Gaithersburg families unsure of future after losing their homes three months ago

SARAH Y. KIM DCist/WAMU

When his condo exploded, Marc Saint-Jour could see the smoke from his law firm’s office window.

Just seconds before, he’d been on the phone with his wife. She was in their home at Potomac Oaks Condominium with their sevenmonth old baby, and had just called him twice: the first time, to ask him if he had felt an earthquake, the second time to tell him their house was on fire. As Saint-Jour was telling her to get out, the call ended abruptly.

He rushed out of the office and to the condominium, or what was left of it. There were fire trucks everywhere.

“As I got closer, I realized there’s no way, by the looks of it, that my wife and my daughter could have possibly got out of there alive,” Saint-Jour said. He was about to run in when his wife appeared.

“She’s embracing me and hugging me and telling me the neighbors are dead. There’s no way they made it. We turn around and there goes a neighbor limping, covered in ash,” Saint-Jour said. “It was a traumatic event.”

The explosion that destroyed Potomac Oaks Condominium in Gaithersburg on Nov. 16 left at least 14 people injured and one person dead. Montgomery County police said the explosion was set by a resident who made statements that

“were indicative of intentions of suicide,” and that they believe he used accelerants to start the fire.

The explosion also displaced 25 families.

While continuing to grapple with the trauma of that day, Saint-Jour and many of his neighbors said they have had trouble getting aid from Montgomery County and the City of Gaithersburg to find stable housing. In interviews, residents told DCist/WAMU that they don’t know where to turn for help, and they fear becoming destitute.

“Every turn I make is a dead end,” Saint-Jour said. He took weeks off work to find housing, and his family lived for months off of a GoFundMe.

The lack of affordable housing in Montgomery County is also part of the problem. Residents said the condo was one of the few affordable options they had in the area, and for some, finding a place to rent near their offices or their childrens’ school simply isn’t an option. A few people have found apartments but can’t keep up with the rent payments, or are counting on insurance that might expire before the condo is rebuilt. Others have been living in hotels or staying with family and friends. Those who have nowhere else to go are staying at the county’s homeless shelters.

Tiffany Kelly, a community advocate who’s been helping the displaced families, said the county needs to be providing more individualized assistance.

“The services were very sparse. They weren’t very coordinated. And most of all, they weren’t equitable,” she said.

Residents at Potomac Oaks credit Kelly with pressuring the county to provide resources. She got involved a couple of weeks after the explosion, after seeing a social media post from one of the residents who said they needed clothing.

Soon she learned that residents weren’t always getting the money the county said it had distributed. Families told her they were getting about $1,500 – about half of what county officials told Kelly they were providing at the time, she said.

“If they would have just taken a moment to speak to these people, they would have heard the same thing that I had heard,” Kelly said.

The county’s Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), which is responsible for helping the residents find housing and shelter, told DCist/WAMU that it has served 23 of the 25 displaced families (two declined assistance). Each of the 23 families is getting between $6,000 and $8,000 from a community fund administered by Montgomery Housing Partnerships, depending on the family’s size, insurance status, and the level of damage to their home.

DHHS said the community fund raised $138,000 as of Jan. 19 and is now closed. The department said families have now received all of those funds — first on Nov. 22 and then on Dec. 8 — and received a final disbursement in early February. In addition to money from the community fund, DHHS said each family also got approximately $1,000 from other nonprofits and about $500 to $800 from Red Cross for immediate needs like clothing.

Residents and advocates like Kelly aren’t the only ones sounding the alarm — the county itself acknowledges it would ideally be providing more help to displaced families.

DHHS has been struggling with staffing and recruiting, said Amanda Harris, chief of services to end and prevent homelessness at the department. Administering the county’s Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ERAP) — set up to help people behind on rent due to the COVID-19 pandemic — has taken up much of staff’s time, Harris said. Pre-pandemic, the department offered more “holistic case management.”

“It wasn’t just cutting checks to people. It was really identifying what their needs were, working with them,” Harris told DCist/WAMU. “We simply do not have the capacity to do that right now. We hope that once ERAP is complete and we have exhausted all our resources there that we can get back to a place where we can provide a different level of service.”

For weeks, the county covered expenses for a room at a Comfort Inn for many of the displaced families, but by early January that flow of money had stopped. (Originally, the county gave families until early December to move out but gave an extension due to demand).

Liz Zhuang, a state clerk, lived at the Comfort Inn with her husband and two children until early January. When they learned they could no longer stay in the hotel shelter, they began to search for apartments in the area. But the more they looked, the more expensive the apartments seemed to get.

Her family eventually got an apartment, but she said it’s not in good condition. Rent is about $2,000 a month, which exceeds their budget.

“The first day we move in, the door is loose, the windows will not open,” she said. “Mice run over, around my feet. We haven’t bought furniture, so we sleep on the floor.”

On top of rent, Zhuang still has to pay $450 a month in condo fees for her destroyed home. The Potomac Oaks Condominium Association wrote in a Jan. 13 email to residents that income from the fees is “essential” to funding operational expenses, as well as funding reserves and special assessment accounts.

To pay for these expenses, Zhuang tried to get help from the county and city. It was a stressful process: She said the social workers she spoke with were “rude” and initially seemed reluctant to help. Zhuang said she was told she didn’t get homeowners insurance so she couldn’t depend on the county to pay all her fees. (Her homeowners policy had expired just before the explosion.)

“At least at the beginning you should help us get in the right direction,” she said. “We lost everything. Nothing left.”

Harris said all DHHS social workers are trained on empathetic, trauma-informed care and that she would encourage residents who had negative experiences to reach out.

After several weeks of back and forth, Zhuang said the city of Gaithersburg is now covering three months of her rent and that the county is covering one month. She’s hopeful that the aid will help her get back on her feet. That rent assistance comes in addition to about $7,000 Zhuang said she got in aid, divided over three payments.

Harris said that the county cannot readily give out housing vouchers — which pay a majority of a recipient’s rent — to those affected by the explosion, who aren’t necessarily low income enough to qualify.

However, as WTOP reported in January, families that might not otherwise qualify for a voucher could do so in the case of a fire, flood, or natural disaster, provided that they get signed certification from the county executive’s office. That criteria, outlined in the Housing Voucher Administrative Plan’s Section

6, Chapter 4, was updated in July. WTOP reported that earlier criteria did not specify that families could qualify for a “project based housing voucher” in case of a disaster, and that DHHS was not initially aware that the criteria had changed. (DHHS and the Housing Opportunities Commission (HOC) have since worked on getting vouchers for residents. The county executive’s office confirmed it sent a letter in late January to HOC authorizing the use of vouchers.)

Still, Harris said demand for vouchers is high, and has only grown since the pandemic began. She estimates that there are currently 30,000 people on the county’s waitlist for housing vouchers and there is not enough funding for the majority of applicants.

Traci DiMartini, a Potomac Oaks resident for nearly two decades, described her neighbors as making up an ethnically diverse, “very middle-income community.” Their neighborhood, she said, is a far cry from wealthier parts of the city with “gorgeous, multimillion dollar homes.”

As a single parent, DiMartini said she “could never really afford anything else” in Gaithersburg. Her daughter, who’s now in college, had lived in the condo since she was six months old.

She said county and city leaders have failed to show up for residents.

“There’s a complete absence of empathy, compassion, and basic common sense,” DiMartini told DCist/WAMU in January. The entire situation, she wrote in a Feb. 14 email, remains “a huge F.U.” to residents.

DiMartini spent the first few weeks after the explosion staying with friends in the area. Eventually she found a onebedroom apartment, which her insurance will cover for about a year. She said she is luckier than many of her neighbors, and she gets “good income” as chief human capital officer at the U.S. General Services Administration.

Still, DiMartini worries a lot about next year, when she may no longer be able to count on her insurance and may have to start paying rent out of pocket: $2,500 a month.

“There is no affordable housing in this county,” she said. “I just don’t see how a normal, average income family can survive in this county.”

There’s also her daughter’s college tuition to juggle, and a “never-ending list” of things to replace: her bed, her couch, her clothes, her personal computer. Her sleep apnea machine, which cost about $1,200.

DiMartini was unable to retrieve any possessions that might have made it through the explosion — the condominium association restricted many residents from going back, saying it was unsafe.

Recently, she and her daughter passed by the ruins. The building was “crumbling before their eyes.” Much of their unit was completely destroyed, but some parts were still recognizable.

“My daughter said it’s like you’re looking into a doll house,” DiMartini said. “There’s no facade, you can just see into our bedrooms.”

Adding onto her list of expenses, DiMartini has to pay monthly condo fees and a mortgage for her destroyed home. “I’m still paying $440 a month for nothing,” DiMartini said. There’s a lack of empathy, she said, from the Potomac Oaks Condominium Association.

“The attitude is basically: we’re really sorry it happened, but you’re still members of the community, so you still have to pay, you’re paying to help rebuild,” DiMartini said. “I think everyone needs to take a step back.”

The association told residents in an email on Jan. 13 that the demolition of the condo is tentatively scheduled for mid- to late- February. On Feb. 14, the condo association sent a followup email to residents, saying that the city of Gaithersburg indicated that the association would receive permits for demolition within two weeks, and that a demolition date is forthcoming.

DiMartini said she’s trying to focus on the positives. She feels lucky to be alive. She lived across the hall from the man police said set off the explosion. That morning, she happened to be working at her office. The dining room, where she would usually work remotely, no longer exists.

Material things can be replaced, she said. But some things can’t, like baby pictures.

“I lost everything,” DiMartini said. “As my daughter said, that was the only home she’s ever known. We weathered COVID in that home. We celebrated her high school graduation, her confirmation, sleepovers.”

She hopes that this misfortune will turn people’s attention to what she said have long been issues in the county: the lack of affordable housing, and a shortage of government resources for people in need. There’s “a definite division,” she said, of haves and have nots. If the explosion had happened in a “bougie neighborhood,” DiMartini suspects the response from county and city leaders may have been more swift.

“We still have a lot of need and there’s a lot of people in this county and in this area that are not financially affluent,” DiMartini said. “They deserve a voice and they deserve to live a good life in this area without paying $2,500 a month rent for a one bedroom.”

Marc Saint-Jour spent weeks trying to find an affordable place to live, but the apartments exceeded his budget. Their condo, a wedding gift from his parents, had been “a really good deal.”

“We had it made,” Saint-Jour said. “It just turns out that it ended up burning down.”

Saint-Jour said it’s been a “dark time” for him and his family. “[My daughter is] seven months, but I can see she knows that she’s not home,” he said.

Since the explosion, Saint-Jour has been staying in hotels. He had planned to cover his expenses using an $18,000 insurance policy. But he wound up spending thousands of dollars out of pocket on hotel fees due to a misunderstanding with his claims specialist.

Initially, he said, trying to get help from the county felt like “begging for something that you’re not entitled to,” and the county was largely unresponsive until after Tiffany Kelly advocated for him.

After a “slow” process, Saint-Jour recently got a housing voucher. He is expecting to move into his new apartment in March and has since returned to work.

He said there are neighbors who’ve been worse off. One neighbor had to dig her two small children out of the rubble while injured, just after a TV shattered over her, he said. Later, they had to go to a homeless shelter. They are still awaiting their voucher.

Still, he pictures what his wife went through on Nov. 16, while he was rushing home from the office. Carrying her baby, she ran out, as her husband had just told her to. Her neighbor’s door was gone. Half of the building was gone. Black smoke hung in the stairwell, so she ran to a balcony, but the balcony wasn’t there – it had fallen away from the building and lay in crumbles below. On the ground, people yelled to her: “throw the baby.” She hesitated. All she could see was smoke and debris. “Before you jump,” someone said, “try to go downstairs.” She took the neighbor’s advice, and as she made it to the stairs, a second explosion shook the building.

She believed her neighbors were dead when she saw her husband frantically searching for her that morning outside their home.

“There’s no way you go through something like that and you’re okay,” he said.

This story was originally published by DCist/WAMU.