Tiauna Taylor welcomed us into her apartment in Durham's Oxford Manor public housing complex. In the living room, a large hole was clearly visible in the ceiling.
"Four whole years, the ceiling has been like this," she said. "Any time you take a shower, any time you run the bathtub, it leaks downstairs."
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Upstairs, she counted the bullet holes in her bedroom window: Eight.
One of those bullets, she said, hit her in the leg as she was in bed a few months ago. She believes someone driving by was shooting indiscriminately, and hit her unit.
"I’m just glad my grandson … I just dropped him off earlier the day," she said. "Had he been here, that’s the side of the bed he usually sleeps on."
In addition to the safety concerns she has for her and her family, she said the Durham Housing Authority is not responding promptly to the work orders she submitted to include the bullet-ridden windows and walls, the hole in the ceiling, a broken lock, and more.
Taylor told WRAL Investigates that she has called in dozens of work orders to repair the issues over months and years, but the issues have not been corrected. The Durham Housing Authority's website notes that calling a hotline is the process for submitting maintenance requests.
WRAL Investigates sent records requests to five area housing authorities -- Wake, Raleigh, Smithfield, Chapel Hill and Durham -- seeking information about how many work orders each agency has open and how long, on average, a maintenance request takes to fix. Durham's numbers indicated the most open work orders, and the slowest response times to fix them.
For the Smithfield Housing Authority, which oversees 205 units, the director said that emergency work orders are completed within 24 hours, and non-emergency work orders average two to five days. As of late October, it had 27 open work orders, and had completed 839 so far in 2025.
In Raleigh, which oversees nearly 2,000 units, the director told WRAL Investigates there were 288 open work orders as of December 18, with an average turnaround time of 8.2 days to fill them.
In Chapel Hill, a town spokesperson told WRAL Investigates that it oversees 296 units, and has zero open work orders. The average time it takes to fill a work order is four days, and the agency has closed 2,399 work orders in 2025 as of Dec. 16.
For the Wake County Housing Authority, the Executive Director says it oversees 343 units and has 16 open work orders. The average time it takes to fill a work order, he says, is one day, and they have closed 785 work orders in 2025 as of Dec. 19.
For the Durham Housing Authority, whose website states it oversees 1,201 public housing units, a spokesperson said the average time to fix maintenance issues is 27 days. As of late November, it had 2,483 open work orders, and had closed 11,987 so far in 2025. The spokesperson cited "staffing issues" as contributing to delays, and noted "our current goal is to reduce [wait time] to less than 15 days."
In the past, the Durham Housing Authority has recognized struggles, citing a lack of funding, in part because many residents are behind on rent.
Taylor hopes the situation for her and other tenants improves soon.
"I don’t want my grandson to have to live that," she said. "I raised his daddy in that. I raised his aunt in that. I was raised in that. I was trying to give my grandson a different kind of feel."