CLARIFICATION, 2:13 p.m., Nov. 2, 2017: This story has been modified to reflect a significant change. Please see the full clarification at the end of the article.

Mildew is growing under Courtney Turner's sink. The floor in the dining room is uneven. She says the heater doesn't work.

Turner keeps the Oak Cliff home tidy. She fusses at her kids for leaving crumbs on the couch in the living room, where she's arranged family portraits along with her 8-year-old son's track trophy.

She gets a trade-off for the substandard conditions. In a city where the median single-family home rent is $1,600, Turner pays just $670.

But Turner's bargain wasn't supposed to be the deal anymore.

Last year, hoping to improve living conditions for renters, the Dallas City Council voted to crack down on negligent owners of single-family rental homes. But since the rules took effect in January, the vast majority of low-rent landlords have simply ignored the city.

Only a fraction have even bothered to take the first step required under the new rules — registering their properties as rentals.

That means tens of thousands of rental homes remain all but hidden in plain sight from Dallas code inspectors who would be empowered to proactively check that the homes are properly heated and cooled, that the roofs don’t leak, that the toilets flush, that the water gets hot enough and that the electricity is safe.

London Armstead watches as city of Dallas code inspector Diana Conde checks to see if a repair was done at a single-family rental in North Dallas on Nov. 1. (Louis DeLuca / Staff Photographer)

There’s another, more complex problem. Some of the landlords who have reacted to the city’s new rules say they won’t be in the low-rent business for long. The costs are too high and the regulations too onerous, they say. They promise to either sell their properties or increase the rent they charge. Where will their tenants live then, they ask.

Before the City Council decided to go after low-rent landlords last year, the single-family rental market was the Wild West of Dallas real estate. The city dealt with code issues at houses mostly on a complaint basis, meaning tenants had to tell on their landlords and risk retaliation or higher rents. That is, if they knew their rights well enough to complain.

Under the new rules, landlords are required to register single-family rental homes once a year, with some exceptions, and undergo at least one city inspection every five years. The improvement of the single-family rental stock in Dallas hinges on the registrations and inspections. But as of late September, fewer than 6,500 rental homes were registered. City officials believe as many as 50,000 rental properties exist in Dallas.

City leaders shrug off the low registration rate. Some say they never believed it would happen quickly anyway; others say the response is what they planned for and the number is steadily growing at a pace that code inspectors can keep up with. So far, no citations have been issued for failing to register — only reminders.

“The most important thing to us is not fining people; it’s getting people in compliance with the ordinance,” said Kris Sweckard, director of Code Compliance Department.

Still, among those dragging their feet are some of the Dallas’ most prominent low-rent landlords. Caught in the middle are the tenants.

Many tenants say little has changed for them in the past year. The ones who had good relationships with their landlords still do, and some landlords like the new standards. The ones who haven’t seen their landlords in months, if ever, say they’re no better off today than they were a year ago.

And then some renters, like Turner, could lose their homes.

‘We’re talking about the basics’

The Dallas City Council worked on the minimum housing standards with the quarter of the city that lives in poverty in mind. The standards are about ensuring homes are habitable, not necessarily comfortable.

“We’re not talking about the niceties,” said council member Adam McGough. “We’re talking about the basics.”

McGough, who helped finalize the new housing standards, said his council colleagues had heard enough horror stories about bedbugs and mold and infestations to spur them to seek tougher standards.

Mayor Mike Rawlings had already taken the lead with his own initiative. He identified eight “high-impact” landlords, who collectively own hundreds of houses across the city, to better understand their businesses and ask them to improve housing conditions.

Joanne Bonner showed a ceiling with water damage at her Topletz-owned home in Dallas on Nov. 19, 2015. (Louis DeLuca / Staff Photographer)

Among the landlords Rawlings targeted was Dennis Topletz and his family, the Khraish family, George W. Works and Roy and Linda Childers.

Turner lives in a Childers home.

Works met with Rawlings not long after his name landed on the high-impact landlord list. Rawlings asked him to sign a “commitment card” promising to be “part of the solution,” and Works agreed. Since then, little appears to have changed — at least at some of the homes.

Christopher Warren, who said he was a tenant of Works, said the siding at his home is falling off. He’s also called Works about the shower, the toilet, the plumbing. There’s a problem with the water pressure.

Warren hadn’t seen a city inspector come by, and he probably won’t. Works signed the mayor's commitment card but, as of late September, had completed registration on just two of his residential properties with the city — out of nearly 100 linked to him or his family through property records.

Warren said he repairs his rental with money from his own pocket. He used black spray paint on a wooden banister. The front window is boarded up.

“We still call him," he said of the landlord. "They don’t come.”

It can be hard sometimes to understand whether landlord or tenant or both are at fault. Some tenants willing to share similar stories declined to give their names. Landlords say some tenants are just difficult and don't pay up. In a separate follow-up interview weeks later at the home, Warren’s mother said she rents the house and that she has a good relationship with Works, and that he always does repairs quickly, and that her son had spoken out of turn. She declined to give her name. Her son was not home.

Works did not speak to specific complaints, but he said that generally he doesn’t repair homes for tenants who are delinquent on rent.

The city has had a mixed bag of responses from the other landlords that Rawlings pursued. A couple of tenants in Joseph Bevers’ JB III Investments homes, for instance, said they liked their landlord and that he had made improvements recently.

“Mr. Bevers is about the best landlord you can get,” said Evelyn Standmire, whose son lives in a JB III rental in east Oak Cliff. Her son echoed his mother’s sentiments.

Standmire said Bevers sent a crew last year to install a new HVAC system and apply a fresh coat of paint, though the light blue exterior had begun to chip by summer.

But city officials have mostly lost touch with the landlords after the new standards went into effect. The city is still suing Dennis Topletz over the way he has operated his rental properties. The city, which has clashed repeatedly with the Topletz family over decades, alleged many Topletz-owned homes are havens for crime and lack hot water, air conditioning, heat or working toilets.

The face of the crackdown

HMK landlord Khraish Khraish (right) speaks back and forth with tenant Joe Garcia during a meeting in February. (Rose Baca / Staff Photographer)

Khraish Khraish, the owner of low-rent rental company HMK, also butted heads with the city and some tenants who sued him and alleged the conditions were squalid in the homes, which Khraish disputed. Khraish unilaterally returned an amended version of the mayor’s commitment card that only allowed the city to inspect the homes once the registration process started. The mayor’s office ignored the card.

More than any other landlord, Khraish has become the face of the response to the city's effort to crack down on low-rent properties. He promised to close his West Dallas rental business, which a court has so far prevented him from fully doing. The new standards are too onerous and too costly and would make housing unaffordable for tenants, he said.

Khraish’s decision to pull his aging West Dallas rentals from the market left hundreds of families anguished about where to go. Many were paying about $500 a month.

Khraish maintains that the mayor’s interest in his properties was just an attempted landgrab for the fast-developing and gentrifying neighborhood.

“I was housing 300 low-income families,” Khraish said. “I was doing it for a long time -- almost 20 years in this business. To suggest that Code Compliance didn't know me and my property is total bunkum.”

Vana Hammond, who heads Rawlings’ GrowSouth effort, said she asked the other landlords if they could take in the displaced families.

The answer, by and large, was no. They had no room.

“Business has been good for them,” Hammond said.

Vacant houses and scraped lots owned by HMK can now be found in West Dallas. HMK sold some homes for $65,000, but other tenants found new rentals. (David Woo / Staff Photographer)

Khraish and some other landlords have argued that the city might just leave well enough alone. But council members and city officials, who are exploring other avenues to provide affordable housing, so far haven’t shown much interest in loosening regulations.

McGough, a city prosecutor before he became a council member, said in his experience, slumlords play a “shell game”: They’d fix up properties where they dealt with complaints and wouldn’t invest in the others until the city made them do so. McGough said he came to believe that slumlords had the resources to pay but won’t act until they are forced to do so.

Sweckard, who runs the city’s Code Compliance department, said tenants have had little recourse.

“One of the complaints we heard through the whole process from tenants was that they never saw the landlords,” Sweckard said.

As part of the registration process, Code Compliance asks landlords to go through their houses and fill out a checklist so they’ll know exactly what inspectors will look for.

Works objected to the checklist and the requirement that landlords sign an affidavit affirming their addresses are free of liens. He said his homes already undergo yearly government inspections because he participates in the federal housing voucher program known as Section 8.

“I don’t know why anybody would do that,” he said. “It’s like throwing yourself under the bus.”

Some of the other landlords that signed the mayor’s commitment card — ISYA Ltd., ABOVO Corp. and JB III Investments — didn’t return calls seeking comment. The first two hadn’t completed registration on any of their properties as of late September, city records show.

JB III had registered three addresses, a tiny fraction of the number it owns.

Juanita Couch owns a company called JC Leasing that was also among the landlords targeted in Rawlings’ high-impact landlord initiative. She said she’s attempting to comply with the city’s new regulations but is registering her rentals in batches because she doesn’t have the staff to handle the repairs on all of the homes at once.

City records show she filed registration paperwork for 10 homes in July. That’s a fraction of the roughly 150 residential addresses in Dallas that belong to the Couch family, according to property records.

Couch warned that fixing the homes to meet city standards will push landlords to increase rents to cover the costs.

“My question to you is: Where are these poor people going to live once the landlords do all this work?”

What inspectors look for

Take a look at some of the things city inspectors must check after landlords register their homes. The full set of minimum housing standards appears on a checklist that landlords must sign during the registration process.

Annual registration for a single-family home is $43. That covers the yearly paperwork and the cost of one inspection every five years.

If inspectors find violations, they’ll send an electronic notice to the landlord and give him or her time to fix the problems — usually a month.

'Do this, do that'

Roy Childers and his wife, owners of three dozen Dallas properties, quietly declined to sign the mayor’s commitment card. And they have ignored a notice from the city to register their houses.

Soon, they may not need to. Childers said he’s selling his properties as fast as he can.

“When they start enforcing all these conditions on these homes — ‘Do this, do that, do this’ — then you cannot rent a home to a low-income family anymore,” Childers said.

Turner moved to a Childers home in March, and now she has to move out. She said Childers has asked her to leave by Dec. 3 because he’s sold the house, and that he told her his houses “are going like hot cakes.”

The mother of three hands out meat at a grocery store for a living and has an eviction history. She had been staying in a hotel and said she was glad when Childers gave her a chance.

At the time, Childers told Turner he was thinking of getting out the rental business, she says, but not when.

“If Roy knew he was going to sell by this year, he could have gave us a shorter lease, he could have sent us on our way,” Turner said.

A copy of the one-year lease provided by Turner doesn’t explicitly say her landlord can break the agreement if he sells the property. She has filed a suit against Childers in a small-claims court.

Childers called Turner “a disgruntled tenant” and declined to comment further.

Turner said she has complained to the city about the lack of heat and other problems, like a flimsy back door and windows that wouldn’t open. She credited Childers with making some repairs -- the ones that didn’t cost a lot of money.

“He said that he could only do what my rent paid for,” Turner recalled.

CLARIFICATION: This story has been modified to remove statements from a man who is living in a G.W. Works home and identified himself as Keivaughn Green. The Works family disputed that they have a tenant by that name, and when confronted by The Dallas Morning News, the tenant declined to confirm or deny that Keivaughn Green was his real name.