Path of Lease Resistance As the pandemic drags on, tenants and housing advocates report hostile confrontations with property managers over unpaid rent.
Jewel Burgess, Park 7 resident
By Morgan Baskin Photographs by Darrow Montgomery
T
he first time she remembers protesting in the region, about 10 years ago, Tara Maxwell was outside the Virginia home of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. His wife Virginia, the target of Maxwell’s ire that day, is a prominent right-wing lobbyist and current adviser to President Donald Trump’s administration. “If I can protest at Clarence Thomas’ house, I can protest at anybody’s house,” Maxwell says dryly. “It doesn't bother me.” So when Maxwell, an independent contractor with experience in law enforcement and political consulting, moved into the Park 7 Apartments on Minnesota Avenue NE last August, she was not afraid to raise hell over problems with her living conditions. To start, she says, there was the persistent gas leak from her stove. Then there were the cockroach-infested washing machine and dryer, and the roaches she’d find scaling the walls of her building’s hallways. Little did she know that Park 7––which opened in 2014––was notorious among housing advocates for its poor management, with maintenance requests of-
ten languishing for months without resolution. “This is my home,” Maxwell says. “I shouldn't have to feel, you know, oppressed and bullied and harassed, just to be able to live here. And I should be able to have decent amenities and maintenance repairs. I shouldn't have to fight and argue for that.” Months after Maxwell moved in, D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine announced that Park 7 Residential LP, a Maryland-based corporation owned by prominent local developer Chris Donatelli, would refund nearly half a million dollars to 470 current and former tenants of the building who were improperly charged for water use, which had falsely been marketed as included in rent. (Neither Donatelli nor a spokesperson for Park 7 responded to City Paper’s emailed requests for comment. When City Paper called Donatelli, he cited a conflicting meeting and said he would call this reporter back. He did not do so before press time.) Of the 377 units at Park 7, 362 are affordable, or rented below market rate, and many of the tenants are low-income workers, seniors, and people with disabilities. By June, when it was clear that the economic effects of the pandemic were far from over, Maxwell notified Park 7 Residential via email that she was going on a rent strike and would withhold rent payments. Shortly thereafter, she
8 august 21, 2020 washingtoncitypaper.com
began surveying her building to see if anyone else would join her. She’s not the only one–– Stephanie Bastek, a DC Tenants Union board member who has been organizing Park 7 tenants for three years, estimates that 28 families are on rent strike, and that 94 have signed onto a letter demanding rent forgiveness. Meanwhile, as conditions at Park 7 continued to deteriorate this spring, one of Donatelli’s other property companies received between $150,000 and $300,000 in a Paycheck Protection Program loan meant as pandemic relief, public records show. “What's funny to me is that the argument all these landlords are making when they're pressuring tenants and assigning payment plans is, ‘We need your money to pay management, we need your money to make sure that, like, the building runs smoothly,” Bastek says. “And that seems like a total lie.” Maxwell began seeing tweets from the DCTU as it organized rent strikes across the city and reached out to the group, not realizing initially that it was already working with Park 7 tenants. In August, she linked up with the DCTU to canvas one of Donatelli’s other, more well-maintained properties: Highland Park in Columbia Heights, a mixed-use complex located above the neighborhood’s Metro stop, where studio apartments rent for about $1,900
a month and a two-bedroom can run $4,200. COVID-19 has affirmed what Maxwell already believed to be true about the city in general, and her apartment in particular: That living in a building of lower-income residents makes them less visible, and their concerns less acute, to people in positions of power than they would have been if they had more resources. The canvassing group, which included a resident of Highland Park and two from Park 7, arrived at the building around 4 p.m. on Aug. 12, and spent about an hour and a half knocking on doors. They visited 15 apartments, handing out fliers that read, “Your landlord discriminates.” “At Park 7, Donatelli has failed to maintain sanitation [standards] under COVID, consistently intimidates tenants organizing, and refuses to pay for extermination. Children have nowhere to play but by the trash,” the flyer continued. Maxwell thought the afternoon was going pretty well. Most of the Highland Park tenants who answered their doors politely took the fliers, and several asked questions about the conditions at Park 7. Even though none asked her to leave or expressed annoyance, Maxwell says around 5:30 p.m., Jason Sadlack, one of the managers of the property, stopped the organizers in a hallway and told them to leave. When they didn’t, he asked a colleague to call the
