D.C. officials told tenants Saturday the city is making progress on addressing charges of landlord abuses and dangerous living conditions, but some who attended the meeting at St. Aloysius Church said they did not find the gathering helpful.
“Instead of sending five inspectors, we’ll shortly have the ability to send one,” said Don Masoero, chief building inspector for the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs. “It’s an efficiency issue.”
In six to eight months, he said, you’re “clearly going to see a difference in what DCRA’s doing. I’m asking [you] to bear with us.”
Johana Shreve, the city’s chief tenant advocate, said heating issues would crop up before then for many tenants.
“We do not want to see tenants victimized … we do not want to see families in the cold during the upcoming season,” she said.
Wilson Reynolds, director of constituent services in the office of Ward 1 Councilmember Jim Graham, said Graham will introduce an “omnibus tenant protection bill” at the council’s Nov. 18 meeting.
The bill includes provisions that would allow individuals to file suits against their landlords, and would require regular inspections of all buildings for habitation and sanitation reasons, he said.
“Enough is enough — the problems are monumental. Now we’re trying to get a deal,” Reynolds said.
Though officials said they were taking steps to help tenants in the District, Tanya Hall said the meeting was not useful for her. As a resident of Kelly Miller, a public housing unit near Howard University Hospital, Hall said the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs representatives at the meeting referred her to the District’s Housing Authority — so her questions were still unanswered.
“They’re telling me they can’t do anything. What do we do?” she said. “I’m trying to find out myself — what is my next step?”
Laquasha Mosley, also of Kelly Miller, was similarly unsure about who to contact with grievances, but added that the DCRA official who invited her to the meeting was helpful.
“We’re all in this together,” she said. “I do think it’s a good thing, because the DCRA rep said she would come and inspect [the property]. They have the power to get things done.”
