This story was commissioned by the River City Journalism Fund
Nine years ago, Ferguson’s Canfield Green Apartments gained international attention as the site where Michael Brown Jr. was killed.
But more recently, the complex — now named Pleasant View Gardens Apartments — has become Exhibit A in a different story, this one about federal COVID-19 relief funds.
Aria Legacy Group of Lakewood, New Jersey, bought the complex of 414 apartments in April 2021. Big changes soon followed.
That August, the U.S. Supreme Court ended the federal COVID-19 eviction moratorium.
A few weeks later, the new owners began taping notices to the doors of 80 tenants, informing them they had just three days to move out. The eviction notices touched off a scramble among Ferguson city officials and nonprofit groups to keep roofs over tenants’ heads.
While that crisis was eventually averted, Aria Legacy Group wound up filing 265 eviction cases between September 2021 and the autumn of 2023, St. Louis County court records show.