Told to Go, She Made a Stand

Md. Woman Mounted a Campaign to Stave Off Eviction Over Late Rent

After Michelle Armstead's apartment complex said renovations would prompt evictions, she rallied others affected and enlisted official help. (By Lois Raimondo -- The Washington Post)

When Michelle Armstead learned in early November that she and some of her neighbors were being thrown out of their Burtonsville apartment complex because they had paid their rents late, she got angry.

"I'm not good enough to live here anymore -- and I've lived here for 10 years?" she wondered. She resolved to make herself heard so that her countdown this evening wouldn't be to eviction.

Armstead's ruckus-raising is a lesson in individual initiative and why local politics matters.

She turned early to Del. Herman L. Taylor II (D-Montgomery), for whom she had handed out campaign literature a couple of times in 2002. "These people have done things wrong," Taylor said, referring to Armstead and her neighbors and their spotted history of rent payment. "But they need to be treated very carefully. They're the voiceless in our society."

Not Armstead. As she wrote in a flier she distributed to her neighbors: "Let's not sit back and let the powers that be tell us when we have to leave our homes. . . . Don't let them take away our power!!!!"

A single woman in her late thirties, Armstead works in Silver Spring as a physician scheduler for a national health maintenance organization. She takes home a little more than $2,000 a month, most of which goes toward her $800 rent and $486 car payment, she said.

With her budget as tight as it is, unexpected expenses or dips in income create what she called a "spiraling, snowballing effect" that is difficult to overcome.

In early 2004, she spent three months on disability, receiving 60 percent of her salary, and had to borrow money to forestall eviction. She acknowledges that she has been late on her rent payments many times since then, sometimes triggering eviction notices but always paying in full. "It's really hard to get caught up," she said.

Her complex, Castlegate Apartment Homes, was acquired in December 2003 by Fairfield Residential LLC of San Diego, which owns about 3,000 rental units in Montgomery County. Castlegate's 376 garden apartments are laid out in several clusters of low-rise buildings along Castle Boulevard in the easternmost part of Montgomery.

Police say the complex and others nearby have long had crime problems: robberies, drug dealing, thugs in the parking lot. One day last year, while walking her sheltie in a nearby park, Armstead saw police investigating the discovery of a body.

Still, she appreciates the tree-filled view from her apartment and likes several of her neighbors. So when she found a letter taped to her door Nov. 1 saying she must vacate by midnight Dec. 31 so her apartment could be renovated, she immediately applied for a transfer to a renovated unit. Castlegate denied her request.

A property manager told her the reason was her history of late payments and said more than a dozen other tenants were in the same position.