Washington City Paper: How Can D.C. Make Life Harder for Landlords Like Sam Razjooyan? The City Has the Tools, But It’s Not Using Them

Washington City Paper Reporter Alex Koma follows up on a December piece by colleague Suzie Amanuel, exposing a storied DC landlord who has a pattern of neglect due to unsafe living conditions. Koma’s article centers on how lawmakers, attorneys, and activists think the city government should be better at policing landlords who force tenants to live in squalid conditions.

Two years ago, some tenants’ rights attorneys thought they’d made a break in a big case. Thanks to an innovative D.C. law, they had tracked down the name of the person behind an opaque company operating an apartment building. But when they punched that name into Google, they couldn’t believe what they found: The name didn’t belong to human; it belonged to a dog.

The company had listed its office dog as its “beneficial owner” in documents submitted to the D.C. government—the attorneys at the Children’s Law Center only discovered as much because the firm also listed the dog on the staff page of its website. This might be a silly example of how landlords have flouted the city’s corporate transparency rules (and the attorneys say the company in question agreed to amend its paperwork soon after they discovered the furry discrepancy), but it is nonetheless representative of the problems that tenants face in holding bad landlords accountable.
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“We’ve seen cases where proof of abatement was submitted online and accepted but the violation definitely was not abated,” says Makenna Osborn, a policy attorney at Children’s Law Center. “The owner may have submitted something from a different unit, or just painted over something to make it look nicer.”

Image Credit: Washington City Paper