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U.S. Attorney sues Trumbull housing authority
YOUNGSTOWN
The U.S. Attorney’s office has filed a civil lawsuit that says the Trumbull Metropolitan Housing Authority discriminated against a man with diabetes and end-stage kidney disease in its housing-voucher program.
Besides the Warren-based authority, the complaint names as defendants Russell Osman, the authority’s assistant director, and Valerie Simeon, its voucher-program coordinator.
The suit, which alleges housing discrimination based on disability, is assigned to Judge Benita Y. Pearson of U.S. District Court in Youngstown.
The U.S. Attorney filed the suit after the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which funds the authority’s housing-voucher program, investigated the matter and charged the defendants engaged in discrimination in violation of the Fair Housing Act.
Donald Emerson, the authority’s executive director, declined to comment Thursday on details of the case, but said he believed the matter would be resolved “relatively soon” and that he’d have more to say when it’s resolved.
To protect their privacy, the U.S. Attorney referred to the man, his wife and their two children only by their initials in the complaint.
TMHA gave the family a voucher to rent a house on Merriwether Street in Warren, but the man’s dialysis center social worker said the basement room there, where the man had planned to undergo home dialysis, wasn’t suitable for that procedure because it was a passageway between the garage and the main house and would have been difficult to keep clean and sanitary, the suit said.
The couple said they found another house they wanted to rent with their voucher, but TMHA terminated their voucher assistance in October 2014 because they had not moved into the Merriwether Street house after the authority inspected and approved it, the suit said.
Without a voucher, the couple couldn’t afford to rent a suitable home, so the man went to live with his father, and his wife and their children moved to her grandmother’s home 20 miles away, straining their marriage and family life, and causing the man’s health to decline, the complaint said.
In the 11 months the couple lived apart, the man was hospitalized at least four times and twice contracted dialysis-related infections, the suit said.
The suit seeks unspecified monetary damages for the complainants and a court order requiring TMHA “to restore them to the position they would have occupied, but for such discriminatory conduct.”