An affordable housing development near Willow Glen was supposed to give homeless older adults a safe place to live. Instead, a number of residents are clamoring to leave.
Leigh Avenue Senior Apartments, located at Leigh Avenue and Southwest Expressway, provided housing to 63 older adults when it opened in 2021. Seven residents told San José Spotlight they feel suffocated by mounting violations they receive for minor mishaps, like written warnings when their visitors forget to sign out and $25 charges for spilling coffee on the floor. If they don’t pay, management threatens to evict them, the residents said.
“I was not happy from the first day I moved in,” resident Carol Fowlkes, 73, told San José Spotlight. “They’re belittling us. There’s a lot of us who don’t deserve to be treated that way.”
Living in frustration
Fowlkes was one of the first tenants to move in when the apartments opened. Prior to that, she had been homeless for about seven years. She lived in a tent in Gilroy while suffering with a kidney disease, and was placed in a hotel during the pandemic.