By Sue Anne Pressley Montes
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 14, 2006

The District has agreed to pay $700,000 to settle a civil rights suit filed by tenants who said they were forced to move from largely Hispanic neighborhoods in Columbia Heights and Mount Pleasant after the city unfairly condemned their apartment buildings.

The 24 tenants alleged that the District used "the guise of code enforcement" to threaten them or evict them, some without prior notice or relocation assistance, according to the Washington Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs. The committee, which assisted the tenants, announced the Nov. 30 settlement yesterday.

"This is very significant because it sends a message that a group of individuals that most people would think of as not having a great deal of power because they have low income and limited English proficiency were able to stand up to the government when they thought they were being treated unfairly," said Isabelle Thabault, director of the committee's Fair Housing Project.

District officials said they were pleased with the settlement. "The parties worked diligently to come up with the settlement agreement, and we are pleased with the terms," said Traci Hughes, a spokeswoman for the D.C. attorney general's office.

In 2000, the city launched the Hot Properties Initiative, intended to enforce housing codes and identify buildings in disrepair. The program identified 75 buildings scattered across the city, Thabault said, but a pared-down list ended up targeting 27 buildings in predominantly Hispanic neighborhoods.

Some tenants came home from work to find eviction notices on their doors. One building, at 1512 Park Rd. NW, was closed in January 2001 with three hours' notice, Thabault said. The building later was bought by a developer and converted into four condominiums, priced at $400,000 each, she said.

A complaint against the city was filed in U.S. District Court in 2001, and in April 2004, a jury found that some of the Hispanic residents had been discriminated against. The District appealed, and a new trial was ordered this year, but the settlement eliminates the need for another trial.

One of the plaintiffs, Isabel Moreno, said he had arrived home from work one day to find an eviction notice on his building at 2922 Sherman Ave. NW. "We were extraordinarily surprised," Moreno, 66, a machinist born in El Salvador, said yesterday through an interpreter. "We were extraordinarily worried about what we would do."

But the tenants stuck to their cause, he said. "With this settlement," he said, "we are now able to see the light we have been hoping to see for a very long time."