A Fairfax County landlord accused of running a boarding house in unsafe and overcrowded conditions was at the same time collecting public housing subsidies to operate the dwelling, according to court records and county officials.
Ibrahim Sh-Ibrahim was ensnared earlier this year in a Fairfax County strike team’s broad crackdown on building code violations and residential overcrowding, though he was cited as early as 2006 for packing too manytenants into the
Adonis Court town house in Alexandria.
A February inspection found that Sh-Ibrahim was allowing “at least two families” to live there, with illegal locks on bedrooms doors, unsafe basement living space and electrical hazards, according to an documents filed at the Fairfax County Circuit Court. Zoning officials filed a civil suit against him in April.
“The pictorial evidence and other things that I saw — you guess how heavily and intensely the house is being used,” said Lee District Supervisor Jeff McKay, whose district encompasses the house. “It is definitely a case of overcrowding.”
Sh-Ibrahim remains part of the Housing Choice Voucher Program, formerly called Section 8, in which landlords who agree to cut rents for low-income tenants in the program are paid back through federal funds administered by the county, according to Department of Housing and Community Development spokeswoman Kristina Norvell.
Sh-Ibrahim was being reimbursed for a single family living at the unit, Norvell said, a subsidy that will run out when the family moves out or by the end of June.
“We take this case very seriously,” she said.
Attempts to reach Sh-Ibrahim, whose phone number is not listed, were not successful Thursday.
The case is especially troubling due to the extensive waiting list for other residents to get on the Housing Choice Voucher Program, a backlog that has grown to 7,326 households. There are 3,179 active vouchers in Fairfax, Norvell said.
The situation also raises questions of whether county agencies are communicating adequately with each other to ensure chronic violators aren’t kept on public subsidies. McKay said he believes housing officials mostly do a good job vetting applicants.
“You are always going to have some egregious examples of people who take advantage of the system, and when we find those people, we need to do a better job of quickly prosecuting them and taking their vouchers,” he said. “In this case, this really isn’t anyone’s fault other than the left hand of government not knowing what the right hand is doing.”
