How many maintenance requests can go unanswered before a tenant should get the city involved, sue, or withhold rent? The process of making sure a building is up to D.C.’s housing code can be arduous, a fact the tenants of one Southwest building know all too well.
Luis Macias-Montenegro has lived at Capital Park Tower on G Street for nine years, the last two with his husband, Bill Townsend. Since last year, Macias-Montenegro has tried to get the building management to address security concerns, rodent infestation, and issues with the fire alarms in the apartment complex, filing complaints with the D.C. Department of Buildings (DOB), the local Advisory Neighborhood Commission, and, eventually, D.C.’s Office of the Attorney General. The complaints, filed in 2023, led to a DOB inspector visiting the building and issuing a violation to the owners of Capital Park Tower, Macias-Montenegro said.
In fact, the DOB database currently shows the property has 71 open violations of the housing code, dating back to 2018. The agency has issued 110 Notices of Infractions at the property since fiscal year 2020, including nearly 50 the building management has yet to pay the resulting fines for, totaling $66,000. These aren’t uniquely high numbers, and DOB says the number of outstanding infractions the building has doesn’t make it an outlier, but they represent an issue tenants across the city face.
When a tenant feels their landlord is letting conditions deteriorate and housing code violations pile up, the first line of defense is the DOB, which can inspect properties and require their owners to make repairs or fine the properties if conditions violate the housing code. The fines DOB issues (in the case of Capitol Park Tower, ranging from $118 to $4,428) are supposed to incentivize landlords to proactively fix housing issues and provide adequate service to tenants. But the reality, tenants like Townsend and Macias-Montenegro say, is that issues are often only fixed after DOB gets involved. If they don’t, housing conditions and quality of life can deteriorate.
“The difficulty that lies in forcing management to take action and the burden of proof we have is very heavy on us,” Townsend said. “There’s no mechanism for us to force management to do better.”
The property manager and owner of the Capitol Park Tower apartments at 301 G St. SW is Urban Investment Partners (UIP). Over the years, tenants have complained the company’s property managers have responded to maintenance issues and security concerns with hostility and derision. Many residents spoke out after a pair of fires in 2022 and 2023, which tenants said were preventable. Management at the Onyx, a building in Navy Yard, was so poor, according to tenants, that the Navy Yard Advisory Neighborhood Commission passed a resolution asking the District to revoke UIP’s business license in July of last year.
Lisa Wright is the tenant association president at Capital Park Tower and has lived in the building for four years. Since she’s been there, she estimates there have been 15 fires, and says UIP has done little to fix the resulting damage or prevent further ones. After the 2022 and 2023 fires, residents complained the building’s fire alarms weren’t loud enough to hear from their bedrooms — and Macias-Montenegro still harbors the same concerns. Eighteen of the currently open violations at the property are about fire safety, ranging from a lack of instructions about what to do when a fire alarm goes off to a lack of fire extinguishers. DOB found many of the violations in the months following the 2022 and 2023 fires, according to the database.
It took three years to fix a broken lock in the basement, according to tenant association vice president Timothy Seals. It took over a year and an inspection from DOB to fix fire damage that was causing gnats to infest apartment units, according to Wright. Flies infested apartments and garbage piled out from the trash room into the hallway before staff fixed a broken trash compactor, Seals said.
And a family friend of Macias-Montenegro, an older Venezuelan woman, complained to management about a gas leak but was ignored for 14 hours until Townsend stepped in and advocated on her behalf as a white English speaker, according to Macias-Montenegro and Townsend.
Staff with UIP at Capital Park Towers declined to comment on their management of the building. UIP corporate staff did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Countless tenants across D.C. face similar battles, according to lawyers at the Children’s Law Center (CLC). The legal nonprofit advocates for children to access health care and education, but it also is part of a unique Medical-Legal partnership (or MLP), in which staff receive referrals from doctors about housing conditions like mold or lead that impact a child’s health. With this referral, a CLC lawyer then steps in to advocate for the client in Housing Conditions Court.
Kathy Zeisel is the director of special legal projects with CLC, and she’s worked with the nonprofit for 15 years. Its advocacy, along with that of other nonprofits and tenant advocates, was instrumental in getting the D.C. Department of Consumer Regulatory Affairs (DCRA) to split into two agencies, the DOB and the Department of Licensing and Consumer Protection, with the hope the split would allow the city to more efficiently respond to tenant concerns, and the creation of the Housing Conditions Court by retired judge Melvin Wright.
But Zeisel says many landlords still refuse to fix violations to the D.C. housing code, like mold, malfunctioning fire alarms, and unsecured entrances to the building. She also says the worst offenders are often repeat ones — and that taking them to court in each instance is often ineffective and can take months to resolve.
“A lot of the times it’s the same landlords or same property management companies over and over,” she said. “We would much rather have the city be the ones going in and seeing the systemic problems and dealing with them on both an individual and systems level.”
If a tenant has complaints about housing conditions and the landlord isn’t fixing them in a timely manner, the tenant has four options: report the landlord to DOB, wait for the inspection and watch the fines pile up; take the landlord to Housing Conditions Court and sue to have the issues fixed; put rent in escrow until the issue is fixed; or go on a rent strike. The last two options both put the tenant at risk of being sued by the landlord.
To help navigate these options, there are advocacy groups like D.C. Legal Aid, CLC, and the district agency, and the Office of the Tenant Advocate. But the DOB is the city’s primary watchdog for housing issues and should be the first call when housing code violations are involved. DOB urges tenants to report any suspected housing and property maintenance violations to DOB at dob.dc.gov or 202-671-3500.
Since the DCRA split on Oct 1, 2022, DOB has increased its rate of inspections. The agency performed an average of 22,488 housing inspections in the six years before the split, and an average of 40,598 in the two years after, according to the DOB database. But those inspections aren’t translating into meaningfully improved conditions for tenants, the CLC has found.
Makenna Osborn, a policy attorney at CLC, tried to explain the root causes of this discrepancy at a Committee of the Whole performance oversight hearing for DOB in February. She said that although DOB was conducting more complaint-based and proactive housing code inspections, many of the 28,057 resulting violations weren’t corrected by landlords. Only 38% of violations found after complaints in FY 2023 were abated or resolved in that same year, according to a DOB report.
“After years of this ineffective level of timely correction, there are currently 53,710 unabated housing code violations impacting 11,739 tenant households in the District,” Osborn said at the hearing.
According to a DOB spokesperson, abatement rates are improving, with a 39.7% increase in housing code violations that were confirmed abated in the last fiscal year. When landlords don’t fix violations, DOB can refer the case to the Office of Administrative Hearings, but the hearing process can take years, the DOB spokesperson wrote. For instance, 48 infractions at Capitol Park Tower are currently in the adjudication process.
Capital Park Tower tenants are well-acquainted with the complaint process. Seals, the tenant association vice president, has lived in the building for 22 years and recalls when tenants would walk to the nearby DCRA offices to make a complaint.
“DCRA knew this was a problem building. [DCRA’s office] was right down the street, people used to walk right down there,” Seals said.
Seals recalls the building was once fined for asbestos. But now he can’t find proof of that or other fixed violations, because DOB removes detailed data on violations from the violations dashboard once an issue is fixed, though some information is available on the enforcement dashboard. It’s a problem CLC notes often confuses tenants, especially because landlords don’t always notify tenants when a violation is fixed.
Seals tries to inform UIP management at the building of issues and tenant complaints, but he says he never gets far.
“When you give notice three or four times, eventually you stop beating a dead horse,” he said.
While DOB has increased proactive inspections, prioritizing buildings they feel inspections will have the most impact, they are limited by capacity constraints. The Proactive Inspection Program Act, which the D.C. Council passed, would increase the rate of inspections if it is funded in next year’s budget.
In the meantime, a DOB spokesperson stressed the agency needs tenants to report any potential violations the landlord hasn’t fixed to ensure their homes are up to code. Tenants can view the housing code standards on the DOB website. If a tenant has a question about if a specific violation has been fixed, they can contact DOB.
Despite everything, tenants at Capital Park Tower say they still wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. The building is uniquely affordable — Townsend estimates rent for the same kind of apartment in the area would cost $800-1200 more a month. For Wright, it’s the size of the units that keep her there. Seals has lived there for over two decades and values the sense of community, although he said that since people have moved out in the last years due to the conditions, he now knows a lot less of his neighbors.
“We as a community are frustrated, because why do I need to leave the place that I like, the community that I love, the location that I love?” Macias-Montenegro said. “It’s not tenant responsibility, it’s a property management responsibility. And if we move out, it basically keeps procrastinating the problem, giving them the continued room to do whatever they want to do.”
The question is, how can tenants make their landlord more proactive? UIP isn’t the worst building owner or management the building has ever had, Seals said, but tenants still deal with negligence.
“If it’s a spark, they’ll ignore it until it becomes a fire,” said Seals.
This article has been lightly edited from the print version. This article is part of our 2024 contribution to the D.C. Homeless Crisis Reporting Project in collaboration with other local newsrooms. The collective works will be published throughout the week at bit.ly/DCHCRP.
