{"id":240,"date":"2019-04-25T12:44:42","date_gmt":"2019-04-25T12:44:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/?p=240"},"modified":"2019-04-25T16:46:46","modified_gmt":"2019-04-25T16:46:46","slug":"rent-hikes-may-force-longtime-residents-out-of-a-columbia-heights-apartment-building","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/240\/","title":{"rendered":"Rent Hikes May Force Longtime Residents Out of a Columbia Heights Apartment Building"},"content":{"rendered":"

www.washingtoncitypaper.com\/news\/housing-complex\/article\/21065873\/rent-hikes-may-force-longtime-residents-out-of-a-columbia-heights-apartment-building<\/a>
\nRent Hikes May Force Longtime Residents Out of a Columbia Heights Building The building’s owners want to raise rents by as much as 60 percent over four years.
\nDarrow Montgomery
\nIn yet another Columbia Heights apartment complex that has long been home to immigrants and seniors, tenants wonder how long they have left in their homes.
\nSixty-two-year-old Ana Maria Ramos moved into 1466 Columbia Road NW half a lifetime ago. She remembers how, 30 years ago, the building\u2019s manager threatened to evict her for being pregnant. She remembers seeing a man violently attacked in the apartment courtyard, his hand sliced clean off by an assailant. She remembers paying less than $300 per month for an efficiency.
\nRamos is the first to admit that life in the building has been far from perfect, but she depends on the stability it has provided her. It\u2019s home.
\nShe fears it may not be for long. Last May, the owners of 1466 Columbia Road NW filed a hardship petition with the District\u2014a document testifying that the revenue generated from the building, which is rent-controlled, has not kept pace with rising costs to maintain it. The apartment building\u2019s owners are asking the city to increase tenants\u2019 monthly rent beyond the standard allowable amount for rent-controlled units, which is the consumer price index plus 2 percent. They want to raise rents by as much as 60 percent over four years.
\nThey can do that because, in D.C., landlords of rent-controlled buildings are effectively entitled to a 12 percent rate of return on their properties. The owners of 1466 Columbia Road NW report a net income just shy of $30,000 annually for the building, which they report costs about $356,000 each year to maintain.
\nThe hardship petition law \u201cis outdated and wholly unfair to tenants,\u201d says Beth Harrison, the director of the Legal Aid Society\u2019s Eviction Defense Project, in an email. Legal Aid is representing the tenants of 1466 Columbia Road NW. \u201cToo often, they lead to high rent increases that price out tenants in situations where the landlord is making a profit and hardly facing a \u2018hardship,\u2019\u201d Harrison says. She says Legal Aid found that, in a review of 95 hardship petitions filed between the fiscal years 2007 and 2015, 57 percent of the petitions granted came from properties with positive net income.
\nRamos\u2019 34-unit building sits just one block south of the sprawling DC USA complex on 14th and Irving streets NW, an area that is perhaps the heart of new development in Columbia Heights. In 2016, City Paper reported on the challenges that many of the District\u2019s Latinx residents face in Ward 1 neighborhoods, where developers have snatched up older buildings that have fallen into disrepair with the goal of breaking rent control covenants and boosting profitability. The practice is common around D.C., but is particularly acute in the constellation of neighborhoods in and around Columbia Heights, which the Urban Institute says has experienced some of \u201cthe hottest housing boom[s]\u201d of the aughts.
\nRamos and her neighbors have watched their neighborhood change around them. They just didn\u2019t expect to become a casualty of it.
\nOver the last year, the building\u2019s tenants, represented by the Central American Resource Center (CARECEN) as well as Legal Aid, have engaged in mediation efforts with the building\u2019s owners in attempt to negotiate as low an increase as possible. Tenants who spoke with City Paper say they\u2019re caught between vacating their homes of two or three decades and facing rent increases close to double what they\u2019re paying now, at a time when many are past the point of their peak earning potential.
\nThe owners\u2019 hardship petition includes a proposed schedule for tenants\u2019 new rents. A roughly 60 percent increase would mean leaping, for example, from a $1096 monthly payment for a one-bedroom unit to $1,765. The average monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment across D.C., according to a March report by real estate website Zumper, is $2,150; across the D.C.. metropolitan region, it\u2019s about $1,500.
\n\u201cFor others, it\u2019s a lot harder,\u201d says Johanna Valenzuela, a tenant counselor at CARECEN. Some people \u201care not in a financial situation\u201d where they can sign on to a price hike of that magnitude. \u201cIf it came to that, some might say, \u2018Well, I\u2019m going to have to leave,\u2019\u201d Valenzuela says of her clients.
\nTheir frustrations are compounded by concerns about how the building has been maintained. Maira Sanchez, a 51-year-old who has lived in the building for 26 years, says that she\u2019ll be in the shower with shampoo in her hair when the water cuts out without warning. Fifty-seven-year-old Addisu Wondem, a 19-year resident of the building who immigrated from Ethiopia, says that he must sometimes fill up the water tank of his toilet by hand in order to flush it properly.
\nWondem, Sanchez, and Ramos simultaneously burst into laughter at the suggestion that they would ever take their trash out at night, when they say droves of rats cluster in the dumpsters on the property. All three have tackled pest infestations. All three say they have gone nights in the winter without heat. The Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs issued or approved 13 notices of housing code violations on April 22 alone, which include mandates to install smoke detectors in tenants\u2019 apartments, fix water leaks that have deteriorated walls inside the building, and repair holes in tenants\u2019 ceilings.
\nThe property\u2019s hardship petition, received by the Department of Housing and Community Development in May of 2018, lists the owner of 1466 Columbia Road NW as a limited liability corporation called New Ravenswood LLC, with an address courtesy of The Barac Co., a property management company that maintains thousands of units across the District.
\nThe listed authorized representative for New Ravenswood LLC, Anthony Bruno, is also working on behalf of Barac, according to the document.
\nBusiness registration filings with the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs show that the registered agent of New Ravenswood LLC is Barac, and public property records show that the registered owner of 1466 Columbia Road NW is Barac.
\nWhen City Paper reached out to Bruno for comment, he wrote in an email that \u201cnaturally\u2014it\u2019s not that cut and dry. Barac is not the owner that filed the [hardship petition]\u2014Barac is the Management Agent.\u201d Bruno then directed City Paper to local real estate attorney Richard Luchs, who \u201cis representing the owners,\u201d Bruno wrote. (Of Barac\u2019s fingerprints on the building\u2019s public property records, he says, \u201cThe Barac Co is the Registered Agent for many entities. This one included.\u201d) Luchs, who is perhaps most well known for successfully exploiting loopholes in the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act on behalf of property owners, did not respond to City Paper\u2019s request for comment.
\nWhile some tenants, like Sanchez, say they would consider taking a buyout if it proved enough to serve as a down payment for a house\u2014some of CARECEN\u2019s clients in the Park View and Mount Pleasant neighborhoods have taken buyouts ranging between $20,000 and $30,000\u2014Ramos sees her options as limited. She points out, for example, that she doesn\u2019t know if she\u2019ll live long enough to pay off a 30-year home loan.
\n\u201cYo no. Yo no, porque yo estoy vieja,\u201d Ramos says. Not for me, because I am old. So Ramos will stay at 1466 Columbia Road NW, fighting for as little of a rent increase as possible, because she doesn\u2019t know what else to do.<\/p>\n

Mary Bolton 202-390-1208<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

www.washingtoncitypaper.com\/news\/housing-complex\/article\/21065873\/rent-hikes-may-force-longtime-residents-out-of-a-columbia-heights-apartment-building Rent Hikes May Force Longtime Residents Out of a Columbia Heights Building The building’s owners want to raise rents by as much as 60 percent over four years. Darrow Montgomery In yet another Columbia Heights apartment complex that has long been home to immigrants and seniors, tenants wonder how long they have left in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-240","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-housingarchive"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=240"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}