Recently, the Vista Apartments at Shadow Mountain have come under scrutiny.

Tulsa City Councilor Lori Decter Wright and state Rep. Melissa Provenzano visited the apartments. The media reported what they saw.

Their inspection of the facility revealed horrific conditions, including apartments without walls or floors, widespread leaks and interruptions of basic services.

If you trace the building’s ownership, it eventually leads you to Isaac Perlmutter, who lives in New York.

Those of us in public life are all too aware of similar problems for Tulsans. Out-of-state landlords take advantage of our loose regulatory environment to exploit working families in Tulsa.

They skimp on building maintenance, make big profits on fines and fees, and enlist local attorneys to run “eviction mills” to get rid of people after they’ve been taken for all they have.

Tulsa has the 11th highest eviction rate in the nation. It feeds into the city’s problem of homelessness and has a crippling impact on families. Eviction isn’t just a symptom of poverty. The way some of these real estate professionals practice their trade, it’s a generator of poverty.

In the 1880s, a journalist named Jacob Riis began photographing conditions in New York City tenements. His work, titled “How the Other Half Lives,” called attention to the terrible conditions many of the urban poor faced.

Then, as now, the gap between rich and poor was very large in this country. Then, as now, people vilified the poor and blamed them for their own difficulties. Or worse, people ignored the problem because it was tucked out of view.

But we can no longer ignore the problem that is developing in our own community. Compare the pictures of modern Tulsa and industrial New York and ask yourself if this is acceptable in the town we call home.

There’s room for practical rental reform in the Oklahoma Legislature. We could do more to rein in bad out-of-state actors without troubling local landlords who on the whole do a good job keeping up their properties. For example, we could enact more stringent registration requirements to establish a clear line of landlord responsibility for maintenance and repairs. We could better educate tenants on their rights under the law. And we could encourage wider local use of Early Settlement Mediation, a method whereby landlords and tenants work out their disputes before going to eviction court. The practice is common everywhere else in Oklahoma, which may explain why our rates are the highest.

The work of these two elected officials and the journalists who covered the story should be applauded. Taking a hard look at society’s ills is the first step in addressing them.

We can and must take action to hold out-of-state landlords accountable for their exploitation. And we have to secure a better deal for the other half of Tulsans who are our neighbors, our brothers and our sisters. We can’t just repeat and relive the dark chapters of our history.

Rep. John Waldron, a Democrat, represents Tulsa’s District 77 in the Oklahoma House of Representatives.

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