In an aging house tucked along a bend on a steep road in Pittsburgh, Darnica Gordon said she tried to pay her rent even as the inside of her home was falling down around her.
First, part of the kitchen ceiling buckled from water leaking through the roof.
Then, chunks of plaster above her dining room collapsed — a piece crashing to the floor, shaking her from her sleep.
Her landlord, VineBrook Homes, sent a crew to repair the damage, which was blamed on a clogged toilet, and then months later part of the ceiling fell again, scattering pieces across the floor.
"It's like pouring rain in the dining room," she said.
Month after month, the problems mounted, along with her own struggles to pay the bills, and then came the $1,900 water charge — more than twice the regular amount.
Her landlord put her on an installment plan that added $165 onto her rent to cover the cost, raising her monthly payment to more than $1,000, records show.
By the time the eviction notice arrived on her doorstep last year, she had nowhere to go.
Like other renters, Ms. Gordon was facing late fees, attorney costs and legal action from a company that has changed neighborhoods across Allegheny County at a pace rarely ever seen.
In just five years, VineBrook Homes and its subsidiaries — flush with millions in cash — amassed hundreds of homes in working-class neighborhoods from Penn Hills to Pittsburgh’s West End.
Driven by cheap prices and the critical need for affordable housing, the company took control of more than 100 properties in the county through the first year of the pandemic.
By the end of the crisis in 2022, the company and its subsidiaries owned 522 properties and became the largest out-of-state owner of homes in the county while building a real estate empire that spanned the nation.
VineBrook and its subsidiaries are among several corporations that came into the Pittsburgh region at full tilt, buying houses often in bulk deals, turning them into rentals, and in many cases, knocking out first-time homebuyers with cash offers.
As VineBrook exploded in growth, housing advocates in other states say it carried out business practices that ended up harming tenants on a large scale and sparking lawsuits and government legislative initiatives that would last for years.
Time and again, renters challenged VineBrook over tactics that included excessive evictions, unlawful fees and neglected properties — allegations that the company denied.
VineBrook’s foray into Western Pennsylvania real estate ushered in its own problems — code violations, unpaid taxes and rampant evictions — that housing advocates say have taken a toll on communities, a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette investigation found.
More than a dozen people interviewed by the Post-Gazette described moving into homes that looked to be newly refurbished only to discover some of the properties were rife with structural breakdowns, leaking pipes and roofs, black mold, and infestations of insects and rodents.
Steve Taylor said the basement of his rental home in Penn Hills was prone to flooding after heavy rain, but when he returned from work one day, he found the floor soaked in raw sewage.
He put in an urgent request for help through the company’s online portal, but after a full day of waiting, no one showed. All the while, if someone in his home flushed the toilet, more sewage would ooze into the basement, he said.
“It was flooded,” he said. “As soon as you walked in the front door, you could smell sewage, and I got a 5-month-old grandbaby.”
In frustration, he said he went to Home Depot the next day, rented a snake, bought a water vacuum for $90, and managed to drain much of the sewage that had been filling the basement. A plumber showed up the following day.
“The sewage water had nowhere to go. It was bubbling up into the sink. This wasn’t water. It was [expletive].”
A company spokesman said VineBrook makes every effort to improve properties and has invested more than $60 million in the Pittsburgh area, often in neighborhoods that need investment.
The Ohio company said its goal is to repair its homes to make them more livable and provide "a single-family home lifestyle that is otherwise out of reach for many."
As far as making service calls, VineBrook said the company responds to emergency needs within four hours on average, and last year "under two days for routine and urgent work orders."
It wasn’t just the tenants who complained of crumbling homes that needed the company’s attention.
At more than a dozen properties, inspectors for Pittsburgh and Allegheny County found leaks, rotted floorboards, mildew, mold and raw sewage, and exposed electrical wires, records show.
In at least 17 cases, Pittsburgh officials filed criminal complaints against VineBrook companies for problems including debris, overgrowth and structural breakdowns that inspectors repeatedly turned up in visits — a roof that was rapidly deteriorating at one home. The cases have since been resolved.
Though tenants said they frequently had to press the company to make critical repairs, Vinebrook could act swiftly when its customers didn’t pay their rent.
In the past four years, the company filed more than 320 eviction proceedings, nearly half of them last year.
Vinebrook says such actions are taken as a last resort and the company tries to avoid the proceedings.
“VineBrook Homes works diligently to provide affordable homes for lease to residents, to keep rental rates low, and to work with residents who may incur challenges in meeting the obligations of their lease agreement,” it said.
But a Post-Gazette analysis shows that VineBrook filed evictions at a rate that far surpassed the average landlord in Allegheny County — more than five times higher.
Consider: In 2024 alone, the company filed 152 cases across the 356 homes that it owned last year — an eviction rate of 43%. Countywide, the figure is just 8%.
The rush of legal actions took place three years ago when the ban on evictions during the COVID-19 pandemic was lifted.
Trail of unpaid taxes
As VineBrook and its companies were taking people to court — often tacking on thousands in legal fees and other costs — it was late in paying the taxes on its own properties year after year.
At least 40 times, local authorities took legal action against Vinebrook by slapping liens on the properties in a spate of cases that has riled government leaders.
Ira Weiss, a solicitor whose firm represents more than a dozen local taxing bodies, said such delinquencies put pressure on school districts and townships already strapped for cash.
“They’re absentee landlords,” said Mr. Weiss. “It’s a burden on the taxing bodies, and it’s a burden on the people who need the homes.”
Vinebrook said it pays its taxes when it’s notified, and also covers any fees and penalties if money is due.
The company said many of the late payments that led to the liens were inherited from prior owners. "Although the record may show that tax was delinquent on that house, it quite often predates VineBrook," the company said.
Basic online searches by the company and title work performed on the properties — a routine part of homebuying — would have revealed unpaid taxes, liens and other debts, local experts say.
By making sure those payments were made on time, the company may have spared the taxing bodies of having to spend hundreds of dollars to go to court in each case.
“It’s part of the deal and they know that,” said Mr. Weiss.
VineBrook's arrival in the local market is part of a larger trend in property ownership — the growth of the corporate landlord — a business model applauded for investment in neighborhoods but lacking the traditional landlord relationships that have endured for generations.
A Post-Gazette analysis shows corporations own more than one in every 10 single-family homes in Pittsburgh, but have little familiarity with the neighbors nearby.
“I used to be able to pick up the phone and call the landlord,” said Mr. Taylor. “Now it has to be a service request” through an online portal.
Segavepo, a subsidiary of a multibillion-dollar private equity firm in Illinois, broke into the region just before the pandemic and emerged as the second-largest out-of-state landlord.
In just four years, the company scooped up at least 209 properties, most of them in Penn Hills, records show.
It would also file dozens of evictions against tenants last year — a rate three times the county average — while getting hit with tax liens more than 100 times since moving into the area.
Launch an inquiry
During a council meeting in West Mifflin last year, Mayor Chris Kelly demanded the borough launch an inquiry into all corporate landlords, citing those that are frequently tax delinquent.
“I said we have to come up with a strategy and we have to have a game plan,” he told the Post-Gazette. “It’s not only a moral obligation, but it’s financial.”
In response to questions from the Post-Gazette, Segavepo said the company “takes seriously its stewardship of homes across Allegheny County” and that it seeks to “foster quality, stable housing while meeting obligations to the local and state governments.”
Segavepo currently does not owe taxes on its properties, the company said, and the liens all have been paid — in many cases years after they were filed.
The struggles in Allegheny County come after years of housing giants showing a similar pattern in states across the country where they were able to take control of houses in bulk purchases, building real estate fortunes.
In Ohio, where VineBrook owns as many as 7,200 homes, the city of Cincinnati sued the company in 2021, claiming it had racked up more than $600,000 in unpaid water bills and fines.
A settlement was reached, but the city came back two years later and filed another legal action, saying the company broke the pact by failing to fix code violations and kept filing evictions against tenants over improper utility charges.
The city also added claims that the company had created a “public nuisance” and engaged in “repeated intentional violations” of the state landlord law.
“We have no tolerance for investors who come into Cincinnati, let properties degrade, and exploit tenants," Mayor Aftab Pureval said in a news release.
Vinebrook denied the allegations and pressed a counterclaim, alleging the government was unfairly blaming the company as part of an intimidation campaign to “shake it down for money.”
The city and VineBrook settled the case last year, with the government agreeing not to single out the company, and VineBrook pledging to repair problems at its homes while hiring a monitor to make sure both sides were complying.
While VineBrook and Cincinnati were battling, other debates were unfolding in Columbus and Dayton, Ohio, Milwaukee and Indianapolis over similar practices by corporate landlords.
A U.S. Senate hearing three years ago focused on the tactics of several housing companies — including VineBrook — and the need to protect thousands of renters who are vulnerable to evictions, excessive fees and decrepit living conditions.
Lawmakers spoke about the struggles of many tenants to buy their own homes, partly because of the role the corporations played in changing many of the fundamentals of homebuying in neighborhoods nationwide.
Instead of individual house purchases, companies empowered with billions of dollars snatched up properties en masse — often in disinvested areas, in some cases at sheriff sales.
Those types of transactions would make it harder for tenants to compete with the out-of-state investors who were frequently able to offer more money and a quicker deal than buyers who need to get a mortgage.
Cash in
"They outbid people with cash. My own son lost two homes that way," said Pittsburgh City Councilwoman Theresa Kail-Smith, whose district includes southern and western neighborhoods where some of the big landlords have scooped up homes.
"They were looking for a house in Brookline, and they got outbid by $25,000 cash on the same house. They couldn't compete with that," she said.
Before a VineBrook company bought the home in Penn Hills where Mr. Taylor had already been living, he was in talks to buy the house himself.
He said the owner even offered to knock down the price to $115,000 if the buyer agreed to fix some of the breakdowns on his own, like the basement flooding.
But he lost his chance when VineBrook bought the home for $186,000.
He said the owner of the home told him that because of his credit rating and the thousands of dollars more that VineBrook was willing to pay, he couldn’t compete.
“I get emotional every time I think about it,” said Mr. Taylor, who now lives in Georgia.
Year after year, VineBrook, Segavepo and another company, SFR3, targeted working-class areas of the county where houses could be picked up for as little as $60,000 — a third of the average home value in Allegheny County, a Post-Gazette analysis shows.
SFR3, a New York real estate investment fund, scooped up more than 200 homes in the county over the past four years — a third of them in Pittsburgh neighborhoods.
Vinebrook bought at least 84 homes in Penn Hills, and for Segavepo, one out of every five purchases was in Monroeville.
The rush to buy homes peaked in 2022, driven partly by low-interest rates and an affordable-housing crisis that was felt in communities across the region.
But in time, some of the companies began to struggle under mounting debt from years of homebuying, and were forced to sell off thousands of houses.
In the Pittsburgh area, VineBrook unloaded more than 150 homes, records show, but continues to be the largest out-of-state landlord in the region.
Mr. Kelly, the West Mifflin mayor, said he talked to other community leaders who said they welcomed the big companies into neighborhoods where homes had remained empty for years.
But as people began signing leases, the investments came at a cost.
Mr. Kelly said he heard from renters in West Mifflin who couldn’t get basic repairs and in some cases, were getting evicted.
“We have people who have called me and are desperate,” he said. “They can’t get any help.”
Ms. Gordon was forced to scramble after the court order was delivered to her door in October.
In the two years she rented the Pittsburgh home from VineBrook, she often struggled to pay her bills.
She had dealt with collapsed ceilings, rent hikes and an excessive water bill that came after months of problems with a running toilet that repeatedly clogged, she said.
Now, she feared that she and her three children would be forced out.
“I’ve lived here for so long,” said Ms. Gordon, a part-time secretary at a home health care company.
Not until a local aid group stepped in — weeks later — did she finally catch a break and was able to get emergency money.
She still owes hundreds of dollars in water bills and is constantly making repairs, but at least she is able to stay.
“My children literally grew up here,” she said.
Two weeks ago, she renewed her lease for another year with one more added cost — a $60 increase in her rent.
First Published: March 14, 2025, 2:00 p.m.
Updated: March 14, 2025, 8:08 p.m.
