City View Apartments in downtown Omaha accumulated a long list of health and safety concerns before a new management company deemed the building uninhabitable last summer.
A disabled veteran was trapped in his 10th floor apartment for weeks when the elevator stopped working. In a civil complaint, one woman wrote of human urine and feces in the stairwell, a kitchen sink that didn’t work and holes in the ceiling. Bed bugs forced some to leave their infested belongings behind.
July 31 will mark one year since the decrepit downtown building was shuttered. What remains is a vacant 200-unit apartment tower, questions of accountability and residents who were left to pick up the pieces.
Drugs, bugs and a dead body
Remi Dortch moved into City View Apartments at 604 S. 22nd St. in November 2020. Conditions at the time weren’t perfect, but a fourth-floor studio was an affordable and safe place for Dortch and her young child.
A few years later, Dortch, her fiancé and three children moved into a two-bedroom, newly remodeled apartment on the seventh floor. By then it was “one thing after another.” Dortch described constant fights, police visits, squatters in vacant units, fire alarms that would go off at all hours of the night. She recalled more than one dead body found in the laundry room and rampant drug use.
“That apartment was like something straight out of a freaking movie,” Dortch said. “There were shootings up there, people kicking at people’s doors, constantly having to worry about getting robbed. It was a lot.”
The city came close to shutting down the property in January 2025 before the apartment’s Miami-based owners, Tzadik Management, narrowly met a deadline to repair the building’s fire alarm system to Omaha Fire Department standards.
An order to vacate had been issued months before, but the city delayed forcing people to move out as officials pressured Tzadik Management to make repairs rather than displace more than 100 people.
The final straw for Dortch came in February 2025 when she discovered bed bugs in her daughter’s baby swing and crib. She moved out shortly after.
“Bugs crawling all over her stuff,” Dortch said. “That was the deal breaker to me.”
In the end, it was a new management company – not the city – that closed the apartment complex in June 2025. By then, months of safety hazards, media coverage, financial woes and code violations had piled up.
The Reader made calls seeking comment from Tzadik Management executives in Miami for this story. None were returned.
The company still operates. In 2021, Tzadik announced the purchase of nearly $20 million in properties across South Dakota. In a press release published in June, the company boasted of “record-low vacancy levels” across multiple Sioux Falls properties.
No citations for out-of-state owners
Local tenant law attorney Dave Pantos explored legal options for the displaced residents of City View. A class-action lawsuit wasn’t feasible. The property had been placed in receivership months before at the request of Merchants Bank of Indiana, which alleged Tzadik owed upwards of $18 million.
A real estate transfer statement signed July 1 lists City View Acquisitions LLC as the current owner following a $3 million purchase from a different limited liability company, Ash Realty Spe Ii, LLC.
“I think the city does not see itself as having a proactive role in addressing the concerns of tenants,” Pantos said. “The result typically is, a place doesn’t pass inspection and the city at some point says okay, well now it has to close and no one can go there — there’s no middle ground.”
Tzadik City View LLC purchased City View in 2019. In a press release published that fall, the company’s regional vice president said, “We are excited about the opportunity City View provides and plan to provide the best management possible.”
CEO Adam Hendry at the time said, amid lowered interest rates, Tzadik was “going where the opportunities take us.”
By the time code violations piled up in 2024, company leaders were nowhere to be found. The city instead had to communicate through Tzadik’s legal representative. City leaders did discuss the possibility of criminally citing the company but struggled to identify who would be charged, said City Attorney Matt Kuhse.
“If my memory serves me correctly, their headquarters is in Florida. So, they could not be cited, and an arrest warrant would have to be issued,” Kuhse said in an email to The Reader. “Extradition from Florida to Omaha for a municipal offense does not happen.”
Finding someone local was complicated. Kuhse recalls a maintenance worker, but no one on the property who would rise to the level of a manager.
The City of Omaha has shuttered other properties amid unsafe conditions. In 2018, hundreds of Myanmar refugees were evacuated from the Yale Park Apartments in North Omaha due to unsafe electrical circuits, natural gas leaks and units infested with mice and bedbugs.
The downtown Flora apartments, closed in January 2022, were described by a city inspector as “among the worst” conditions he’d ever seen. In December 2022, residents of a 17-building complex in northwest Omaha called Legacy Crossing were displaced after the property was condemned.
Situations involving large apartment complexes often receive considerable media coverage. Pantos described them as unique situations in terms of scale and the social needs of residents. He said tenants of much smaller units experience similar unsafe conditions every day in Omaha.
“City View included elderly people, people in poverty, people with substance abuse issues,” Pantos said. “Different entities pulled together to do something, but things like this do happen all the time.”
Often, it’s nonprofits and volunteers who are left to pick up the pieces.
Between 100 and 130 people lived in City View at the time of its closure. A network of local nonprofits and city staff worked to connect them with housing. Among the first to step up was Tamika Mease, leader of North Omaha Community Partnership.
“I mean, drugs, trafficking, anything detrimental that you can think of was taking place in that building,” Mease said.
North Omaha Community Partnership was among several local nonprofits activated to connect residents with resources, including Reimagine Omaha and Threshold CoC. The process wasn’t as simple as renting U-Hauls and sending people on their way, Mease said.
Residents had to be set up with social workers, some had to put their belongings in storage, others needed new furniture because theirs was infested with bed bugs. Volunteers had to wait for days in the lobby to inform residents without cell phones that their time in the building was coming to an end.
“I’m not gonna lie to you, City View kicked our butts,” Mease said.
Dortch and her family left City View before the forced closure. She said she’s now in a much better living situation, but she wishes the former owners of City View “took things more seriously.”
“We had to live there; they didn’t,” Dortch said. “That was just a place for them to talk about every day versus having to go there every day.”
City View still sits empty today — the tower joins a growing list of Omaha properties that failed to meet the basic needs of the city’s most vulnerable.