The District government is suing 23 landlords with long histories of violating the city’s housing laws and providing miserable living conditions to vulnerable tenants, D.C. officials said Friday.
The District will ask the D.C. Superior Court to appoint receivers to collect rent from the owners of the most blighted and neglected properties and use the money to repair the housing-code violations. If the rent money is not enough to cover the cost of the repairs, the District will ask the court to order the landlord to fix the problems or face prison or fines.
“It’s immoral to have human beings living in these conditions, and it’s against the law,” Mayor Adrian Fenty said.
The 23 owners named in the suit were “the most egregious of the egregious,” Fenty said. The complaint cites more than 70 buildings and more than 470 apartment units. More landlords will be added to the lawsuit, Fenty said.
D.C. Councilman Jim Graham said some property owners were out to “make a fast buck” from “human misery.”
“Maybe if we put these guys in handcuffs, we will be able to bring true attention to the problem,” Graham said.
Interim Attorney General Peter Nickles said he got the idea for the receivership tactic several weeks ago after persistent plumbing problems at one building left 30 or 40 people homeless and a five-alarm fire at a Mount Pleasant apartment complex owned by one of the named landlords displaced hundreds of people.
The city’s penalties were not stiff enough to turn around the decades-old problems, and rogue landlords calculated the fines as a cost of doing business, officials said. Only five property owners have been taken to court in the last five or six years, allowing dishonest landlords to “nickel and dime” the city, Nickles said.
“Now we are naming names and naming properties,” Nickles said. “Maybe after all these years, they will get the message.”
