Apartment City

Dhan Subedi flipped through sheets of apartment listings on Thursday, 15 days before the deadline for her four-person household to vacate Glenbrook Apartments . She’d circled and called the most affordable units in Boise. The earliest one would be available was Oct. 15, nearly a week after her deadline to leave a one-bedroom, $575-a-month apartment. Her 13-month-old son, Kaden, rolled around the floor at the feet of her mother, Mina Subedi. The families of both Dhan and her husband, Prem Subba, are Bhutanese, though Dhan was born during her family’s two-decade stay at a refugee camp in Nepal. Subba’s was one of thousands of Nepalese- speaking families evicted from the country. Located at the corner of South Curtis Road and Cassia Street, the family’s sparse Glenbrook unit is close to the Boise Airport, where Subba works, and State Street, where Subedi works at a market. It’s also close to the former Boise International Market , where the couple owned the Bhutanese and Nepali grocery...

Alyssa Mulliger Staff Writer @AMulligerSHJ Spartanburg native Tamela Lyles remembers the exact date she moved into unit No. 310 at Oakview Apartments in the city’s Northside neighborhood. It was Jan. 23, 2004, and she was 19 years old. Lyles lived in the 800-square-foot, two-bedroom apartment with her three children. The family experienced good and bad times at Oakview, keeping mostly to themselves except for associating with some residents a few doors down, Lyles said. Oakview's residents are gone now — the city began demolishing the units last week to make way for the new Dr. T.K. Gregg Community Center . While some former residents say the apartments provided a needed home, they also say moving has brought welcome changes and opened up a new life to them. Built in the late 1940s and early 1950s along Howard Street, the federally subsidized, low- income apartments lacked central air conditioning and had tiled floors and cinder block walls . Over the ...