Editor's Note: This story originally ran in Real Estate Authority on April 7.

When Shir Agha Safi landed in Iowa in early October 2021 after being evacuated from Afghanistan, he was carrying little more than the clothes on his back as he was driven by a Catholic Charities caseworker to an Extended Stay America in Urbandale, Iowa, right off Interstate 80. Yet, he and the other refugees staying at the motel were initially given little food or supplies.

The modified cloverleaf interchange by which the motel sat proved nearly impassable for the new arrivals, who had no independent means of transport if they wanted to cross over to the few restaurant chains that operated just beyond it. And it soon became fatal for a 26-year-old Afghan refugee who went out at night in search of food and was killed in a hit-and-run while walking on the shoulder of the eastbound lane, according to Safi.

"One of the Afghans I knew from Afghanistan, he didn't know how to cross the street here. He tried to cross the street and he died," Safi recalled in a recent interview with Law360. "We were that much new ... and they just leave us this way. ... There was a lot of neglect and mismanagement from the resettlement agencies."

The deadly accident, which happened in late October 2021, does not appear to have been previously reported.

The multiple refugees Law360 spoke with in Iowa and who spent time at the Urbandale Extended Stay did not have any complaints about the motel itself, describing it as clean and comfortable.

Uninhabitable Conditions

Safi is one of three dozen refugees, advocates, resettlement agency representatives and government officials Law360 spoke to over the past four months about the refugees' challenges finding and retaining adequate housing in the U.S.

In the first of this two-part series, Law360 described the broad outline of the crisis and the roles the federal resettlement system, resettlement agencies and the housing shortage might have played.

The problems appear to have been especially acute in Iowa and Oklahoma. Complaints by and large named Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services, Catholic Charities agencies and the International Rescue Committee.

Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services and Lutheran Services Iowa did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The IRC said in a statement that its local staff "worked around the clock" in the months following the evacuation to support the resettlement of Afghan refugees, and that the national housing shortage — which limits options for Americans and refugees alike — proved a significant obstacle.


"We were criticized by some of our supporters for not being compassionate, and I say, 'It's not a lack of compassion, it's a lack of options, and it is awful,'" said Patrick Raglow, executive director of Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City.

Safi moved from the Urbandale Extended Stay to permanent housing in November 2021, when a different Catholic Charities representative brought him from the hotel to an apartment in west Des Moines that required a $575 monthly rent on a 12-month lease.

"I took my stuff and everything, went to that housing, and that housing was bad," Safi recalled. "If you ask, 'I want to see the house,' they say, 'No, it's not our policy to see the house, you have to sign the lease first.'"

A review posted anonymously on Apartments.com in December 2018 calls the property "slummy and poorly maintained," and describes issues with bedbug and cockroach infestations and unresponsive management.

Barbara Decker, the executive director of Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Des Moines, told Law360 in an email that "all apartments are inspected before move-in and any issues are addressed with property managers before clients move in."

"We are sorry to hear of these concerns," she wrote. "We remain in contact with many of our former refugee clients and have several programs established to assist them beyond their initial 90-day service period."

Catholic Charities paid the rent for six months, according to Safi, who expressed exasperation over not being clearly told what funds he and the other refugees were entitled to.

It was only with the help of another volunteer organization, Des Moines Refugee Support, that Safi managed to keep paying the rent after Catholic Charities closed his case, and subsequently exited his lease and moved to a well-kept apartment in August 2022, he said.

"[The volunteers] are putting money from their pockets," Safi said of Des Moines Refugee Support. "They are spending their own money they are supposed to spend on their kids."

Safi has since founded his own refugee support group and is in touch with several other refugee families in the area. He says more than a dozen have recently received letters threatening eviction over late rent and fees.

Four families from Safi's network shared their experiences with Law360 through the help of an interpreter. They all had variations of the same story, such as being forced to sign leases before inspecting the premises or being assigned to derelict, grimy, bare units with insect infestations or structural failings like an external wall visibly collapsing onto itself.

"We told [the resettlement agency], 'This is a house, we are supposed to live here, not just stay here for an hour or two,'" said Hafiza Mohammadi, a 27-year-old widowed homemaker who came to the U.S. with her 10-year-old son and her sister. "Yes, we came [from] Afghanistan, but our houses in Afghanistan were way better than this house."

Maddening Logistics

Iowa has welcomed more than 1,000 Afghan refugees since Kabul fell to the Taliban a year and a half ago. Most arrived within six to nine months after being vetted at military bases and other centers in the U.S. and around the world, but more have continued to trickle in.

Sedina Traljesic, one of the volunteers at Des Moines Refugee Support who helped Safi and other refugees in the area, recently described a system where information is scant and hard to come by. Traljesic also said the resettlement agencies proved reluctant, if not outright hostile, to cooperating with her group so that it could apply for benefits and services on their behalf.

"Yes, the resettlement agencies were overwhelmed, but they refused our help," Traljesic said.

The $1,225 that each refugee was entitled to for immediate necessities, sometimes called "welcome money," was a particular source of confusion.

In particular, Traljesic questioned whether the resettlement agencies were right in spending the money partly on rent when, she said, the Iowa Finance Authority told her group there were separate funds available to cover 12 months of housing.

IFA told Law360 via email that it has reimbursed a handful of resettlement agencies with $3.2 million to date through its Refugee Resettlement Assistance program — which taps into federal COVID-19 emergency rental assistance funds — for the agencies' spending on "hotel, relocation, rent and/or utility assistance" on behalf of the Afghan refugees. More than 250 Afghan households have received some aid as of mid-March, IFA said.

"Of the 254 unique households assisted through resettlement agencies, 137 were in the Des Moines metro area, [and] the remaining 117 households were assisted by a resettlement agency working in the Cedar Rapids area," IFA noted. "To date, 40 of the 254 unique Afghan refugee households assisted under the [Refugee Resettlement Assistance] program have reached their maximum 12 months of assistance."

The program will continue disbursing funds while they are available, IFA said.

Polk County and Des Moines in particular received separate emergency rental assistance allocations and worked with the Impact Community Action Partnership in administering that money, the agency added.

Anne Bacon, Impact's chief executive, said the nonprofit helped local authorities disburse some $70 million in federal emergency rental assistance funds to local families for two years during the pandemic, including, anecdotally, multiple Afghan households. The awards averaged six to eight months, with "many families" hitting the cap Impact set at 12 months, Bacon said.

The official resettlement agencies did not typically engage with Impact about getting emergency rental assistance funds to refugees, according to Bacon.

"By the time folks walked into our door, they typically had a volunteer, [and] that was typically a first- or second-generation native speaker who'd come in and try to assist," Bacon said.

Traljesic separately corroborated Safi's accounts that the agencies often required refugee families to sign 12-month leases before seeing the housing selected from them, and that the accommodations regularly turned out to be subpar, if not straight-up unsafe.

"They are horrible — rats, and just unsafe living conditions and areas," Traljesic said. "And they are in these areas where they are far from the schools, the grocery stores, with no cars, no buses, not knowing the language."

Des Moines Refugee Support has raised these issues with the Iowa Finance Authority, Iowa attorney general, Iowa Auditor of State and other government agencies, but has received little to no feedback, Traljesic said.

A spokesperson for the Iowa Auditor of State told Law360 at the end of February that the agency had not released any report on the issue and declined to provide further comment. Iowa's Attorney General's Office did not respond to requests for comment.

Two officials with the Iowa Department of Health and Human Services acknowledged the concerns, but said the department became highly creative in reorganizing internally to give its Bureau of Refugee Services more visibility and partnered with other state agencies to leverage federal emergency rental assistance to direct more than $3.2 million to the refugees. Though the state HHS does not have a formal oversight role, the department also provided ad hoc technical assistance on some occasions where the Afghan refugees were having housing issues, a representative said.

"A lot of our work was challenging, but I will say, today we are in a great, great place," said Mak Sućeska, state refugee coordinator with Iowa HHS. "There are a lot of success stories to share as well, particularly with Afghans who have secured permanent housing, are working full-time, have received adequate and appropriate support ... and we are continuing to create a much more sustainable infrastructure moving forward."

Outlandish Rents

Law360's reporting indicates Oklahoma City and Tulsa, Oklahoma, were also hotbeds of housing problems for the refugees, though people there highlighted the role played by at least a couple of greedy landlords.

Mohammed Osmani came from Kabul at the end of August 2021, leaving his wife behind but accompanied by his mother, his older and younger brothers and their families. They spent six months on a military base in Wisconsin, and then stayed at a Hyatt Place Hotel in south Tulsa until a caseworker from Catholic Charities came to tell them the agency had found permanent housing for them.

"Our case manager took us to the house, but we did not see the inside of the house," said Osmani, who used to work for a logistics firm in Afghanistan. "Before we came to see the house, we signed the lease in the hotel for 18 months."

The four-bedroom, two-bathroom house in east Tulsa was "really old" and had "so many issues," Osmani recalled. The hot water wasn't working for a week upon the family moving in, he said, and the place was swarming with bedbugs, cockroaches, rats and even snakes.



That home, with all its flaws, came for the whopping price of $3,750 a month. The U.S. Census Bureau pegs the overall gross median rent inclusive of utilities in Tulsa from 2017 to 2021 at $882 per month. According to online rental platform Zumper, the median rent for a four-bedroom home in the city has moved up and down from a low of approximately $1,500 to a high of close to $2,000 over the past year and a half.

"Every time we tried to call the case manager about these issues, the case manager didn't take our phone calls," Osmani said. "Then we realized to call the landlord ... We tried to call him so many times, but when he picked up, he treated us like, 'You don't have the right to call me, you have to talk to the case manager.'"

The YWCA, which was involved in the resettlement process and eventually employed Osmani as an interpreter, ultimately encouraged him to seek help from the local legal aid office, which enabled him to break the lease, relocate and even file a fair housing complaint against the landlord with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in Washington, D.C.

Julie Davis, chief executive officer of YWCA Tulsa, confirmed in an early December email to Law360 that though the group was not pursuing legal action on its own, it has referred "many" of its clients to Legal Aid Services of Oklahoma for help in "taking action" against landlords.

HUD said through a spokesperson that though it "cannot comment on any potential ongoing matter, national origin is a protected status under the Fair Housing Act, and HUD will investigate jurisdictional fair housing complaints alleging housing discrimination on the basis of Afghan national origin."

A spokesperson for HUD's Office of the Inspector General told Law360 via email that it's not the agency's "practice to speak about complaints we may have received or our ongoing investigations to protect the integrity of our reporting process and our investigations."

Many other Afghan refugees continue living in units owned by the same landlord, according to Osmani.

"The problem is, all of the refugees can't speak English, don't know how to complain," said Osmani, who has been trying to connect them to legal aid. "The landlords take advantage of our silence, of our status — they think we are refugees, and we are coming from Afghanistan, like it's a forest, like there's no humans in Afghanistan."

Badria Mryyan is the staff attorney​​ at Legal Aid Services of Oklahoma who filed the fair housing complaint with HUD on behalf of Osmani and is preparing a parallel lawsuit. She told Law360 the complaint was submitted in November.

"We think that this is motivated by national origin discrimination," Mryyan said. "I think there is a level of landlords knowing that people are coming from abroad that they don't have that knowledge, and kind of taking advantage of that."

Mustafa Kihan, who used to work for the U.S. embassy in Kabul until the Taliban takeover, also became a tenant of the same landlord as Osmani's in December 2021. The east Tulsa two-bedroom, 1 ½-bathroom unit he shared with his now-pregnant wife and two small children — and for which he signed an 18-month lease sight-unseen — came for $3,650 a month, Kihan said.

After Kihan found out by talking to neighbors that the same home had been previously rented out for less than $1,000 and complained, the landlord agreed to reduce the rent down to $2,850 per month, Kihan said. The landlord more recently offered to bring it down to $1,800 a month, as public aid for the family began to run out.

"I don't know why Catholic Charities accepted that [original] amount," Kihan said, noting that refugees don't always understand the implications of living in overpriced housing.

"A lot of people say, 'It's not us, it's the government or Catholic Charities paying,'" Kihan added. "But the government is helping us with $20,000, $30,000, $40,000 in rent — it's not good."

Kihan told Law360 he declined the landlord's last offer, and at the end of February, found a temporary two-bedroom, 1 ½-bathroom apartment near his children's school for $1,300 a month while he waits for a larger three-bedroom, three-bathroom unit in the same complex to become available within a couple of months for the same price.

Kihan said he was recently told the house he just vacated is now being rented for $1,050 per month.

Insufficient Supply

Oklahoma received some 1,900 Afghan refugees over the course of nine months, the third-highest number of any state and the largest percentage nationwide by population.

The Sooner State was also, along with Iowa, one of the first to figure out that the federal emergency rental assistance funds disbursed in two chunks during the pandemic did not have any citizenship requirement and, as such, could be legitimately used for the refugees.

Thanks to that federal assistance, the outpouring of generosity by local communities and the traditional resettlement aid, this wave of refugees received perhaps more money than any previous one, at least in Oklahoma, said Raglow of Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City. Raglow's agency is a formal affiliate of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, one of the nine official resettlement agencies.

Because of the housing crunch and a few large predatory landlords, however, many of the refugees also ended up in some of the worst homes, Raglow added.


For instance, Raglow said, local individuals helped fully outfit housing for more than 200 Afghan families so that the government money could go toward other necessities. But as quality options ran out, dozens of families had to be placed into two apartment complexes in Oklahoma City run by an out-of-state landlord and which are notorious for poor conditions.

"We are talking about nonfunctional locks, missing screens, nonfunctioning air-conditioning, sewage backing up, infestations, etc. Some of the apartments were 102 degrees in the summer for extended periods of time," Raglow said. "It really falls on management because the problems are not difficult. It's electricians, it's drywall, it's plumbers, it's just keeping a place up."

Raglow said at some point, Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City gave the local government a 2 ½-page list of refugees who were struggling with their accommodations.

Raglow said that after years of forced cutbacks, his group and other resettlement agencies had to ramp up operations and staffing fast after the fall of Kabul, and even had to take on debt to cover costs government authorities would not reimburse until later, if at all.

"We hired as good as we could, as quick as we could, and went to work as fast as we could," said Raglow. "Did that include all the training we'd like to have done, all the community conversation? No, it didn't. Did [our people] lack compassion? No. They were very compassionate. Did they get burned out sometimes? I'm sure."

According to the U.S. Department of State's Office of the Inspector General review this week of the Afghan resettlement effort, resettlement agencies struggled to hire qualified people to handle the refugees and quickly lost many caseworkers to attrition, as they felt overwhelmed by the task at hand.

"The [resettlement agencies] either got few applicants or applicants with no experience, requiring their already-overworked employees to provide training to the new employees," the OIG found. "[Resettlement agencies] had to compete with one another to meet staffing needs during a period of time when there was a general labor shortage.

Law360 separately heard from others in Oklahoma and across the country that attitudes clashed after the Afghans' arrival. There were instances where both refugees and landlords failed to meet each others' expectations with regard to the rights and responsibilities of tenancy and what is required of home and property owners.

According to the State Department's OIG, many refugees had "unrealistic expectations" of the kind of homes they would be given, especially after spending weeks or months in well-appointed hotels or motels, and often saw their assigned rentals as "insufficient" or of "an inferior quality."

"I think this situation ... it brought out the best in people, [but] it also brought out the worst in people," said Ginny Bass Carl, executive director of Community Cares Partners, a public-private partnership that helped administer the emergency rental assistance program in Oklahoma.

Impossible Odds

Many of the refugees speak little or no English and don't know how to navigate the housing system or use legal, democratic or media channels to complain, making it hard to pin down exactly how widespread these problems are.

Marty Johnson, director for mission for Trinity Presbyterian Church in Charlottesville, Virginia, told Law360 that out of several Afghan families he has helped resettle in his area, he has seen at least two placed in substandard or inadequate housing. One of the cases involved an out-of-state landlord, further complicating any effort to bring accountability and transparency, Johnson said.

In both cases, he noted, the resettlement agencies "were stuck" in what they could do with their lack of resources amid the city's increasingly hot housing market.

Many of the refugees also spent a long time — up to six months in some cases — in cheap hotels or motels, often in locations far removed from the city and its services, Johnson added.

"It's hard to start feeling at home when you are in a motel," he said. "If you have a permanent address, it certainly makes it easier to get [government services] and potential employers probably feel more secure."

Atiqullah Andish, who was a combat interpreter with U.S. special forces in Afghanistan for nearly a decade, landed at Dulles International Airport, just outside Washington, D.C., on June 28, 2022, with his wife and two children. They ultimately ended up at a Staybridge Suites in Charlottesville, where they lived for 45 days and which Andish described as "wonderful."

The trouble started when the International Rescue Committee found the family permanent housing and had them move in before they could see the interior, Andish said.

"When we came to the house, it was something else ... the house was full of bugs, cockroaches ... it was dirty," he said. "Then the refrigerator was not working, the microwave was not working, the door of the closet was not working."

After Andish gave an interview to a local TV station in August, he said the landlord replaced the appliances and tended to some of the other problems, though the house remains "wet," the closet doors are still broken and cockroaches still roam freely.

Andish did sign the $1,350 monthly lease for the two-bedroom, one-bathroom house in northwest Charlottesville, where the family still lives, a week after moving in, "because if I went back to a hotel, they won't be able to find me a house for another six months. I had no choice."

"I don't want to be saying bad things about the IRC, because they helped us a lot, they paid for rent for [4 ½] months," Andish said.

In a recent exchange, Andish noted that pretty much all of his income goes to cover rent and utilities on the property. He said he is trying hard to find more affordable housing, but has not been successful thus far.

In Minnesota, a nonprofit news organization that covers immigrant issues wrote in June that the first eviction notices were hitting refugee families. Local media in the Bay Area reported in December 2021 on the difficulty for refugees to find affordable housing in one of the most expensive markets in the country.

In Florida and D.C., Law360 heard from representatives for multiple nonprofit groups about caseworkers stretched to the breaking point and, at times, unresponsive and unwilling to engage. Law360 also heard about difficulties in communicating with the refugees, as well as some who turned down multiple possible housing options in a row.

In Baltimore, about 100 refugees were placed in three different apartment buildings that had been distinguished in their heyday, but had since fallen into disrepair and were being rented out with little upkeep and maintenance by their out-of-state owner. The families had to contend with vermin, bedbugs, trash not getting picked up and failing appliances that were not replaced in a timely fashion, said Barbara Cook, a retired physician who has been helping the refugees as a volunteer through her Presbyterian church.

Ultimately, she and other volunteers brought up the issue with the Baltimore renters union and campaigned to bring the apartments' poor conditions to light, ultimately securing a new, much more responsive manager and other improvements. Many of the refugees remain there because of the units' older layout, larger footprints and somewhat affordable rents, which the IRC paid for six months, and in many cases for longer, thanks to local government help.

The IRC noted in its written statement to Law360 that the Afghan resettlement effort was one of the "most complex, massive and unprecedented logistical and humanitarian challenges in American history" and a "monumental" undertaking for resettlement agencies that lack resources.

It also bumped up against the national housing shortage.

As such, execution was "not flawless, and not without its challenges," but the International Rescue Committee "worked with our staff and exceptional community partners to meet the moment," according to the statement.

According to Cook, the resettlement agencies did some things for the refugees, though not a lot, and broadly failed to take advantage of the help of qualified, credentialed volunteers like herself.

"They were definitely underresourced, but the second piece is they relied on their bureaucratic policies and procedures rather than, 'There's a need here, we have volunteers, we need to utilize their help,'" she told Law360. "They didn't seem to appreciate how difficult it is for these refugees to learn the system in the United States. ... They just seemed to be numb to that, and that's been the most frustrating thing."

--Editing by Alanna Weissman and Lakshna Mehta.