The long hard fight over 2724 11th Street NW
By hola | Published | No Comments
The 26-unit apartment building at 2724 11th Street NW is a bedraggled-looking structure in Columbia Heights. Its sagging redbrick exterior shows its age. Inside, a musty smell permeates the air, resulting from the leaky roof that’s led to water damage and mold. The building has been standing nearly a century, home to generations of Washingtonians, each with their own stories to tell. But the current chapter is arguably the most dramatic as its tenants fight a legal battle with the building owner that has been going on for years.
While conditions could be among the worst in the city, the situation at 2724 11th Street NW is indicative of the kinds of issues tenants living in rent controlled apartment buildings face in the District’s rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods. A whole battery of unmet problems—leaky roofs, mold, and various infestations—seem to indicate, tenants say, that the landlord wishes to drive them from their homes in order to capitalize on the neighborhood’s renewal.
Felipa Arias, the co-president of the tenants’ association, moved into the building in the ’90s. As every structure in the vicinity is renovated or rebuilt as condominiums, she notes that 2724 11th Street is becoming one of the oldest buildings in the neighborhood.
“Since most of us are low-income people we can’t afford to buy condominiums, or go somewhere else,” she says. “So, all we can do is look for help and continue fighting.”
Heavy rains caused a new roof leak, letting rain pour into another apartment in the building. For weeks afterwards, residents called and called the building’s management company, SCF Management LLC. But they say no one came to make repairs.
When Hola Cultura contacted SCF Management, Stan Ford Sr. responded in an email, declining comment both for his company and the owners. Ford and the 11th Street building’s lead owner, Ellis J. Parker III, have reportedly been involved in previous rent control controversies. While testifying before the D.C. Council in 2006, Ford admitted that he was paid generously for getting tenants to move out of another building where Parker was an investor.
After part of the ceiling collapsed and water poured into their apartment, the tenants called Channel 7 News. Reporter Horace Holmes came out to investigate, airing footage of the couple and a plastic tarp used to funnel the deluge out a nearby window. Nevertheless, water leaked into the apartment one floor below, leaving a trail on mold and water damage along their walls.
A delegation of tenants went with Holmes and the TV camera to confront the management company. (Watch the TV news segment here.)
“After the television news broadcast, they came to make the repairs,” Arias says. But the leaky roof is only one of the many problems the building’s tenants face.
Arias says she has experienced rats, mice, cockroaches, bedbugs, mold, water damaged walls, and flaking paint. Her landlord took her to court last year over broken plumbing, blaming Arias and her husband for the damage but a judge threw out the case. A radiator also burst in her unit. After a month, the landlord repaired it but only after threatened with a lawsuit.
“This is a block with, I assume, million dollar houses on it. Then right next to [these houses] you have real slum conditions like this,” says tenant organizer Robert Wohl. “I think you see that level of unevenness and inequality all over the city.”
Wohl works for the Latino Economic Development Center (LEDC), one of several tenants advocacy groups in the city. He’s helping the residents at 2724 11th Street, and other buildings throughout the city, where low- and moderate-income residents need help asserting their legal rights as tenants.
Many residents of the District are familiar with the rising costs of housing. Rents have grown faster in the District than in most major cities, according to a report by the DC Fiscal Policy Institute.
Felipa Arias and her neighbors are caught in the consequences of this property boom. They started the website “save2724.wordpress.com” as a platform to spread awareness of their plight.
“The Parkers have a long history of displacing tenants and mismanaging properties…” it reads on the site’s homepage, referring to the family identified as the building’s lead investors. The tenants association accuses the Parkers, longtime D.C. building owners, of trying to take down rent control and “therefore destroy affordable housing in our city.”
It is no secret that low-cost housing has been disappearing in the District, a situation hitting Latino renters particularly hard. Latinos have the highest rental rate of any race or ethnic group—65 percent of all Latino households rent in Washington D.C., according to the Urban Institute. That is higher than the citywide average. Across D.C. 60 percent of households rent their homes, rather than owning, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. More than one-third of these renter households are low income including many living below the poverty line.
But experts say disappearing low-cost housing is a problem for all District residents—even for those who can afford their rent.
“An exodus of workers out of the District can threaten the city’s economic vitality. Without a variety of workers with a wide range of incomes living here, the District will be unable to sustain certain parts of the economy, including our strong service industry,” DC Fiscal Policy Institute analyst Wes Rivers told the Capital Community News.
Despite a renewed interest in creating affordable housing, public policy experts say it will take an enormous amount of resources and effort to meet the housing needs of the city’s low-income residents.
A central facet to the District’s housing crisis is the surge in rental prices. According to an analysis by the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute this surge is disproportionate to the growth of incomes.
The combination of rising market rate rental prices alongside a shortage of government subsidized low-income housing is squeezing the personal finances of a growing number of low- and moderate-income renters who would like to continue living in D.C., according to housing experts and tenant activists. In 2005, more than 65,000 rentals could be found for under $800 a month. By 2012, that number had dwindled to 34,000 units. Moreover, the number of rentals for $1000 or more nearly doubled—from 51,000 units to 98,000 units. The average rental price in Columbia Heights today is more than $2,800-a-month, according to a recent rental report published on the Prince of Petworth website.
Why is affordable housing disappearing?
Peter Tatian, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute who studies D.C. housing trends, says today’s affordable housing crisis, in large part, is connected to the influx of young people with college educations.
The 2008 recession left many U.S. cities with poor job markets. The District on the other hand, had the government sector to act as an employment buffer. Many of these young professions—often called “millennials”—came to DC in search of jobs, Tatian says.
This demographic shift was particularly pronounced between 2000 to 2010. But now experts say a new trend is emerging as the national economic recovery has made other cities competitive again with the District. According to recent population counts by the U.S. Census Bureau, fewer millennials are moving into the District today, compared to a few years ago. However, it is not clear whether D.C.’s diminishing allure to the young and highly-educated will provide relief to tenants such as Arias and her 11th Street neighbors, since the city’s population continues to grow. A recent Washington Post article discusses what the end of the millennial boom will mean for the city: a flattening of the economy and more opportunity for other groups.
D.C. Latinos have also been moving out to the suburbs for decades. In fact, there are entire Latin American immigrant communities that set down roots directly in suburban Maryland and Virginia, bypassing what was once considered by many as a dangerous and undesirable urban core.
The movement out of the traditionally Latino barrios in central D.C. can be mapped through the census data. By 2010, Latinos are still present in the Columbia Heights area, the Latino population is moving north and northwest to neighborhoods such as Brightwood and other parts of Ward 4, and to a lesser extent, Ward 3.
We spoke with Anabell Martinez and Michael Antonio Garcia at the Central American Resource Center (CARECEN), a community based organization that provides housing, and legal services.
“That’s what we are attacking right now. We’re finding out where it is affordable to live in people’s income brackets, and it seems like everyone is being pushed out of Wards 1 and 4 and moving into 6, 7 and 8,” Garcia says.
Homelessness is also rising, as the high cost of housing makes people more vulnerable. With households paying large portions of their monthly paychecks in rent, experts say the loss of income due to illness or layoff can quickly put people—and entire families—out on the street.
“What has been different more recently is the growth in family homelessness, as opposed to homeless individuals,” Tatian says. “We attribute that largely to the high cost of housing. For most families, it is an economic issue.”
So what is someone to do when the rent is too high, the landlord refuses to fix dilapidated conditions, public transport is lacking, or their apartment becomes too small for a growing family? Philip Kennedy, the tenant organizing manager at the LEDC, says D.C. has many policies and programs in place to prevent displacement.
“A lot of other areas face the same kind of gentrification and they don’t have all the tools we have. So that is pretty unique,” Kennedy says. “But they are only valuable if people take advantage of them and know them, which is where we come in.”
“[A] big thing we talk about a lot is the need to preserve existing affordable housing, particularly in places like Columbia Heights. That’s really important because there is a lot of affordable housing that was put in place there in the ‘60’s, ‘70’s, and ‘80’s,” Tatian says.
“As that housing begins to age, as owners of those properties start looking if they have other options besides providing affordable housing and those options are more profitable for them, then there is a lot of incentive to change it,” Tatian says. “That has been a constant pressure. The city really needs to be proactive in terms of thinking about where those risks might be and thinking about how can we hold onto it as much as possible because it’s really hard to recreate it if we lose it.”
The building at 2724 11th Street NW is one of these rent controlled buildings where the future is uncertain.
Last year, the landlord submitted a hardship petition, one of the few ways the owners of a rent-controlled building can exact rent hikes well beyond the standard small annual increases. The owners of rent-controlled buildings are guaranteed by law a 12 percent rate of return on their properties. If profits slip below that level, they can petition to be excused from rent control. Just by submitting a Hardship Petition, a landlord can immediately demand a steep rent increase–often 30 percent higher. Considering that twenty-five percent of DC renters spend more than half of their income on rent, hardship petitions pose a very real problem for many renters.
The tenants of 2724 11th Street sought help from the neighbors in the surrounding blocks. Almost every tenant in the building helped launch a community campaign that involved public meetings at the building with community leaders and elected officials, protests at the property manager’s office every time they went to pay rent, and canvassing the blocks around their home. They also succeeded in organizing their neighbors to oppose a zoning variance that the landlords wanted to add units to the building.
“The tenants here have been very successful. So earlier this year the landlord realized he was not going to win and withdrew his hardship petition. That meant that the most immediate threat was gone, but the conditions here are still really bad. The fact that there are rats everywhere and there are tenants living with leaking ceilings and mold in their walls. That is also a threat to affordable housing,” says Wohl, of LEDC. “Now a lot of the work we are doing here focuses on improving the buildings conditions.”
After inspectors came, the landlord was given tens of thousands of dollars in fines because of the poor conditions of the building. Yet, the building remains in its poor state, prompting tenants to work with pro-bono lawyers to bring a lawsuit against the landlord.
“DC has really exemplary tenants rights, but there is nobody really enforcing those laws,” Wohl says.
For the tenants of 2724 11th Street, it’s become a test of endurance. Since they first took on their landlord a few years ago, the makeup of the tenant association has changed. The first group took buyouts and left, leaving their units vacant. Today, most of the residents are Hispanics—mostly immigrants from Central America—which has been helpful because there is less of a language barrier now that most everyone speaks Spanish. They present a unified front to preserve their affordable housing.
“We’re members of an association, and we’re all fighting together,” Arias says. “So, if I can’t go to a meeting someone else can.”
Adds Arias: “We are here and we are not going anywhere.”
—Story by Oliver Garretson, photos by Herbert Ramirez and maps by Nicholas John
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