The Last Holdouts

Their Neighbors Left, but the Martinez Women Stood Firm

Seventy-three-year-old Eva Martinez and her two 30-something daughters have a contract to buy their apartment building in Northwest Washington. All they need is $3.4 million, and they need it by July 31.

Theirs is an unusual tale of tenant tenacity. For years, they fought illegal rent increases and landlords who let their four-story apartment building deteriorate into a hulk of crumbling bricks, loose windows, leaky ceilings, broken furnaces and rats.

And after every other tenant had left the St. Dennis, at 1636 Kenyon St. NW, the three women spent 2 1/2 years living there alone, the last holdouts amid boarded-up windows, unlit corridors, broken doors and gang graffiti.

That wasn't easy, but now the Martinezes face an even greater challenge: to turn the St. Dennis into affordable condominiums or co-ops for low- and moderate-income families in the middle of rapidly gentrifying Mount Pleasant.

"Many things have happened in this building, but this whole project is now in the hands of God," said Anabell Martinez, Eva Martinez's younger daughter. "We just need a developer to help us complete this project."

In the microcosm that is Mount Pleasant, the gentrification that is transforming many of Washington's inner-city neighborhoods is writ large. Among the slum landlord properties, rent-controlled buildings and shabby rowhouses stand stately Victorian homes and pricey condominiums. The neighborhood, once filled with Latin American immigrants in low-rent apartment buildings, has rowhouses that white professional couples are snapping up for more than $750,000. Tenants try to organize and get the support to convert their buildings into low-income cooperatives; developers push back and try to convert apartments into $300,000 to $400,000 condos.

The Martinezes are trying to maintain what the administration of Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) and housing advocates say they support.

"We talk a lot about diversity and about mixed-income neighborhoods as values in the city," said Bob Pohlman, executive director of the Coalition for Nonprofit Housing and Economic Development. "But if you simply allow the economic forces to run their course, you're not going to have that."

Eva Martinez, however, is a woman of enormous faith. She fled El Salvador's civil war in 1987 and like many Central Americans of that period, made her way illegally into the United States, crossing a treacherous stretch of Mexican desert. She worked her way as a housekeeper into obtaining a green card and legally brought her daughters, Eva Aurora and Anabell, to Washington in 1993. Since then, they have lived in the St. Dennis, and that's where they want to remain. When Eva and her daughters temporarily moved out of the St. Dennis in late November as part of a legal agreement, the elder Martinez intentionally left a picture of the Last Supper on the apartment wall.

Eva, who can't speak English and barely can read and write in Spanish, said she is sure that she will one day return to live in her old place, only it will be new again.

Her daughters aren't fluent in English, but Eva Aurora got a GED and Anabell graduated from Bell Multicultural High School and both earned degrees from Trinity College. Little by little over the past decade, they educated themselves on the intricacies of the District's landlord-tenant laws. They came to understand that as rent-paying tenants, they had rights. And as an official tenants association, they were a legal force to contend with.

So they organized. Eva Martinez became president; Eva Aurora, vice-president; and Anabell, treasurer of the 1636 Kenyon St. Tenants Association.