Interview with a Former Beal Employee: Wendy Alfaro-Cruz

In early March, What’s Left Ypsi got the chance to speak extensively with former employee of Beal Properties, Wendy Alfaro-Cruz.

What’s Left Ypsi: What was your role at Beal properties?

Wendy Alfaro-Cruz: At first I was a front desk person, and then… I was front desk marketing, and then I got moved to maintenance.

WL: Do you have a strong political identity? 

W: No… I think it’s crazy that Trump is firing people that work in forests and stuff.

I’m like–that’s crazy… I think we should have better access to apartments and stuff. You know, there’s this whole thing about [how] landlords aren’t for the people… but then it’s like, well, if you can’t afford a house, then you have to rent. But then, where do you draw the line with rent caps and stuff like that? I definitely think people should be talking about it more and speaking up.

WL: Why did you leave Beal Properties?

W:  I always compared it to being in a relationship with, like, an abusive person. But you don’t want to leave, you know? ‘Cause there’s times where he’s really nice… But then there’s other times when I don’t know if he’s under pressure, which he probably is, or like wanting these deadlines that investors are asking him… he could be a little aggressive.

…when I was working at Arbor One, he would make the property manager cry, and I’m still friends with her… It was just [that] he was giving a lot of work to very [few] people.. So of course that gets really stressful. And it was very, very demanding. 

When we were over in Toledo… I would send [one of my maintenance guys] to do so much work because I knew he would do it. And he went into one room and he ended up getting bit by fleas. So I took pictures and I sent them to Stewart and I’m like, “Why are my maintenance guys getting bit by fleas?” And he’s like, “Oh, that’s nothing. Those are not bug bites.” And I’m like, “What are you talking about?” Toledo, in that area where he has apartments–they’re known for bedbugs and fleas.

And he just like… didn’t believe us… I’m like, “I’ve worked with this man for years now. I’m telling you that my maintenance guys are getting bit by fleas and there’s like bug bites on his back…”

And that was my final straw to leave. I was like, “If he’s not gonna believe his own employees are getting bit by bugs, I’m done.”

“He would send his employees emails being like, ‘I don’t care what you need to do. Even if you have to go follow her to her car, to her job… she needs to pay.'”

WL: So you worked for Beal twice: first around 2014 and again around 2020. Were those experiences different?

W:  When I first worked with him, I thought he was fine. He wasn’t as intense. At that time… he didn’t have as many properties as he did [in 2020].

…when I came back that was when he had Arbor One and… sold Arbor One, and then he sent me and [some] maintenance guys to Toledo. And [that’s when] I was like, fuck this.

WL: What’s it like working there?

 W: He wasn’t present at all… I had found out that he would hire the bare minimum. I think it’s like…once you have 50 or 55 employees, you have to offer health insurance. And so he would keep it at 49, 48 employees. So there was always the issue of not having enough people to work on the properties… he’s not fixing the things that he’s supposed to be fixing… and he’s just buying and buying and buying and being like, ‘look at all these properties I have. Look at all these apartments.’ But he’s not actually fixing the ones that he already had before he purchased them.

And so I think that does have a lot to do with why maintenance requests aren’t done, why things are the way that they are… I hear about buildings being condemned at Arbor One… all of ’em were completely fine when I left! … The buildings were totally fine. It doesn’t surprise me but it does shock me that they would condemn these buildings and… I could bet you Stewart only has three maintenance guys for that entire property… I think it should have been like maybe one to two per building. But of course he’s not gonna pay for that. 

What’s shocking is that when I see… posts about Beal people are like ‘he’s a piece of shit, blah, blah, blah.’ Which I think–of course he is. But I think a lot of people don’t know that he works with other people that are also pieces of shit. Honestly, I don’t think Stewart is as bad compared to, I don’t know if you have heard of [redacted name of a Beal employee]?

WL: So as an employee it also seems like maintenance requests aren’t being handled…

It’s very common because he doesn’t have enough employees.

When he was renovating his house… he would send his employees to go fix his [own] house… he didn’t have enough maintenance guys, the maintenance requests [for his tenants] weren’t being done… [Also,] they’ll send [maintenance guys] to nicer places and then not focus on the ones that he actually should be fixing.

WL: How do you handle that?

W: What comes up a lot is like, let’s say he wanted us to fix a refrigerator and I go there and I’m like, ‘this needs to be replaced.’ Instead of telling [Stewart that it should be replaced,] I’ll just replace it. I just wouldn’t tell him. A lot of times it was a lot easier and quicker to just do that–or move people to different apartments… Stewart wasn’t really good at communicating even though he was really good at emailing. 

…When he would do evictions, he just didn’t care if people were down on their luck. I mean, we all have to pay our rent, but he… tended to be a lot more aggressive and [anyways] I just started doing stuff without telling him. 

WL: You mentioned earlier that people sometimes tried to put their rent in escrow?

W: [When people had unresolved] maintenance requests, I would tell them… ‘you need to put your rent in escrow.’ What’s sad is that a lot of people don’t have the money to get lawyers [and] Stewart just didn’t give a fuck. He just didn’t care. He [would say] ‘I don’t care if your rent’s in escrow, you still owe.’ He would use the contract that people signed against them. And be like, ‘you signed this contract.’ And his mom [and lawyer] would be like, ‘Yeah, you signed this contract. You need to pay. This is a legal document that you said you could pay.’

WL: Anything else about being an employee?

W: He doesn’t want to offer health insurance. I don’t know if that’s the case now, but when I was there, bare minimum; bare, bare, bare minimum employees.

 [Also,] he would buy a lot of these commercial buildings for no fucking reason, and they would sit empty. He has two on Grove or whatever. I think it’s just a status thing for him like, ‘oh, look at all these properties I have.’ Dude, you don’t have enough people. You don’t have like enough tenants to rent out those empty commercial, um, buildings because they’re fucking expensive. Dude, use that money to go fix your apartment. Why are you buying commercial buildings? Why are you buying that tall ass building when probably a lot of the offices are empty? 

WL: What’s Stewart like?

W:  I would say he tries to be like hardcore on the outside, but a lot of times he’s afraid of confrontation, so he sends other people to do it for him.

[Like at City Council recently,] I’m surprised that he showed up. I’m actually super surprised… he won’t show his face. He’ll send someone else to do it for him.

…he loves suing people. Just loves it. Because he has his mom as a lawyer, he doesn’t have to pay legal fees to use a lawyer or anything.

[Regarding] the anti-Beal [feelings in the city], It wasn’t as intense [before COVID] as it is now… I think people are being more vocal about it and posting it on social media and all that stuff. Um, I think [before] if Stewart would hear stuff about that, he’d just be like, “I don’t care.” But I think now there’s more people speaking up and so he’s probably like, “Oh shit,” like “I should clean up my image and like do all these things being like, ‘look at what I fundraised for.’” I think he’s doing that in response. 

WL: You mentioned Beal would ask you to do unethical things – like what?

W: Harassing people for payment, including those who have part of their rent covered by the state… there is one instance where… this is crazy, but he would send his employees emails being like, “I don’t care what you need to do. Even if you have to go follow her to her car, to her job… she needs to pay.” …And it could be a small amount, like a hundred dollars that they were maybe off, but he would email his employees and be like, “I don’t care what you do, you need to go look for this person… call their work, go show up to their apartment… I need you to blow up their phones…” 

I mean, of course we’re not gonna do that. But he does send emails to his employees so that we can harass ’em. I would just ignore it… I’m not gonna do that. Holy shit. 

[Also,]  him not paying contractors… was a whole thing too. He had accounts with Lowe’s and he had accounts with, um, I want to say they’re called HD Supply. And I guess when you have money, you can open up accounts with ’em. So you could just go in, get stuff, and leave.

…There were times where we would go to Lowe’s and he hadn’t paid the bill in months. And then… I could be wrong… I think HD Supply tried suing Stewart when he was still owner of Arbor One… and then he sold it and I think Stewart tried fighting it, saying that like, I don’t own Arbor One anymore so like that account doesn’t, you know, exist or whatever. And so like–of course, if I can’t get supplies, I can’t do my job. And then people don’t get their maintenance request done.

WL: Were there times when you had to leave things behind? 

W: Yeah. Mm-hmm. 

WL: Any advice for dealing with Stewart?

W: Definitely email… probably the only thing that Stewart was really good at was emailing. I would tell tenants, ‘you need to email for documentation.’ Because if you call Stewart and [ask,] you know, ‘give me until tomorrow.’ Stewart would [say] ‘okay,’ and then he’s gonna completely forget.

CONTENT WARNING: VIOLENCE, GRAPHIC DESCRIPTIONS

WL: So he treated contractors badly…

W: The one that comes up for me the most…  was there was a shooting at Village Grove. It was like two people got shot…  So we go up to Village Grove and I open the door and there’s blood and guts, like literal brain matter and just guts everywhere, which, you know… I’m like, okay, this is a lot. Like at this point it’s not even like our cleaning company [can] do this, it’s gotta be a biohazard guy. 

And I remember I called Stewart and I was like, “This needs to be cleaned up by a biohazard. It can’t be a cleaning person.” He was like, “Okay, look for quotes or whatever. And so I did–I found this company and he came in, did a quote, I wanna say it was for like $5,000 or something like that. I sent the quote over to Stewart and he was like, “Yeah, that’s fine. Let’s get him in and clean it.” And they did a great job. And then [later] this guy says that Stewart hasn’t paid him, and then Stewart wants to settle with him for a thousand dollars and then tell me that it wasn’t as messy as I said it was, and he’d never stepped into that apartment.

… I have pictures of those that I remember I sent him being like, what are you talking about? There’s blood and guts on the ground. I remember [the biohazard guy] called me crying, being like “Can you please convince Stewart to pay me even if it’s a thousand dollars?”

And I think that was like my downhill [moment] like, okay, this is kind of fucked. That was the first time. 

“That was my final straw to leave. I was like, ‘If he’s not gonna believe his own employees are getting bit by bugs, I’m done.'”

CONTENT WARNING: VIOLENCE, DEATH

WL: We hear you worked for Beal when the worker died during the Thompson Block construction.

W: I was there when that happened.

I remember him and I think a family member of his worked with him. I don’t know if it was a cousin, maybe it was a friend… but they were really close. And, again, instead of doing maintenance requests for the apartments and where people are actually living, they do Thompson Block and I don’t remember [what but], I remember the conditions not being up to standard. And, if I remember correctly, they were trying to put up a wall and either they didn’t have enough people to hold it up or they didn’t have the right equipment and he got smushed is what happened.

His super close friend, I think the kid must have been like 19 or 20, I remember him coming into the office sobbing and I was consoling him. And then I remember a couple days or a couple weeks after, a lot of those guys, maintenance guys quit because they felt like Stewart didn’t care.

WL: Do you blame Stewart?

W: I blame all of ’em. ’cause it’s not just him. It’s like, it’s all of ’em.

And… he’s very easily influenced. So if someone’s like, “Oh, you should do it this way,” then he is like, “Oh, okay, that sounds fine.” I don’t know who was in charge of that. I know his dad at the time had a construction company and I think they were also in on that. But like, I don’t know what sort of training or safety precautions were going on, because Stewart will try and do things the cheapest way possible.

WL: Back to a lighter topic… there are stickers all over town with Beal’s name on them.

W: Those ‘Beal is a Slumlord’ stickers crack me up!

And it’s just like, dude, you’re not fixing like what you should be fixing. You’re being like, ‘oh, I invested all this money and blah, blah, blah,’ but you’re not investing that money in the apartments that you should be fixing… he would be so much better if he would just fix what he already has right now at this moment. But he just keeps buying shit. [And] I mean… you’re not paying your suppliers. You’re not paying Lowe’s, you’re not paying HD supply. Or like that poor [biohazard] guy. 

WL: Can’t imagine having that reputation…

W:  Maybe he just doesn’t fuck with the people here in Ypsi because they know about him. His investors, I think, were from Jersey or something like that. So he tends to get outside investors that aren’t part of the community because I’m sure that he won’t get money [from] people here because they like, know about him.

The views expressed in this interview are solely those of the interviewee and do not necessarily reflect the views of What’s Left. While we strive for accuracy, we cannot guarantee the completeness of the information presented. Please direct any concerns to whatsleftypsi@gmail.com