The Landlord Who Looted the Poor
Frank Sinito, the CEO of Millennia Housing Management, drained over $3.1 million (enough to pay the monthly rent for 700 low-income households for an entire year) from the bank accounts of 16 federally subsidized apartment buildings — and a federal court has now ruled that he did it knowingly, deliberately, and in direct violation of agreements he personally signed.
The properties Sinito and Millennia stripped were affordable housing developments, the kind of housing that exists specifically because the federal government agreed to back the mortgages so working-class and low-income families would have a safe, stable place to live. These are communities built on a promise. Sinito broke it — repeatedly, systematically, and while simultaneously signing documents agreeing not to.
The money did not go toward building repairs. It did not go toward operating costs. According to a federal ruling issued on May 22, 2025, the vast majority of it went into Frank Sinito’s personal bank accounts.
How a Housing Giant Built an Empire on Stolen Tenant Money
Millennia Housing Management manages over 30,000 multifamily housing units across the country. The company sits at the top of a stacked web of limited partnerships, LLCs, and investment entities, all ultimately controlled by one man: Frank Sinito, who is the sole member of nearly every investment LLC in the portfolio. When a federal agency offers to insure a mortgage on an affordable housing property, they require the owner to sign a Regulatory Agreement, a binding legal contract that limits when and how money can leave the project’s accounts.
The agreements at issue here were strict: distributions of surplus cash could only happen annually or semi-annually, only after proper accounting, and only with the Secretary of HUD’s written approval for anything outside those windows. Frank Sinito personally signed every single one of these agreements on behalf of the properties. Then he and Millennia transferred money out of these accounts dozens of times, at irregular intervals, with no written approval.
The money flowed to Sinito’s personal accounts and to a rotating cast of LLCs — entities with names like “GMF-Stonybrook, LLC,” “American Preservation Builders, LLC,” “Peace Lake LA TC,” and “Hillsborough FL TC, LP” — none of which are parties to the affordable housing projects the funds were legally required to serve. This was cash meant to maintain apartments, fund reserves, and ensure low-income families had functioning heat, plumbing, and roofs over their heads. It ended up somewhere else entirely.
— HUD Office of Hearings and Appeals, May 22, 2025
The Pattern Across 16 Properties
The sixteen properties span Ohio, Michigan, and Iowa: senior housing towers in Cleveland, affordable family apartments in Toledo, a rural housing project in West Union, a historic-area development in Detroit. The violations were not isolated. HUD filed sixteen separate complaints, and the tribunal consolidated them because, as the ruling states, they involved “overlapping entities and a coordinated pattern of conduct.” This was not a clerical error. It was a business practice.
Unauthorized Transfers by Property ($USD)
Total across all 16 properties: $3,111,525
They Told Him to Stop. He Didn’t.
What makes this story particularly infuriating is not that it happened once. The timeline of events shows a man who received an explicit federal warning, acknowledged wrongdoing in signed audit documents, and then continued the exact same behavior at additional properties. This was not an accident or an oversight. This was a choice, made over and over again.
Sinito and Millennia begin making unauthorized distributions from FHA-insured properties; HUD later establishes this behavior predates the 16 properties in this case.
HUD’s Departmental Enforcement Center issues a formal cease-and-desist letter directly to Frank Sinito about unauthorized distributions at another Millennia property. He is on legal notice. He continues anyway.
Sinito, Millennia, and associated entities execute 115+ unauthorized transfers across 16 properties totaling $3,111,525 (roughly what 84 families pay in rent for a full year). Independent audits flag the violations. Sinito signs the audits, agrees the findings are correct, agrees to fix internal controls.
As of this date, Respondents have repaid exactly $0 of the funds taken from the affordable housing properties.
HUD files sixteen formal complaints with the Office of Hearings and Appeals. The complaints are consolidated into a single proceeding due to the coordinated nature of the violations.
Rather than mount a factual defense, Millennia and Sinito sue the federal government in Ohio federal court, arguing the entire administrative enforcement process is unconstitutional. The lawsuit fails.
The Ohio federal district court dismisses Millennia and Sinito’s constitutional challenges and denies their request to halt the proceedings.
The federal administrative tribunal rules that 115 of 119 violations are legally established. Liability is confirmed. Penalty hearings proceed on June 2, 2025. The maximum civil money penalty per violation is still on the table.
What $3.1 Million Means When You’re Poor and Your Roof Is Leaking
Federal affordable housing programs exist for one reason: the private market fails poor people. Private landlords charge more than low-income workers can pay. Developers do not build housing that does not make them rich. So Congress created a system where the federal government co-signs the mortgage — backs the loan, reduces the lender’s risk — in exchange for the property owner agreeing to specific obligations. Those obligations include keeping the money inside the project where it can actually serve the tenants and maintain the property. That money is not the owner’s money to spend. It is the community’s money, held in trust.
When Frank Sinito pulled $1,030,700 (enough to replace the roof, fix every broken elevator, and repave every parking lot in a mid-size apartment complex) out of Morning Star Towers alone over 21 separate transactions, that money stopped existing for the people living there. Every $75,000 transfer to his personal account in March 2023 is $75,000 that was no longer available for maintenance reserves, emergency repairs, or the operational expenses that keep a building livable. These are not abstract accounting entries. These are real, physical consequences in real buildings where real families sleep.
The federal case makes clear that auditors visited these properties, saw the financial irregularities, documented them, and presented their findings. Sinito signed those audits. He certified the findings were accurate. He agreed, in writing, that internal controls needed to be strengthened. And then he did nothing. No repayments. No process improvements that actually stopped the transfers. The audits became paperwork theater — a performance of accountability that led to zero accountability. Tenants living in those 16 properties across Ohio, Michigan, and Iowa had no way of knowing any of this was happening.
What is most enraging about the non-financial cost here is the deliberate concealment built into the corporate structure itself. Sinito is the sole member of nearly every investment LLC controlling these properties. Layer after layer of shell entities sit between him and legal responsibility, constructed specifically to make it harder to pierce the veil, harder to trace the money, and harder to hold one human being accountable for the choices he made. The people living in these apartments do not have a team of lawyers constructing elaborate corporate shields. They have a lease and a hope that the building they trust to house their family is being run honestly. It was not.
— Administrative Law Judge Alexander Fernández-Pons, May 22, 2025
The Documents That Buried Them: Verbatim From the Federal Record
The following are direct quotations from the May 22, 2025, ruling of the HUD Office of Hearings and Appeals. These are not paraphrases. They are the tribunal’s own words describing what Frank Sinito and Millennia Housing Management did.
“HUD alleges that Respondents made unauthorized transfers totaling more than $3.1 million from accounts associated with HUD-insured multifamily housing projects.”— HUD Office of Hearings and Appeals, Order on Motions for Summary Judgment, May 22, 2025 (Opening Section)
“The unauthorized transfers identified here are not the first of their kind. On June 22, 2021, HUD’s Departmental Enforcement Center issued a cease-and-desist letter to Mr. Sinito concerning similar unauthorized distributions dating back to at least 2019 at another FHA-insured multifamily property within the Millennia portfolio.”— HUD Office of Hearings and Appeals, Order on Motions for Summary Judgment, May 22, 2025 (Section II.A.18)
The website that I got this document from is the Housing and Urban Development’s: https://www.hud.gov/sites/dfiles/HA/documents/24-JM-0150-CM-005-Order-on-Motions.pdf
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