Local real estate firms are increasingly keen to cash in on a lucrative government program. One local developer has leveraged it to build a small empire of low-income apartment buildings where construction never ends and tenants live in squalor.
Editor’s Note: This story was supported with a grant from SpotlightDC: Capital City Fund for Investigative Journalism.
I.
In the waning days of 2021, Andre Hunter, a 59-year-old resident of an apartment building at 4001 1st St. SE, found himself responsible for containing a flood.
Standing in the building’s narrow central stairwell, where he’d been mopping up dog feces and other detritus that littered the floor, he watched water spill out in a steady gurgle from under the front door of his neighbor, John. Then it began to rush.
John’s downstairs neighbor ran upstairs as Hunter frantically unlocked John’s apartment. Water was raining out of the light fixtures in the neighbor’s kitchen; seeping through her walls; oozing from the smoke detectors. Inside John’s apartment, the scene was grim: a bathroom flooded to the shins, a current of water pouring out from holes in the ceiling.
“It wasn’t a little [water]. It was a whole lot,” Hunter says. “It was horrendous.”
For the tenants of 4001 1st St., the plumbing debacle of December 2021 was garden variety horrendous – the kind that might have left them without water for days, but at least didn’t end in any injuries. They had plenty of experience with the truly dangerous kind of horrendous, four tenants told DCist/WAMU: plumbing issues that left a tenant’s 12-year-old stepdaughter concussed when a bathroom cabinet fell off the water-soaked walls onto her head; pervasive mold that caused a resident’s asthmatic young daughter to stop breathing.
Other incidents ultimately drove John, who is in his 80s, from his home. John, who up until the building sold in 2019 had been its maintenance worker of more than a decade, keeping the hallways clean, the lawn raked, the parking lot clear of trash. John, who had a long-running friendship with Hunter that turned into something like care: Hunter even ordered him a Thanksgiving turkey in the fall of 2021.
But Hunter never got to deliver it. John was hospitalized in November for severe leg burns he’d sustained huddling near a space heater for warmth in his frigid apartment, where the heat had stopped working in the fall of 2021. Hunter is the one who discovered him and called an ambulance, and John has been in and out of assisted care facilities ever since. (DCist/WAMU was unable to speak with John for this story, and is using only his first name to protect his privacy).
More than one year after the flooding, John’s apartment was still uninhabitable. The air was thick with the musty odor of mold, and a yawning hole in the kitchen ceiling bore the long-unfinished attempts to repair the pipes above it. The floors were scattered with crusty piles of plaster; the bathroom walls, meanwhile, were splattered with black goo. John’s old crutches rested on the dusty blue couch in his living room, next to a Bible.
“I know my friend will probably never come back here,” Hunter said, standing under a collage of family photos that hang on John’s living room wall. “He has nothing to come back to.”
A hole in the ceiling in John’s apartment at 4001 First St, SE
The catastrophes that have plagued the eight-unit apartment building at 4001 1st St. are relatively new. Not the foregone conclusion of a building that’s reached the end of its natural life, they are instead the consequences of a series of failures wrought by a fledgling developer from Maryland named Sam Razjooyan, who took over the place in 2019 and is, in all likelihood, trying his best to flip a building near you.
Thirty-five-year-old Razjooyan is a real estate developer with a strategy: acquire rent-stabilized buildings at rock-bottom prices; buy out remaining tenants; carve up units by adding drywall to create more bedrooms; and then market them to participants in the Housing Choice Voucher Program or other housing subsidy programs, where, because of local and federal regulations (as well as poor management on the part of D.C. agencies), property owners can command double or triple what they would otherwise collect. He could employ this model perfectly at 4001 1st Street SE, an older building full of deeply affordable studio and one-bedroom apartments.
But according to lawsuits and interviews with more than a half-dozen tenants across four properties, Razjooyan has left many of the tenants in the properties he’s flipping living in abject squalor.