Told to Go, She Made a Stand
Md. Woman Mounted a Campaign to Stave Off Eviction Over Late Rent

By Cameron W. Barr
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 31, 2005

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.

Armstead began to consider where she could go and started putting a few things in boxes. She also began calling county housing officials and her elected representatives to find out what she and her neighbors could do to stay at Castlegate. Taylor offered to hold a town hall meeting for tenants in late November.

To contact as many of her neighbors as possible, Armstead knocked on doors and put fliers on windshields, because the ones she put up in stairwells disappeared. She used the Internet to learn how to write a news release to draw media coverage of the meeting.

Fairfield's vice president of redevelopment, Phillip Pitney, said the company has spent more than $6 million on renovations and is making existing tenants apply for renovated apartments in order to "improve the quality of an asset, from an investor's standpoint, and to improve the quality of life there, from the residents' standpoint."

He estimated that 90 percent of residents who wanted to stay were being accommodated in renovated apartments and that the rest were being screened out because they had violated provisions of their leases or because of criminal records. He declined to comment on Armstead's campaign against the evictions.

Armstead said she understands that Fairfield is seeking to renew the property. "I definitely agree it was needed, but innocent people, hardworking people, got caught up in the process," she said.

The Disabled and the Poor

Nearly 20 tenants went to Taylor's town hall meeting; many told their stories to the elected officials and county workers in attendance. One tenant, Victor Hill, has lived in the complex for 25 years. He has cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair. He said he had no place to go.

Taylor said he considered the group a microcosm of the underclass. It included many low-wage workers, some disabled, some on public assistance -- people who are really getting beaten up, he said. He and Montgomery County Council member Marilyn Praisner (D-Eastern County), who also attended, agreed to arrange a meeting with Fairfield executives.

In Taylor, the tenants had an especially receptive listener. He grew up living on food stamps, and his sister and father are disabled.

As he left the meeting, Taylor called a Fairfield executive on his cell phone. It was about 9:30 in the evening. He was emotional, even a little angry. "I told her to get in gear and start helping to arrange a meeting," he said. "And she did it."

Praisner convened the meeting Dec. 8. Fairfield explained its plans for renovating the property and accommodating the majority of its tenants as it did so. Its representatives presented detailed information about the rental history of Armstead and other tenants, including three who were evicted for failure to pay rent and eight who had paid rent late three or more times in the previous 12 months. Some had outstanding balances.

Praisner, Taylor and county housing officials asked the company to reconsider its practice of using poor rental history as a reason to force out tenants displaced by the renovation, instead of allowing them to transfer to another unit. The company said it would respond quickly, but the days began to pass.

As mid-December approached, Armstead and other tenants waited for word from the county or Castlegate. Some gave up and moved out. Armstead began to wonder what was going on.

Joe Giloley, chief of the county's Division of Housing and Code Enforcement, used the wait to look into an agreement that Fairfield and county officials signed when the company bought the property. Giloley concluded that the document appeared to prohibit the company from using rental history as a reason to deny a transfer to a tenant.

On Dec. 16, he faxed a letter to Fairfield's lawyer laying out the county's position and naming 11 tenants who deserved a transfer instead of eviction.

For the first time, Armstead began to believe she would win.

A Resolution

In an interview, Fairfield's Pitney said that the company was abiding by the agreement with the county but that the two parties had "clarified" their understanding of it.

At least five of the 11 tenants on Giloley's list are transferring to renovated apartments, Pitney said; the others are in discussions with Fairfield or are being denied apartments because of violations of the terms of their leases.

He said that several tenants not on the list will benefit from the new understanding of the rental agreement as the company completes its renovation, but he could not say how many.

In the days since Armstead learned of Giloley's letter, her sense of victory has turned bittersweet. Castlegate is offering her a lease for another apartment -- but only after she pays three months' rent on time.

Also, Castlegate is proposing to charge her $1,008 for the same type of apartment that she now rents for $800, and an additional increase seems likely if the lease materializes after her three months of probation.

Sitting in her apartment, with its empty shelves and full packing boxes, Armstead contemplated the terms of the offer. "It just feels like I'm being set up somehow," she said. But she is relieved that she and the others won't be evicted on New Year's Eve.

Her neighbors are grateful for her intervention.

"All of a sudden, it's great," said Ann Schwind, who planned to move in with family and send her college-age daughter to stay with friends. "Now we get to stay in a place we like with the people we like, with our dollar store and our dog, right across the street from the swimming pool."

Armstead "helped us a lot," said Hill, her disabled neighbor. "But I always felt they can't kick me out -- they can't do that to a handicapped guy."