentlessly as I was and for as long as I was in order to extort the market rent from me). Incidentally, Spinnaker Reach's rating with the BBB has gone from A- to F for failing to respond to my complaint against it, and will stay that way for the next few years. Moreover, it is the fact that Spinnaker Reach is an income-restricted rental property that tries to be kid-friendly (an impossible task, as anyone familiar with income-restricted rental properties knows all too well) that emboldens Spinnaker Reach/Royal-American to openly and relentlessly extort the market rent from tenants (after using bogus bonuses like a month's free rent to lure them) in direct violation of HUD's rules, as Spinnaker Reach essentially holds the kids at the Property hostage in its dealings with HUD. The moral here, of course, is that you can't judge an income-restricted rental property by how physically well-maintained it is -- and Spinnaker Reach is the best-maintained rental property I have ever come across (I've spent the majority of my life as a tenant pretty much throughout the East Coast) -- what amenities it has to offer (Spinnaker Reach gets top marks there, as well), its demographic, who manages it or the surrounding neighborhood. If you don't make the assumption as a tenant that any income-restricted rental property is automatically a slum and prepare yourself accordingly, you are setting yourself up for some major -- and potentially fatal -- problems. For the anonymous respondent to my original review from yesterday, I trust this update lears up any confusion as to whether or not I work for Management. For those of you thinking this is nothing more than a grouse from a tenant who has fallen out of favor with Management and is moving on (which I most certainly have and am), I include my initial impressions of Spinnaker Reach in the form of my original review, as follows: Pleasantly Surprised (8/28/2011): New, luxury-style property & apartments, both with great amenities; friendly, efficient & helpful Office Staff; clean, safe & quiet neighborhood with abundant shopping, etc. Nothing to not like, unless you don't like kids (most kid-friendly property I have ever encountered, other than the one I grew up in), the greater extremes of weather you get as you approach the Beach (one neighborhood over) or don't have access to a car and don't like to walk (shopping district is 1 mile away, as is the nearest bus stop). New tenant, so haven't had the chance to see any indications of the high crime mentioned throughout this listing -- although no Jax neighborhood is completely free of crime -- but my research (mainly through the JSO at www.coj.net) indicates that this neighborhood is safer than neighborhoods traditionally reputed to be more affluent, such as Baymeadows. Update (8/30/2011): Since 2 negative reviews have been posted here in response to my positive one in as many days, I thought an update and word of caution to the discerning reader was warranted. Everyone knows that most of the reviews at Apartmentratings.com are illegitimate -- posted by either disgruntled former (or soon to be former) tenants or management passing themselves off as tenants (or tenants acting on behalf of management). What I am seeing here is that there is another kind of illegitimate review at Apartmentratings.com: tenants who deliberately portray their property as being worse than it is in order to protect it by scaring off prospective tenants. I say this because I know from personal experience that Spinnaker Reach tenants are fiercely protective of their Property and utterly terrified of it deteriorating into a slum tenement -- perfectly understandable, given that the Property is primarily intended to be kid-friendly, but is income-restricted. What these tenants should understand is that this approach can be self-defeating and also a self-fulfilling prophecy, if Management finds itself in over its head because of its inability to get apartments occupied during a protracted because of its inability to get apartments occupied during a protracted downturn in the economy (I know this to be the case, also from personal experience) and finds itself forced to abandon the Property, so that a slumlord winds up taking its place (at some point, this has occurred at least once at 2 of the 3 properties -- out of 5 total, including this one -- I have resided in where a slumlord was not in place to start with).

    Review 57 out of 103

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