A Failure in Enforcement

Gallery

A Crumbling Home

At a troubled Southeast apartment complex, tenants have reported no heat or gas, a falling ceiling, cracked walls, mice and a defective water heater in recent years. The owner says he's made repairs in recent months, but wants tenants to leave so that he can sell the building.

» LAUNCH PHOTO GALLERY

While one arm of DCRA failed to enforce housing codes, another routinely granted landlords permission to convert newly emptied buildings to condominiums. The law requires that tenants vote to approve condominiums and that developers pay a conversion fee to help uprooted tenants: 5 percent of the sales price of every new unit. But vacant buildings are exempt.

Records show DCRA regularly approved "vacancy exemptions" without requiring inspectors to go inside newly emptied buildings to look for signs that tenants had been forced out. Of 144 case files produced by DCRA, just 35 show interior inspections. Inspectors simply signed off on dozens of applications after claiming they couldn't get inside buildings because the owners had locked the doors.

In other cases, it would have been impossible for inspectors to determine what conditions had been like for tenants because the landlords -- even before receiving exemptions -- had launched wholesale renovations to prepare for condominiums.

Lauren Pair, who has overseen vacancy exemptions since August 2006, also said she does not research building code violations before approving exemptions because the law does not give her authority to reject an application on those grounds.

She and others said the law governing exemptions is vague. On the application, landlords are required to provide an explanation of how buildings became vacant, which the city calls a "self-certifying process."

"The law does not give the authority to challenge the information that we get from a landlord," said Keith Anderson, a rental property program specialist. "Unless we have knowledge about a property, we're basically bound to take their explanation."

But a review of more than 200 vacancy exemption applications shows that some landlords provided little or no explanation. DCRA approved the exemptions with few questions.

Pair said she has rejected some applications for "technical reasons," which were often quickly resolved, but has held up only one application in recent years. It was for a building on Vernon Street NW, where every fled after a late night fire in 2006. Investigators said the fire was deliberately set but have not determined who was responsible.

DCRA has overlooked tenants in other ways, too.

The law requires the city to provide displaced families with funds collected from the condominium conversion fee. But in the past three years, the exemptions have saved landlords $16 million in fees.

DCRA has collected $2.4 million since 2004 from landlords who did not have exemptions. But even then, few tenants benefited -- less than 2 percent of the money has been spent on housing assistance. The rest has been sitting untapped, officials said, even as thousands of families search for affordable housing. The fund was recently transferred to the Office of the Tenant Advocate.

Last October, city officials transferred oversight of vacancy exemptions and rental housing from DCRA to the Department of Housing and Community Development, saying the move would put more focus on the preservation of affordable housing.

The D.C. Council has for more than a year raised questions about the exemptions. It approved a measure from Graham in 2006 to repeal the provision, but the repeal was put on an emergency hold when developers raised concerns, and council members are expected to address the issue again in the coming months. Fenty also proposed late last year that landlords with outstanding code violations be barred from converting their properties to condominiums.

But housing advocates say the mayor must also create a workable system of inspections and enforcement, including regular criminal referrals.

"The District has good laws, but it's a question of how they get enforced," said Joel Cohn, legislative director with the Office of the Tenant Advocate. "Unless you have someone who is actually paying attention, who knows the laws and is willing to prosecute, then the best laws in the world are pretty useless."

Staff researcher Meg Smith contributed to this report.