Fund Gives Tenants Little Relief

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Distress Aid Fails to Reach Many Decayed Buildings

A multi-million dollar fund to repair buildings in bad condition has sometimes been tapped to pay for expansive repairs at single-family homes and units in small row houses.

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LeBeau said many tenants had lived there for years and wanted to stay. Rents were low, with one tenant paying $300 a month. LeBeau said families decided to move because they feared that DCRA would not force the landlord to maintain the building or use the city fund for extensive repairs.

"Tenants don't know what the city has done with this fund," she said.

The District, with some of the strongest tenant-protection laws in the country, created the repair fund in 2001. When DCRA finds housing code violations and owners refuse to correct them, the agency decides whether to use the fund to make repairs. If work is done, DCRA imposes liens on properties or a special assessment on owners' tax bills, both of which would accrue interest until the money is repaid.

DCRA Director Linda Argo, appointed in mid-2007, acknowledged that the fund operated for years without formal guidelines. She called the agency's oversight of the fund "sloppy" and said DCRA has removed several administrators in charge of the fund. She also has strengthened the city's efforts to get property owners to repay the money.

But Argo said the city has to pick repair projects carefully so the money doesn't run out. "If we used the fund to repair every door or window we were asked to, the fund would be depleted in a matter of weeks or months," she said. "We are being more aggressive with this fund, but we can't blow the entire fund on just a few projects."

Most years, however, DCRA has allowed millions of dollars to sit untapped even as the city pumped an average of $5.3 million annually into the fund. In 2003, DCRA left $6.4 million unspent; in 2004, $3.5 million. The money piled up, rolling over year after year.

By 2005, records show, the fund topped $11.5 million. Then-Mayor Anthony A. Williams stepped in, redirecting $7.3 million to pay for new school buses and equipment for the police and fire departments, records show.

"There's a dramatic disconnect between the great need for these repairs and the amount of money that DCRA is spending," said council member Mary M. Cheh (D-Ward 3), who leads a committee trying to determine what went wrong and has demanded a full accounting of the fund. "This is nothing short of a mess."

The 48 apartment complexes most often cited for bad conditions, accumulating more than 16,400 housing code violations in recent years, have received a total of $210,000 in repairs since 2005, a Post analysis found. The city spent 13 times that amount on repairs to single-family homes, vacant properties and less-troubled apartments.

The building with the highest count of code violations in the city -- an 85-unit complex in Mount Pleasant that burned down in March -- received $56,500 worth of repairs from DCRA over three years, records show.

At a complex on Ontario Road NW owned by the same company as the Mount Pleasant building, NWJ Cos. of Philadelphia, advisory neighborhood commissioner Bryan Weaver said he and others spent eight months urging DCRA to use the repair fund.

The complex had been cited for hundreds of violations, with residents complaining that a retaining wall had collapsed, blocking the back entrance to one of the buildings; doors and windows were broken; and fire alarms and extinguishers were in short supply. Squatters were breaking in, bunking in stairwells and landings.