Street Sense Media: At one building, the fight for better housing conditions never ends

Donte Kirby of Street Sense Media reports on the struggle many tenants face in submitting complaints to the Department of Buildings (DOB) in reporting deteriorating housing conditions. This piece covers issues at a specific property that is managed by Urban Investment Partners (UIP), then turns to Children’s Law Center attorneys for the historical context of this ongoing issue.

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.” 

…

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.

Photo Credit: Donte Kirby/Street Sense Media