Nashville Tenants Clash With Apartment Owner After Being Given 3 Days To Vacate

Janet Salgado hadn’t even finished moving into her new apartment when her phone rang.

“They called me on a Thursday,” Salgado says, “and I had to be out on Monday.”

That gave her three short days to move.

She is 8 months pregnant and has three young children. Her parents live in another Mosaic apartment, and she says her dad is bedridden with pancreatic cancer.

Still, no exceptions were made. She was told she needed to leave, even though she had just moved into her own apartment less than a month prior. Her family was told the same.

“If I didn’t [get] out by Monday then the sheriff would come and they would give me an eviction and they would get my stuff out of the apartment,” she says.

The housing dispute grew heated this week when the property owner flew to Nashville to meet with residents of the Mosaic Apartments on the south side of the city. The meeting was meant to provide clarity about why residents were told they need to leave.

At the meeting Wednesday in the gym of the elementary school across the street from Mosaic, residents lined up to recount the chaos that followed those calls.

One woman sold her car so she could afford to move to a new apartment. Her baby was only a few days old when she received the call so she had to pay for help moving her furniture. Other cash-strapped residents spent on storage units.

Paige Pfleger WPLN News

Residents of Mosaic Apartments hold signs saying “No More Intimidation” and “Justice for the Mosaic Warriors” at a meeting with the apartment owner, Rob Bond.

The owner of the apartments, Rob Bond, flew from California to meet residents. He says no one is being evicted — instead some tenants need to relocate temporarily so repairs can be made.

“We are here today to make sure that Mosaic is restored from storm damage in a safe and healthy way,” he said to residents.

Some apartments were deemed uninhabitable after the March storms, he says, though it took two months to convey that to residents. He says they will provide other apartments within the complex for those affected.

But that surprised tenants like Salgado. She says her apartment seems fine, and that after she was told she had to leave, she asked for another unit at Mosaic but management refused.

Metro Councilmember Russ Bradford organized the meeting in hopes of ironing out those discrepancies.

“I would like to give Bond the benefit of the doubt,” Bradford says. “But again I want to make sure that we get this in writing so that if they turn around and they don’t honor all this, then we have something to call them out on.”

But it seems the meeting may have sowed more confusion than clarity. To shouts and boos, Bond left the gymnasium abruptly to catch a flight. Over the shoulder of his private security guard in the hallway, he said he doesn’t know why residents were told they were being evicted.

“Look, I don’t know what they did or did not receive, right?” Bond said. “I’m not here. I’m not a manager.”

But residents and activists feel that the tenants, many of whom primarily speak Spanish, were being taken advantage of. They’re asking for $6,000 per tenant in compensation for the displacement, and they want fixes that they say have been problems for years, not just since the March storms.