Home repairs disputed | The River Reporter

By LIAM MAYO

THOMPSON, NY — An allegedly incomplete set of home renovations has led to a lawsuit between Sullivan County residents and the Home Depot. 

Thompson residents Larry and Denise Boggs first sought help from Home Depot six years ago. 

The Boggs are both disabled, African-American veterans; Denise is in a wheelchair, after having a leg amputated. They needed to make renovations to make their home handicapped accessible, but didn’t have the funds to make those renovations themselves. 

Home Depot, through the Home Depot Foundation, offers a veteran housing grant program; recipients receive funds for the new construction or the rehabilitation of housing. Team Depot, a network of volunteers working with the foundation, does the manual work of repairing veterans’ homes. 

The Boggs worked with Action Towards Independence (ATI), a Sullivan County nonprofit supporting people with disabilities, to get a grant from Home Depot. The Home Depot Foundation provided the money; Team Depot agreed to make the repairs, supported by the foundation’s funds. 

That’s when the problems started. 

Renovations unfinished

“When they did do the job, they took their time,” says Larry. “Every time they said they were going to show up at a certain amount of time, or we had things to do like my wife’s appointments, they would come at whatever time they felt like coming.”

The work Team Depot did failed to make the house liveable, and in some cases made it dangerous, according to the Boggs. 

“Much of the work that [Home Depot] performed on the home was faulty, including a deck built in violation of building codes, and bathroom wiring that was installed incorrectly creating a very serious fire hazard,” reads one section of the Boggs’ legal filings. 

The work went into 2018, at which point Team Depot stopped working on the house. The Boggs allege in their legal filings that Home Depot employees said they couldn’t help with the project any more, because the Hasidic Jewish community had needs that came first. 

“We went to say, ‘Are you coming to finish the rest of the project?’” says Denise. “The deck needed to be stained and everything. [The employee] said, ‘No, the Hasidics are here, they have to work for them,’ and [he] gave us the stain and the brushes to do it ourselves.”

The deck never got fully repaired. It attracted the attention of Town of Thompson code enforcement in 2019. The town’s code enforcement officer sent the Boggs a letter saying they were in violation of town code for the deck, and a follow-up visit revealed further violations inside. 

“I didn’t know what was going on—I was losing my leg,” says Denise. 

“I had two wars on two fronts,” says Larry. “I had to fight working with her and her doctors, doing all that, plus dealing with [Team Depot].”

Housing concerns

Neither the Sullivan County Veterans Services Agency nor the Sullivan County Veterans Coalition offers this kind of home repairs. 

The veterans coalition can help with emergency repairs (like a burst boiler) for applicants who meet the requirements, according to chairman Howie Goldsmith. 

The federal department of Veterans Affairs offers a renovation loan to cover certain situations: according to information from militaryvaloan.com, the loans can cover up to $50,000 in home improvement costs, allowing veterans to buy homes that are not liveable at the time of purchase. The loan is not specifically aimed at people in the Boggs’ situation, where the renovations are required because of disabilities. 

The issue of home renovations is one of the organization’s greatest challenges, particularly in supporting people as they age, according to ATI executive director Deborah Worden, speaking generally about the organization. ATI can’t comment on their clients’ cases, or confirm that an individual may or may not be a client. 

There aren’t resources in place for home renovations, says Worden; there are some New York State grants, but nothing locally that she is aware of. 

The organization gets frequent calls from residents and from caregivers about the issue. Ramp installation, especially, is one of the organization’s number-one calls, says Worden. It doesn’t help that a lot of homes in Sullivan County are on the older side, she adds—they don’t have the wider doorways or the consideration of ADA compliance that newer homes do.

“People want to age in place,” says Worden. 

Legal filings

In 2021, the Boggs filed legal action against Home Depot, the Home Depot Foundation and 10 unnamed individuals who participated in the renovations. The lawsuit alleges that Home Depot violated its contract to make the repairs, and discriminated against the Boggs on account of their race and their status as disabled veterans.

“There’s not a lot of these kinds of cases that come up,” says Williams Igbokwe, the attorney prosecuting the case for the Boggs. “The law that covers this is really what protects individuals from discrimination from corporations [and] people. In New York, you don’t see a lot of this, so this is really a bellwether case for this type of discrimination.”

Home Depot attempted to get the case dismissed, challenging both the contract and the allegations of racial discrimination. The judge in the case denied the motion to dismiss, arguing that the case had enough merits to be brought forth.

The language of the contract “unambiguously places an obligation on Team Depot to renovate [the] Plaintiffs’ house. Who or what constitutes Team Depot, as discussed supra, is unclear on the face of the contract. What is clear is that Team Depot has some affiliation with [the] Defendants, had obligations under the contract, and shirked those obligations,” writes Judge Phillip Halpern. 

“What is also clear is that the Foundation’s payment of grant money did not satisfy those obligations, especially where [the] Plaintiffs’ home remained in disrepair until at least the filing of the Amended Complaint on March 30, 2022, nearly four years after the alleged breach, and potentially to this day,” adds Halpern. 

The Boggs haven’t encountered racial prejudice from the people in their community, they say—their neighbors helped them, told them what was wrong and how they needed to address it. It’s the institutions which are supposed to help them that let them down. 

The lawsuit isn’t about the money, but about the principal of holding the institutions accountable, say the Boggs. 

“What if it was a elderly couple, or another veteran—disabled veteran—they did that to, who was depending, like us, for them to fix things? … That’s why we’re doing what we’re doing,” says Denise. 

Legal representatives for Home Depot did not answer requests to comment for the article.