And taxpayers are subsidizing the company.
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A bed at G Street Apartments
Warren Branham looked at his 38-year-old brother lying on a hospital bed at the decrepit G Street Apartments last Friday. “He’s been hospitalized twice because of the ventilation,” Branham said. Steps away, their refrigerator was dead—room-temperature inside. The apartment smelled like mold and thousands of decaying cockroaches. His brother suffered a stroke as a baby and seizures as a child, Branham explained.
Twenty-four hours later, Branham’s brother was rushed to the hospital a third time. Again, Branham blamed the ventilation. “My baby is dying,” his mother sobbed over the phone from a waiting room at Washington Hospital Center. She said doctors had resuscitated him four times, but he was flatlining. He was dead within two hours.
And yet, freshly refurbished first-floor units stand empty at G Street Apartments. Branham and his family were stuck on the second floor, forcing Branham to carry his brother up and down stairs to get to doctor appointments. But tenants say the landlord has explained that these units are reserved for new, market-rent residents.
At least six other units are vacant and unsecured. Inside they are smeared with feces, littered with condoms. In one unit there’s a burn mark on the carpet. “I put out a fire there about three months ago,” says Timothy Harper, a former maintenance worker.
Harper says he kept G Street Apartments nice back when he took care of them. But his mandate gradually changed. For him, the most stunning moment came when the boiler broke. He was down in the basement with his boss, Todd Fulmer. A contractor explained the options. “The contractor said, ‘I can put a brand new boiler in here and save you $5,000 over rebuilding this one completely, and have it fixed in a week,’” Harper recalls. “Then Todd said, ‘No. Just rebuild it.’” This process would take months.
Which meant residents there didn’t have heat beyond ineffective space heaters for the winter of 2015. Some of them still don’t have heat. “My oven is what I use to heat my home,” says Karen Hamilton. “And I have a 6-year-old daughter.”
This is not an isolated story. Mold, vermin, broken refrigerators and toilets, children and elderly living without heat and air conditioning, units open to vagrants no matter how many times tenants complain—these are standard conditions at buildings owned by Sanford Capital, the company that owns G Street Apartments and at least 16 other D.C. properties, amounting to hundreds of units across the city.
Sanford Capital has been buying apartment complexes that are home to the city’s working poor for more than a decade. In extensive reporting on the company’s practices, City Paper found that Sanford employs a systematic strategy for allowing buildings to become so squalid that residents are forced to leave. The company also files for evictions in bulk.
In some cases, Sanford has rushed to replace the modest rents of the working poor with those of very low-income people who hold government-issued vouchers set at similar or higher rates—the District footing the bulk of the rent bill and ensuring a guaranteed stream of revenue for the company. In other cases, when a property is more valuable to a future developer vacant, Sanford has left buildings with only a handful of tenants who can’t or won’t move. And at Tivoli Gardens—a complex predominantly occupied by Spanish speakers, some of whom pay more than $1,300 a month for one-bedroom apartments—Sanford keeps occupancy high while letting the property rot. Not a single outer door at Tivoli Gardens locks.
Meanwhile, an alphabet soup of city government agencies, nonprofits, and the D.C. courts have become Sanford Capital’s de facto babysitters. The company makes few repairs on its properties unless fined or ordered to do so. And even then, the repairs often break within days or weeks.
“Any Sanford property—you just walk into it and you know what it’s going to look like,” says Caroline Hennessy, tenant services coordinator at Housing Counseling Services, a D.C. advocacy organization funded in part by local and federal dollars. She has worked with tenants at five different Sanford properties, while her organization’s staff as a whole has worked on at least eight over the years.
According to D.C. Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs (DCRA), Sanford has amassed nearly $150,000 worth of fines since 2009 across 26 addresses. The agency says it administers “proactive and complaint-based” inspections by building, not by landlord, and therefore the 26 addresses may not represent all of Sanford’s violations. DCRA adds that Sanford has paid nearly $98,000 of the fines, with the balance either overdue or not yet due.
And that’s not all. D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine filed a lawsuit against Sanford Capital in October, seeking a court-appointed receiver to oversee a rehabilitation plan for Terrace Manor, a Sanford property in Southeast. Racine is also asking the company to abate housing code violations and for restitution of rents tenants paid while Sanford was illegally neglecting apartments.
In other words, the city is simultaneously enriching and suing Sanford. The District’s Department of Human Services says there are 114 households currently living in Sanford properties and receiving rent subsidies from programs that the agency administers. In addition, the D.C. Housing Authority says that at least 225 of its voucher clients are now living in Sanford properties. Estimating conservatively that vouchers average $1,000—some are more, some are less, and they depend on family income, among other factors—Sanford is being paid about $340,000 a month, or $3.7 million a year, by District and federal programs.
Vacant apartment at Terrace Manor
The Terrace Manor lawsuit isn’t the first that Racine has lodged against Sanford. It followed one last January over a Sanford property located above the Congress Heights Metro station. The first case precipitated the second. When Terrace Manor tenant Monica Jackson attended a hearing for Congress Heights tenants, she was amazed.
“I listened to the tenants, and it was like they were telling my story,” Jackson says. “Everything they were saying that they were experiencing—I was experiencing the same thing.”
The Sanford-owned buildings in Congress Heights had many of the same problems as Terrace Manor and the company’s other properties. Of 47 units at Congress Heights, 32 were vacant as of the suit’s filing, several years after Sanford acquired the rent-controlled site. The company had planned to redevelop it with D.C.-based City Partners into a mixed-use project to feature more than 200 modern apartments and commercial space. (Those plans were displayed on Sanford’s website. While they are still available on the D.C. Zoning Commission website, Sanford’s own site was deactivated shortly after the lawsuit was filed.)
Meanwhile EagleBank, whose website boasts it’s “taking care of our communities,” has provided Sanford Capital and its partners more than $46 million in loans to purchase District properties. And last year, it increased Sanford’s loan on Terrace Manor by $2.4 million. This was after the attorney general sued Sanford over Congress Heights and The Washington Post published photos of that waste-strewn property in an article about the lawsuit. The bank provided the additional funding despite the fact that a provision in the original loan agreement for Terrace Manor, which by then was in desperate condition, mandates that Sanford “keep and maintain the Improvements and the Equipment in good condition,” and “make all necessary or appropriate repairs, improvements, replacements and renewals.”
A. Carter Nowell's house in Bethesda, Md.
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Full article here...
A bed at G Street Apartments
Warren Branham looked at his 38-year-old brother lying on a hospital bed at the decrepit G Street Apartments last Friday. “He’s been hospitalized twice because of the ventilation,” Branham said. Steps away, their refrigerator was dead—room-temperature inside. The apartment smelled like mold and thousands of decaying cockroaches. His brother suffered a stroke as a baby and seizures as a child, Branham explained.
Twenty-four hours later, Branham’s brother was rushed to the hospital a third time. Again, Branham blamed the ventilation. “My baby is dying,” his mother sobbed over the phone from a waiting room at Washington Hospital Center. She said doctors had resuscitated him four times, but he was flatlining. He was dead within two hours.
And yet, freshly refurbished first-floor units stand empty at G Street Apartments. Branham and his family were stuck on the second floor, forcing Branham to carry his brother up and down stairs to get to doctor appointments. But tenants say the landlord has explained that these units are reserved for new, market-rent residents.
At least six other units are vacant and unsecured. Inside they are smeared with feces, littered with condoms. In one unit there’s a burn mark on the carpet. “I put out a fire there about three months ago,” says Timothy Harper, a former maintenance worker.
Harper says he kept G Street Apartments nice back when he took care of them. But his mandate gradually changed. For him, the most stunning moment came when the boiler broke. He was down in the basement with his boss, Todd Fulmer. A contractor explained the options. “The contractor said, ‘I can put a brand new boiler in here and save you $5,000 over rebuilding this one completely, and have it fixed in a week,’” Harper recalls. “Then Todd said, ‘No. Just rebuild it.’” This process would take months.
Which meant residents there didn’t have heat beyond ineffective space heaters for the winter of 2015. Some of them still don’t have heat. “My oven is what I use to heat my home,” says Karen Hamilton. “And I have a 6-year-old daughter.”
This is not an isolated story. Mold, vermin, broken refrigerators and toilets, children and elderly living without heat and air conditioning, units open to vagrants no matter how many times tenants complain—these are standard conditions at buildings owned by Sanford Capital, the company that owns G Street Apartments and at least 16 other D.C. properties, amounting to hundreds of units across the city.
Sanford Capital has been buying apartment complexes that are home to the city’s working poor for more than a decade. In extensive reporting on the company’s practices, City Paper found that Sanford employs a systematic strategy for allowing buildings to become so squalid that residents are forced to leave. The company also files for evictions in bulk.
In some cases, Sanford has rushed to replace the modest rents of the working poor with those of very low-income people who hold government-issued vouchers set at similar or higher rates—the District footing the bulk of the rent bill and ensuring a guaranteed stream of revenue for the company. In other cases, when a property is more valuable to a future developer vacant, Sanford has left buildings with only a handful of tenants who can’t or won’t move. And at Tivoli Gardens—a complex predominantly occupied by Spanish speakers, some of whom pay more than $1,300 a month for one-bedroom apartments—Sanford keeps occupancy high while letting the property rot. Not a single outer door at Tivoli Gardens locks.
Meanwhile, an alphabet soup of city government agencies, nonprofits, and the D.C. courts have become Sanford Capital’s de facto babysitters. The company makes few repairs on its properties unless fined or ordered to do so. And even then, the repairs often break within days or weeks.
“Any Sanford property—you just walk into it and you know what it’s going to look like,” says Caroline Hennessy, tenant services coordinator at Housing Counseling Services, a D.C. advocacy organization funded in part by local and federal dollars. She has worked with tenants at five different Sanford properties, while her organization’s staff as a whole has worked on at least eight over the years.
According to D.C. Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs (DCRA), Sanford has amassed nearly $150,000 worth of fines since 2009 across 26 addresses. The agency says it administers “proactive and complaint-based” inspections by building, not by landlord, and therefore the 26 addresses may not represent all of Sanford’s violations. DCRA adds that Sanford has paid nearly $98,000 of the fines, with the balance either overdue or not yet due.
And that’s not all. D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine filed a lawsuit against Sanford Capital in October, seeking a court-appointed receiver to oversee a rehabilitation plan for Terrace Manor, a Sanford property in Southeast. Racine is also asking the company to abate housing code violations and for restitution of rents tenants paid while Sanford was illegally neglecting apartments.
In other words, the city is simultaneously enriching and suing Sanford. The District’s Department of Human Services says there are 114 households currently living in Sanford properties and receiving rent subsidies from programs that the agency administers. In addition, the D.C. Housing Authority says that at least 225 of its voucher clients are now living in Sanford properties. Estimating conservatively that vouchers average $1,000—some are more, some are less, and they depend on family income, among other factors—Sanford is being paid about $340,000 a month, or $3.7 million a year, by District and federal programs.
Vacant apartment at Terrace Manor
The Terrace Manor lawsuit isn’t the first that Racine has lodged against Sanford. It followed one last January over a Sanford property located above the Congress Heights Metro station. The first case precipitated the second. When Terrace Manor tenant Monica Jackson attended a hearing for Congress Heights tenants, she was amazed.
“I listened to the tenants, and it was like they were telling my story,” Jackson says. “Everything they were saying that they were experiencing—I was experiencing the same thing.”
The Sanford-owned buildings in Congress Heights had many of the same problems as Terrace Manor and the company’s other properties. Of 47 units at Congress Heights, 32 were vacant as of the suit’s filing, several years after Sanford acquired the rent-controlled site. The company had planned to redevelop it with D.C.-based City Partners into a mixed-use project to feature more than 200 modern apartments and commercial space. (Those plans were displayed on Sanford’s website. While they are still available on the D.C. Zoning Commission website, Sanford’s own site was deactivated shortly after the lawsuit was filed.)
Meanwhile EagleBank, whose website boasts it’s “taking care of our communities,” has provided Sanford Capital and its partners more than $46 million in loans to purchase District properties. And last year, it increased Sanford’s loan on Terrace Manor by $2.4 million. This was after the attorney general sued Sanford over Congress Heights and The Washington Post published photos of that waste-strewn property in an article about the lawsuit. The bank provided the additional funding despite the fact that a provision in the original loan agreement for Terrace Manor, which by then was in desperate condition, mandates that Sanford “keep and maintain the Improvements and the Equipment in good condition,” and “make all necessary or appropriate repairs, improvements, replacements and renewals.”
A. Carter Nowell's house in Bethesda, Md.
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government
but its too much to ask this government to be accountable. im fukkin tired of it
