Inside Madeline Fall’s Bloomfield apartment lie clues to the factors that turned the 30-year-old therapist into a tenant organizer.
A small copy of the fifth-edition Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders sits on her office desk. A binder labeled “cookbook” is decorated with an image of former One Direction band member Niall Horan.
But moisture absorbers sit in otherwise empty kitchen cabinets and discoloration covers parts of the ceiling above. In the office, court documents and tenant union flyers edge out the colored markers on a corner desk that was originally used as an arts-and-crafts station.
In March, Fall and about two dozen other residents started organizing to sound the alarm on the conditions at buildings run by NRM Properties, LLC, a South Side Flats-based property management company. The residents say conditions include weekslong water leaks, no air or heat during the hottest or coldest months and a lack of communication from management.
Members of the NRM Tenant Union have taken their concerns to the company, as well as local officials and tenant advocacy organizations. The union is now a month into a rolling rent strike, which Fall said will grow in participants each month that NRM fails to take action on the union’s four key demands: rising rent costs, delayed and inadequate repairs, “extreme” utility costs and a lack of consistent and clear communication.
They’ve joined a long tradition of tenant organizing in Pittsburgh, which surged when the pandemic roiled rental markets.
NRM did not agree to an interview or respond to specific questions over email. Instead, a representative of the company wrote in an emailed statement: “We welcome the opportunity to speak with our residents, either individually or through representatives they have chosen. We encourage anyone communicating on behalf of residents to provide appropriate contact information so we can engage in an open and productive dialogue.”
‘This cannot be real life’
Fall landed in Bloomfield by way of Connecticut roughly three years ago, driven by a desire to live closer to friends.
Shortly after she moved to Pittsburgh, a leak began forming in the kitchen ceiling. Maintenance workers fixed the issue within 10 days, according to maintenance request records shared by Fall.
But when a similar leak appeared in June 2025, she said it took six weeks from the day she submitted a maintenance request for someone to attempt repairs. In the interim, Fall placed buckets on the floor to catch the liquid. A jar of the liquid has since become a fixture at tenant organizing meetings and housing court hearings.
“I remember several times just honestly hysterically laughing and being like, ‘This cannot be real life. Why won’t these people come fix my kitchen?’” Fall said. The repairs wouldn’t be complete until September.
Another tenant in an NRM property in Bloomfield told Public Source that she, too, experienced a leak that led to mold and a lengthy effort to cajole the landlord into fixing it. That tenant asked not to be named because she is moving out and doesn’t want to jeopardize the return of her security deposit.
Violations, complaints pile up
In 1997, shortly after graduating from Carnegie Mellon University, Nathaniel Morgan bought his first rental property in Braddock for $31,000.
Since then, county property records show Morgan’s various real estate subsidiaries have bought at least 50 properties within Pittsburgh, costing roughly $13 million in total. The company also owns buildings in Washington and Westmoreland counties. More than 500 units worth around $100 million now exist in the company’s portfolio, according to NRM Properties’ website.
In 2021, NRM began racking up health code violations with the Allegheny County Health Department.
In those five years, county health inspectors issued NRM properties 145 health code violations across 15 of its properties — for issues such as ceiling leaks, like Fall and other tenants described, but also minor rodent infestations, holes in walls and ceilings and building foundations “in danger of collapse or caving in.”
Most of the violations are concentrated in Oakland. On RateYinzLandlord, a website where renters can review their landlords, NRM Properties has a 1.1-star rating on a five-star scale, based on 15 reviews.
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Court records also reveal a handful of cases in which NRM tenants have filed civil claims against the company — sometimes winning judgments.
Former resident Steven Shum filed a civil action against NRM in October saying he had no heat during the winter months. The magistrate ruled in Shum’s favor, resulting in NRM owing him $4,400, which covered rent and heating supplies that Shum paid for out of his own pocket, he wrote in an email.
The payment has been difficult to get, Shum said. He filed an order with the magisterial court to urge NRM to pay him in January, which expired in March. In July, he told Public Source that he had yet to be paid what he was owed.
“There isn’t like a high school class that teaches us what is acceptable and isn’t acceptable in our housing. That’s something that we kind of have to learn.”
morgan parker, pittsburgh tenants organizing committee
Paul Wynkoop, Fall’s neighbor and a member of the NRM Tenant Union, filed a civil complaint against the property management company when his building’s air conditioning stopped working efficiently last July. He couldn’t get his place to remain below 83 degrees, he said, and maintenance eventually gave up on trying to fix the issue. The magistrate ruled in Wynkoop’s favor, resulting in NRM owing him $1,440 for one month’s rent and the air conditioning units he bought. NRM paid the amount in full, Wynkoop said.
NRM declined to respond to specific questions about Shum’s and Wynkoop’s cases, but included in their statement that the company’s “goal has always been to provide safe, well-maintained housing at or below market rates. We work hard to keep our rents competitive within the neighborhoods we serve while maintaining our properties and providing responsive service to our residents.”
Organizing for better housing
Fall had been experiencing a mental health crisis, which would last through the end of 2025, by the time her ceiling started to leak. She fell behind on rent as a result. NRM filed to evict Fall in May, and Magistrate Kate Lovelace ruled in NRM’s favor in June.
Fall left that hearing in shock, she said. Fall said Lovelace did not review any of the documents she brought as evidence and directed her to answer questions directly as opposed to reading the statement she prepared, which detailed her mental health and housing challenges.
“Her website at length talks about being an advocate for Black women, eviction, disability, autism and mental health,” Fall said of Lovelace. “Literally, my case is at the intersection of all of those things, but she doesn’t know that because she didn’t let me tell her.”
Lovelace did not agree to speak on the record in response to Fall’s experience.
“If the only thing that comes from this is that I know the system intimately … that is fine.”MADELINE FALL, nrm tenants union
On a July afternoon, Fall argued her own case against NRM, again in front of Lovelace. Tenants can file civil complaints against landlords in response to evictions if they believe they’re owed money. Inside the small, colorful courtroom with about a dozen seats, Fall recounted the competing issues she had faced last year and her attempt to continue making rent payments despite those challenges.
Wynkoop and Morgan Parker, an organizer with the Pittsburgh Tenants Organizing Committee, sat a few rows behind Fall. Lovelace ultimately ruled in Fall’s favor, requiring NRM to pay Fall $2,500. While the decision doesn’t hold any weight in Fall’s eviction case, which is separate and already moving through the appeals process, the three attributed the outcome to Fall’s ability to speak at length about her experience.
Tenants ‘move fast and break things’
The Pittsburgh Tenants Organizing Committee is a “volunteer-led group of neighbors who want to increase tenants’ rights in Pittsburgh and reduce the power of landlords,” Parker said. The committee holds information sessions to teach tenants about their rights and creates space for tenants to share their organizing experiences with others.
“There isn’t like a high school class that teaches us what is acceptable and isn’t acceptable in our housing. That’s something that we kind of have to learn. And who will teach us? How do we learn these things? We often have to have a pretty dire situation before we start being like, ‘Hey, who will help me?’” Parker said.
Fall initially thought to file a lawsuit against NRM due to the conditions inside her apartment, but per the advice of a friend, she instead began organizing tenants experiencing similar issues.
Since then, she has researched NRM and its properties, gone doorknocking at properties owned by the company, posted flyers and shared her experiences at the committee’s information sessions. She also keeps a spreadsheet of every person or organization she has reached out to in relation to the tenant union.
“I hate Mark Zuckerberg, but I decided that part of the reparations for how much evil that man has done in our lives, that I’m taking the ‘move fast and break things’ quote from him and from Silicon Valley,” Fall said.
Pittsburgh’s rental market experienced a surge in tenant activism during the pandemic, particularly among tenants in market-rate and subsidized housing. The momentum that began roughly six years ago hasn’t stopped, said Maddy McGrady, a co-chair of the Pittsburgh Housing Justice Table.
“From where I’m standing, I think there’s more people than ever coming together to say, ‘How can we seriously do this and build a movement of tenant organizing?’” McGrady said.
At the same time, that work has become increasingly difficult in recent years, McGrady and other advocates say. That’s due in part to a somewhat splintered organizing ecosystem with no centralized voice — unlike organizations in Los Angeles or Kansas City. The connections between tenants and their landlords are also growing more distant, they say, and the daily stressors of life leave people with few hours to dedicate to organizing.
“There’s so many other things in life that are pulling us away from community organizing … but more and more people are falling under the umbrella of, like, this is kind of a do-or-die situation,” Parker said.
While Fall’s personal goal is to remain in her home, she said she’s also satisfied with leveraging what she’s learned through the organizing and eviction process to help others in similar positions. While the eviction appeal is pending, Fall remains in her home and pays rent into an escrow account.
“If the only thing that comes from this is that I know the system intimately, and I’m able to speak on it and be brave and point people in the right direction or talk to them, the news or whatever, so that people are really clear about what’s happening with our housing, that is fine,” Fall said.
Mia Hollie is the economic development and housing reporter for Pittsburgh’s Public Source. She can be reached at mia@publicsource.org.
This story was fact-checked by Cilia Catello.
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