Now, some renters in Davenport live in fear that their homes will be next.
A local tenant rights group is asking for federal help.
Ronda Wilson lives in an apartment at the Marycrest Senior Campus in Davenport. When she moved in five years ago, she hoped it would be her last move. But soon, she began to worry about her safety.
"I don't want to move, but I am afraid, I have very bad anxiety, if you say rain, I get scared," she said. "Snow, with the weight of that on the roof, is scary. I've had nightmares."
First, it was the leaky roof.
"One bucket, four buckets, eight buckets," she said. "The water is literally coming down the walls."
Then the mold.
"They did some bleach wipes, and then they painted over it with what they call a sealant, for the mold behind my recliner, which gives me anxiety," she said.
"They are doing the roof, but when they go, okay, the apartment above me is deemed uninhabitable, what's going to happen to me down here?"
And a letter from her caseworker.
"I am on Section 8 and I thought that was kinda unusual, her sending me a letter asking me to please look over the information she sent me in the mail to find another place," Wilson said. "What alarmed me is that she said 'immediately.'"
Wilson tried to find a new apartment. But she uses a wheelchair to get around, and the apartments she looked at were less accessible and more expensive than her current one.
And she's not alone. Dennis Platt from the Quad Cities Tenant Alliance says there's a shortage of affordable housing in the Quad Cities.
"Our housing stock in Davenport is old, it's, on average, like 50, 60 years old," he said. "And so every year, we're losing a certain amount of housing stock just from natural deterioration, or failure to maintain homes, duplexes, triplexes all around the city."
"So every year, we're having shrinkage of our housing stock, and we're not replacing the affordable part of our housing stock."
The tenant alliance is part of Quad Cities Interfaith. The group holds a monthly open meeting, and provides resources like landlord background checks.
In October, it held a town hall to ask the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD, to do more thorough inspections and fund affordable housing.
Hannah Griggs is an organizer with the alliance.
"We initially did ask HUD to come to the town hall, but they said they were unable to come, so our strategy was to involve the community in calling HUD."
Last month, the Iowa and Illinois HUD field directors, plus the regional director for the Kansas City hub, met with Quad Cities Interfaith. Wilson shared her story and Platt shared some local data.
"We looked at all the different housing deficiencies on a heat map, and we could see them very clearly sprinkled through the city, a cluster in certain parts of town."
"And then we did an overlay of a 1936 redline map of Davenport," he said. "They aligned in a terrifying way."
Griggs says the HUD representatives promised to educate Davenport officials about potential solutions and funding options.
"The first one is receiverships. If a building is falling into disrepair, instead of having the city sell that back to a real estate developer, it could be put into a receivership so that a nonprofit could reserve it for low income people."
"Another idea that was put out was community land trusts," she said. "In a community land trust, the community owns the land together."
She says HUD has also contacted the Iowa Finance Authority, and is conducting a "compliance review" of Davenport, including rental inspections.
In the meantime, the Quad Cities Tenant Alliance continues to support renters, like Ronda Wilson, with education and resources.
