‘Highly Hazardous’: Warnock’s Apartments Hit With Housing Code Violations Over Rats, Mold, Electrical Fires

Sen. Raphael Warnock’s (D., Ga.) church-owned low-income apartment complex has been slapped with multiple Atlanta city housing code violations over rodent and bug infestations, hazardous mold, and overflowing trash rooms, according to city records obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

Records from the Atlanta Police Department’s Code Enforcement Section paint a troubling picture of the living conditions at the housing complex—revealing that the problems date back to at least 2016 and were considered serious enough for the city to intervene on multiple occasions.

The records raise new questions for Warnock, who serves as CEO and senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, which owns 99 percent of the Columbia Tower buildings through a shell company. Since taking office in 2021, the senator has positioned himself as a champion for fair and safe housing and said earlier this year that “housing is dignity.”

Warnock has defended the church’s ownership of Columbia Tower and Columbia Senior Residences at MLK Village apartments after the Free Beacon first reported in October on the building’s eviction proceedings against tenants. In a recent debate, Warnock said the report on the evictions was an attempt to “sully the name of Martin Luther King Jr.’s church,” which spends “every day every week feeding the hungry and the homeless.”

Warnock in January sent a letter to the Department of Defense in response to reports about “repair delays, toxic mold, pests,” and other housing problems on U.S. military bases.

Warnock said it was “shameful” that service members “had to deal with these poor living conditions in the first place.”

“Housing is dignity,” he wrote. “I will continue pushing the federal government to make sure we’re doing everything we can to provide our courageous men and women in uniform, and their families, with the resources and support they need not just to live, but thrive.”

Yet Warnock hasn’t publicly raised concerns about similar complaints from residents at the housing complex owned by his church.

The Free Beacon received over 70 pages of inspection records, tenant complaints, photographs, and correspondence from the Atlanta Police Department’s Code Enforcement Section, which led to at least four housing code violations against Columbia between 2016 and 2019.

In August 2016, the city of Atlanta received tenant complaints about “mice, roaches, and bugs infestation” at Columbia Tower. Inspectors found that the “dwelling unit is infested by insects” and cited Columbia for a housing maintenance violation.

Two years later,