The large downtown Detroit apartment complex once known as the Millender Center has been hit with a lawsuit alleging rodent problems and other poor conditions inside the 33-story high-rise that for many years was considered upscale.
The lawsuit against the 338-unit complex at 555 Brush St., which is now called The Millie on Brush, was filed earlier this month in Wayne County Circuit Court by a resident.
Allanah Morales, 26, claims rat and cockroach sightings in the building's lobby and other common areas, plus water leaks and mold within her own unit, constitute negligence on the landlord's part and a breach of her lease terms.
In an interview, Morales said that prior to filing the lawsuit, she and a handful of other fed-up residents this summer
began putting their monthly rent into a city-sponsored escrow program in response to various problems in the building they felt weren't getting addressed.
The city's escrow program is an option for tenants in rental properties that have code violations or lack a required "Certificate of Compliance."
Yet shortly after she and one of her neighbors appeared on a Fox2 news segment in mid-June about the building's alleged "rat infestation," a segment that included resident-captured videos of rats scurrying around inside, Morales said they were both served notices of nonpayment and potential eviction — despite having been paying their rent into escrow.
@allanah_morales Please continue to share & help spread awareness. If you’ve been following the news recently, then you’ve likely seen my story. The Millie on Brush Apartments & Village Green Property Management are attempting to retaliate against me and unlawfully evict me after I spoke out about the serious living conditions residents have been facing. Despite following the proper legal processes, including exercising my rights as a tenant, I am still being targeted while the City of Detroit continues to turn a blind eye. This situation has significantly impacted my mental health, sense of safety, and overall quality of life. #downtowndetroit #detroit #themillieonbrushapartments #villagegreenmanagement
♬ original sound - Onyx |Allanah Serenity Morales
Morales went on to make a detailed TikTok video about her ordeal and her disappointment with the city's response to her past complaints about conditions in the high-rise. The Sept. 2 video has since racked up over 336,000 views.
"It feels like the city of Detroit is failing not only me, but the other residents of our building," she says in the video.
The Millie on Brush issued a statement for this story regarding the building's current condition.
“We take all resident concerns seriously and have established processes to promptly address them," the statement says. "The Millie on Brush completes routine preventative maintenance, including regular pest control services. As part of these efforts, the property recently passed its final inspection with the city of Detroit with no evidence of rodent activity. We look forward to continuing to work collaboratively with our residents and the city to maintain and enhance our community.”
A city of Detroit spokesman had no comment.
In her TikTok video, Morales describes how she believes that the rodent and pest problems began after the temporary closure last December of the building's trash rooms, which led to trash piling up in some common areas.
She says she spotted her first rat in the building in May when she was walking through the lobby with her dog. She reported the rat to a building manager, who, according to Morales, told her that "these are just normal occurrences that are part of urban Detroit living."
The building manager informed her about a week later that the rat in the building had been captured, Morales says. But Morales remained skeptical the problem was solved, as she could still hear screeching and scratching noises coming from within the ceiling tiles in the lobby.
She again reached out to a building manager, who according to Morales dismissed the noises as likely being from construction work. However, she was hearing the rat-like sounds on nights and on weekends — not typical construction hours.
“All the while, at this time the smell in the lobby is just, like, insane," Morales says in her TikTok video. "It smells like something has died down there. It smells like a corpse in the lobby.”
Amid continued complaints about the odor from her and other residents, building management went on to remove the lobby ceiling tiles about three weeks later, Morales says. And once the tiles were down, there were more rat sightings, the accumulation of what appeared to be rat feces on the floor and the smell grew even worse, according to Morales.
Morales said they eventually reached out to Fox2 because the city wasn't responding to their complaints.
Hours after the Fox2 segment aired on June 15, an inspector city with the city's Buildings, Safety, Engineering and Environmental Department, or BSEED, made a visit to The Millie and wrote up the building for several blight violations, including "failure to abate unsanitary, vermin or rat infested conditions determined to render property unfit for human occupancy."
However, a city administrative hearing officers ultimately determined that the building wasn't responsible and in July dismissed the blight tickets.
A city inspector returned to The Millie in August and wrote another blight ticket for "unsanitary, vermin or rat infested conditions." That ticket, too, was eventually dismissed.
Most recently, this month a hearing officer found The Millie on Brush's owner — Toronto-based Minett Capital — responsible for failing to obtain the required "Certificate of Compliance" for a residential property. That Oct. 12 judgment resulted in a $305 fine.
Eviction case dismissed
A 36th District Court judge last month dismissed the landlord's eviction case against Morales.
She continues to stay in her Millie apartment and pays rent into an escrow account while she hunts for new housing. Her $1,895-per-month lease for the two-bedroom apartment runs until March 8.
During a Free Press visit last week, an odd odor was present in The Millie's lobby and on some residential floors. There also was a strong epoxy-like smell lingering outside the building's Brush Street entrance.
Morales' lawsuit is seeking over $25,000 in damages, including a refund of her past rent payments and a release from her lease obligations.
A representative for The Millie referred comment about the lawsuit's allegations to the property's owner, Minett Capital, which did not respond this week to a Free Press inquiry. The Millie also had not yet responded to Morales' suit as of mid-day Oct. 15. No attorney was listed in online court records.
A big deal when it opened
The apartment building opened in 1985 as part of a broader Millender Center hotel, retail and parking development. The complex is linked to the Renaissance Center by a skywalk and has its own People Mover station.
The apartment building originally had nine penthouses and its units were aimed at middle- and upper-income tenants, according to Free Press archives. The center was named for the late Detroit attorney Robert Millender Sr., who helped manage the election campaigns that put then-Mayor Coleman Young and others in office.
During the October 1985 grand opening, Young recounted how skeptics once argued "there was no market downtown for this type of thing," and described the Millender Center as key to revitalizing downtown and "in its way is every bit as significant as Renaissance" Center.
Millender Center's apartments underwent renovations in the mid-2010s under its then-owner, City Club Apartments, and several dozen subsidized units in the building reverted from affordable to market-rate rents in 2017 when the original tax-free bonds were paid off.
In 2019, the Bedrock real estate firm bought the Millender Center's hotel segment, now a Courtyard by Marriott, and went on five years later to acquire the parking and retail segments from General Motors. Bedrock this summer informed most of the few remaining retail tenants that their leases were ending, and today the building's retail corridors are empty.
However, the world's first combination IHOP/Applebee's restaurant is still on the ground floor of the Millender Center hotel complex and open for business.
Contact JC Reindl: 313-378-5460 or jcreindl@freepress.com. Follow him on X @jcreindl
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Millie on Brush Detroit apartments hit with lawsuit after rat sighting
