Housing shenanigans in DC

Flickr photo by solecism.

This is reprinted from the current issue of themail, published by DC Watch:

Another Tenant Emergency
Andrew Willis Garces, willisa@gmail.com

This year Mayor Fenty has been lauded for responding to the crisis in rental housing administration laid bare by a March 10 Washington Post expose by Debbie Cenziper. Part of this response has included, in the last two months, laying off housing inspectors, decreasing the amount of tenant purchase funding available to low-income tenant associations, and firing respected rent administrator Grayce Wiggins, who sided with the Kennedy-Warren tenants against politically connected property manager Barac Co. earlier this year. The march towards reform continued this week with the notice that the tenant organizers who worked with Cenziper for months to document DCRA’s failings will likely be laid off on October 1, following the Department of Housing and Community Development’s refusal to renew contracts with the two largest tenant education service agencies.

This year alone, with funding from DHCD, Housing Counseling Services and the Latino Economic Development Corporation have provided critical services to tenants in 163 buildings with more than 13,600 units. At all of these properties, the tenants are presently at risk of, or have just recently avoided being displaced and losing the affordability of their homes. Many have project-based Section 8 contracts, and some are at critical points in the tenant purchase process. An appeal from HCS executive director Marian Siegel sent this week reads, in part, “We are currently working with 115 properties that need support from attorneys, educators, developers and others as we will no longer have staff necessary to meet these needs.”

It is inarguable that tenant education and organizing has been the most effective and probably the cheapest anti-displacement strategy funded by the city government, particularly in Columbia Heights and other neighborhoods hit hardest by the housing boom. Tenant rights laws are, after all, useless if tenants aren’t familiar with them. As a former District tenant organizer myself, I can attest to the widespread ignorance of tenant rights among residents of subsidized housing. You can send comments on this plan to DHCD’s director, the mayor, deputy mayor, and city council housing committee chair: leila.edmonds@dc.gov, neil.albert@dc.gov, adrian.fenty@dc.gov, and mbarry@dccouncil.us. And please send copies of your E-mails to mariansiegel@housingetc.org and mhidalgo@ledcdc.org.