The Last Holdouts
Their Neighbors Left, but the Martinez Women Stood Firm

By Sylvia Moreno
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 19, 2008

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.

The first thing that happened to this small, stalwart group is that it was not notified in summer 2004 by the property owner, NWJ Cos. of Philadelphia, that it was selling the St. Dennis. District law requires property owners to give tenants the right of first refusal to buy their building.

The second thing that happened was that the new owner, DBT Development of Washington, began offering tenants thousands of dollars to leave so the company could convert the building into condominiums.

DBT President David Tolson offered the Martinezes $30,000 and, eventually, $100,000, along with an apartment in a DBT-owned building in Columbia Heights at a comparable rent. They refused. By late January 2005, 20 families had left the St. Dennis, leaving the women behind in their third-floor apartment.

The story of the St. Dennis is not unlike that of other D.C. buildings in which landlords let rental properties deteriorate and force out or pay tenants to leave. What landlords did to get around the District's tenant-right-to-purchase law -- until the loophole was eliminated by the D.C. Council in 2006 -- was to sell less than 100 percent of their interest in a property.

Records show that Eric Kretschman, a principal in NWJ Cos., transferred 99 percent interest in the St. Dennis to Tolson and DBT Development in summer 2004 for $2.4 million. Kretschman had bought the building in 2002 for $1.2 million.

It wasn't until Tolson showed up, offering buyouts to tenants to leave and sign away their rights to return to the building, that the Martinezes realized they had a new landlord.

"We complained to everybody," Eva Aurora said, ticking off the D.C. Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs, local nonprofit housing groups and public officials. "They all knew what happened, and yet we couldn't get help."

Their refusal to move prompted Tolson to offer the building to the Martinezes in June 2005 for $5 million, "cash, as is," according to the contract -- a gesture by the landlord to comply with the tenant purchase law before gutting the building. A few days later, DBT gave the Martinezes a vacate notice and brought in demolition crews to work around their third-floor apartment. Still, the women refused to move.

Blake Biles, who along with other lawyers of the Arnold & Porter firm working pro bono with another low-income tenant association in Mount Pleasant, met the Martinezes in summer 2005. After hearing their story, he took them on as clients and that fall sued not only Tolson and DBT but also Kretschman and NWJ for violating the District's tenant purchase law.

"All of them failed to comply with the law. Kretschman sold it to Tolson and didn't offer it first to the tenants, and Tolson knew the tenants hadn't received a notice to buy," Biles said.

"We believed that we could show the [99 percent] transfer was a sham and that we'd be able to prove that to a jury that all the Kenyon Street tenants should have received an offer to sell," Biles said.

Tolson said that the "99-1 transaction" was legal under District law at the time and that his dealings with the tenants after he bought the building were proper. "They contested it, with representation," he said. "If they want to turn it into affordable housing, that's fine. There's always another project."

After two years of contentious pretrial negotiations, Tolson and the Martinezes reached a legal settlement in November. The three-member tenants association got an offer to buy the St. Dennis for $3.4 million, with a July 31 deadline to complete the purchase. As part of the settlement, the women were moved -- at Tolson's expense -- to an apartment three blocks away.

The Martinezes must find a developer to partner with them and put up the money to buy and renovate the building -- for a cost Biles estimated at $6 million to $6.5 million. Lawyers at Arnold & Porter have spoken to nonprofit housing development groups that specialize in building affordable housing and depend largely on District subsidies to keep their projects reasonably priced. But those groups view the St. Dennis project as daunting, Biles said.

The building needs a complete rehab, and the process for acquiring subsidies from the District's Housing Production Trust Fund -- dependent on real estate transfer taxes and projected to shrink this year and next because of a worsening economy -- is cumbersome. Time is running out.

Biles said the most practical avenue for the Martinezes to take is to partner with a commercial developer willing to create a mixed-income building of market-rate and affordable units. "That's better than nothing, and that's one of the options we're looking at because we have a clock ticking," he said.

Familiar with the St. Dennis and the Martinez family's determined quest, D.C. Council Member Jim Graham (D-Ward 1), who represents Mount Pleasant, said he is pressing city housing officials to consider a subsidy or low-interest loan for the developer who steps forward to help turn the St. Dennis into affordable housing. "This should be a very high priority," he said.

If the Martinez women don't meet the deadline, the legal settlement does give them the right to move back into Tolson's building once he renovates it, at their old rent of about $500. They would likely be the only low-income family in a high-priced condo complex, and that is not what they want.

"Our fight has been for affordable housing for low-income people," Eva Aurora said. "What we hope is the government and a developer will be on our side and help us."