Audrey Alflen has accumulated a lot of stuff, the result of living in the same apartment for 22 years.

Next door to her Royal Gardens apartment, though, dumpsters have arrived and workers put up a metal fence around adjacent buildings.

Last year, a California company purchased the Royal Gardens apartments with promises of renovations to the low-income housing development, which accepts housing vouchers for its 300 units.

For long-term tenants like Alflen, the improvements come with an impending move. Alflen uses a walker and won’t be able to relocate on her own, she said. The timeline is also unknown and residents say it is unclear if they will be allowed to return to their existing unit or be permanently displaced.

“Everyone’s up in an upheaval,” she said. “I don’t know when I’m going. I have no one to help me pack. I can’t be lifting. I can’t bend over. No one knows when they’re moving.”

Concerns about the move also come with fears of evictions. New Hampshire’s “good cause” eviction laws allow landlords to terminate a lease for any “business or economic reason,” which includes renovations to the property.

These concerns aren’t new, though, particularly for non-native English speakers who live on the property. A lack of translation services, which are required by federal fair housing laws, have led to miscommunications between management and tenants, resulting in eviction filings and fines.

Ghana Sharma, who previously lived at the apartment complex and is a licensed translator, has often stepped in to help neighbors.

“People call me, ‘We have received a letter from Royal Gardens, I did not understand what this portion is, what does that mean?’” he said. “There are a lot of things that are very difficult to understand there.”

‘The same story’

Stephen Tower, a managing attorney with New Hampshire Legal Assistance, noticed the pattern fast. A number of tenants at Royal Gardens were calling his organization with the same eviction notice.

Tower said letters from tenants stated they had failed to report a change in income, which is required for voucher holders, and were facing fines as a result.

For people whose earnings were below the poverty line, these charges added up quickly, said Tower. Often, the tenants would also attest that they had recorded the changes, but office staff said otherwise.

“The part that was concerning about it is we heard the same story from eight or nine different families, some of whom had already gotten the eviction notice,” Tower said. “They had already left because they thought they needed to leave.”

New Hampshire Legal Assistance filed complaints with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which manages the voucher program, claiming that Royal Gardens staff failed to keep updated records regarding tenants’ income.

At the same time, Tower and other attorneys were in court defending several evictions, where the discovery process would allow access to tenants’ ledgers. Those ledgers were nonsensical, said Tower. On a number of occasions the case was then dropped, he said, but that wasn’t the reality for all tenants who received the letters.

“How many families, non-English-speaking families, didn’t find their way to Legal Aid and because of that got evicted based on ledgers that were completely incomprehensible and made no sense?” he said.

Initial complaints began in 2019, and over the course of a few years property management changed hands a number of times.

Federal response to the complaints was that the property’s recordkeeping was disorganized, said Tower, but not discriminatory in nature.

One case remains open and ongoing, though.

“There have definitely been some serious issues in the past with their recordkeeping that has substantially impacted non-native-English speaking tenants,” said Tower.

Recent renovations

Sharma hasn’t lived at Royal Gardens for a few years but still gets calls from tenants for help.

This month a former student contacted him. She’s pregnant and her husband has been staying over at her apartment ahead of her due date. They did not report an additional resident to office management, and an eviction threat followed unless the couple could prove he did not live there full time.

Often, Sharma sees a breakdown in communication between management and non-native-English speaking tenants.

Without a translator present, it’s hard to decipher pages of rules and requirements in legal language.

Fees and fines associated with court filings also add up quickly, said Sharma.

“A major issue is people are not billionaires there,” he said. “They’re low-income families. When they get eviction notices demanding $500, $600, $700, it’s scary.”

Since the property was purchased in April 2024, 14 eviction notices have been filed. The majority of tenants have represented themselves in court and had housing vouchers.

From the bus stop, Alflen can point to the doors of her neighbors who have faced such threats.

Violations for breaking property rules can amount to removal as well. Last year Alflen received two – which can range from anything from a dispute with another tenant to smoking on private property.

She’s not sure when they’ll start to renovate her building but she knows she’d like to come back to her unit when it’s complete. She knows her neighbors along her apartment block and it is near the bus stop, which is convenient since she doesn’t have a car.

But she has yet to receive reassurance that that will be the case.

“I should be able to say where I want to be,” she said. “I should be able to renovate and come back. That’s what I want.”

Michaela Towfighi can be reached at mtowfighi@cmonitor.com