A crew of about 50 volunteers interested in seeking out and helping the homeless recently descended on District neighborhoods—not unusual in a city known for both its thriving political culture and underclass. But the do-gooders who wandered the streets between 12 and 6 a.m. didn’t hand out plastic-wrapped ham sandwiches and bottles of water. Nope, all these volunteers had to offer were three pages of semi-invasive questions.

It’s part of the opening salvo of Mayor Adrian Fenty’s Housing First program, which “turns the traditional approach to providing homeless services on its head,” according to the Web site of Ward 6 Councilmember Tommy Wells, who supports the effort. The idea is to find the most needy and troubled citizens and get them right into city-provided shelter. To that end, the D.C. Department of Health and Human Services has begun acquiring housing vouchers so that it can shelter 400 of the most vulnerable members of D.C.s homeless population by the fall. The digs doled out will be permanent and scattered throughout the city, as opposed to traditional warehousing strategies.

But how does the city discover who the most vulnerable are? By hitting the streets in the wee hours, when the homeless—and perhaps drunk people—are the only ones out and about. After rousting potential clients from their sleep, volunteers asked them questions that feed into a vulnerability index developed by based on the research of homelessness expert Dr. Dennis P. Culhane. The index rates a person’s vulnerability by looking at things like the length of time an individual has remained homeless and the individual’s history of cold-weather injuries.

Adam Maier, director of the Ward 6 Committee on Human Services, joined up with volunteers conducting interviews on a Tuesday night in the Union Station area. (He blogs about the experience here.) Over the phone, Maier says the process went smoothly: “I was very surprised at how I didn’t get turned away; the whole night there was only one person who was distrustful,” he says.

Maier adds that every person interviewed, whether they responded to any questions or not, received a five-dollar McDonald’s gift card. —Rend Smith

CORRECTION: Due to errors by reporter Rend Smith, an earlier version of this post misstated the name of D.C.’s Department of Human Services and said that Dr. Dennis Culhane developed the vulnerability index used by the department. In fact, the department’s vulnerability index is based on Culhane’s research.

To do good in this town is pretty difficult. But people try. They post missing cat sightings on neighborhood message boards. They fill up community meetings on parking issues and debate with passion and a knowledge of the various regs that boggles my mind. Over the weekend, a Barracks Row resident was kind enough to talk my ear off about various parking matters. Best of all he was cool. He even swerved into a biography of the block’s cat. From the looks of the cat, he and his neighbors had made sure he was well fed.

The next day, I tried to play the good samaritan. I witnessed a motorcycle accident on Alabama Avenue SE. The cyclist had tried to make a left turn down a side street. At the same time, a beat-up Taurus wanted to turn from the side street onto Alabama Avenue. The cyclist swerved. The cycle wobbled and then suddenly both driver and two-wheeler hit pavement. Motorbike parts broke off and scattered. I pulled over and called 911.

But by the time I got through to the dispatcher, the cyclist had gotten up and whispered a few cuss words. The Taurus’ driver apologized but didn’t get out of their car. The cyclist then dusted himself off, picked up the bike and walked away. I had to tell the 911 operator to forget the whole thing. At least the two drivers were cool with each other even if I sounded pretty lame on that 911 call.

I had a second chance to play the good guy. Yesterday morning, while leaving my apartment, I nearly went head first down the short stairwell leading to the building’s entrance. The floors were wet. There was no sign warning other residents. I swung into action! I went down to the really cool super’s basement office and snitched.

But by the time I got back up to the entrance, the floors were dry.

I just ended up looking like an over-anxious nilly.

The residents of Alexandria’s Arlandria-Chirilagua Housing Co-operative thought their problems with rent increases, evictions, and utility hikes were over when the tenants purchased the low-income development back in 1995 and decided to run it themselves.

As it turns out, not so much, residents say.

On Tuesday, about 50 or so residents of the 282-unit co-op staged a protest in front of the multi-building complex, alleging that its elected co-op board, comprised of residents, is mismanaging funds and retaliating against those tenants who have asked that the books be opened.

During the demonstration, residents said board members are handing down random evictions and rent hikes in an attempt to silence the vocally disgruntled.

Mesfun Berhane, a resident of the complex, says that the board attempted to raise the rent and utility fees this month and if tenants can not—or will not—pay the new rate, they are threatened with eviction and also barred from voting in a fall election that will determine whether the complex gets new leadership or not.

“There has been a $100 rent increase,” Berhane said. “We refused to pay and now they are trying to evict us so that we will not vote against them.”

Another resident of Arlandria-Chirilagua, which lies between Alexandria’s Del Ray and Arlington’s Ridge Road neighborhoods, said that management has been withholding hot water in an attempt to push residents out and that he is tired of giving his children cold-water baths.
Tenants also said that the nine-member board, and the management staff of the complex, is stacked entirely with members from 3 families who are running the co-op like a dictatorship. “This is our place, but they’re trying to turn it into their place,” one woman said.

“They’re trying to run it like their family business,” Berhane said.

Calls to the management office of Arlandria-Chirilagua weren’t immediately returned, but if someone from one of the families decides to talk, City Desk will give you the scoop.

The basement is a cold and lonely life, but above all, it is an unnaturally lit life. While my windowless lair prevents passersby from peering into the hard, unblinking eye of my mundane existence, sometimes, lack of natural sunlight can be a bummer.

The solution? Why, unnatural natual sunlight, of course!

Read the rest of this entry »

When it comes to addressing the recession and the nation’s housing crises, our area tends to take a defensive stance: “No, not us. We’re relatively safe. Check out Phoenix though, they’re really screwed.” That sort of attitude. Well, our little tri-state region isn’t doing as well as I’d expect with regard to the foreclosure numbers. We don’t have the worst numbers. Those belong to Nevada, California, and Florida, according to Realtytrac’s U.S. Foreclosure Market Report. But, we’re no Vermont either! Vermont is number 50 in the rankings of foreclosure rates. In the last month, there were only two properties in the entire state with foreclosure filings. In Nevada–numero uno in the rankings–one in every 139 households received a foreclosure filing during March. Nevada has had the highest state foreclosure rate for the 15 months in row.

But check out these local numbers (again from the U.S. Foreclosure Market Report):

Virginia: National Foreclosure Rating-13; Number of foreclosure properties-4,933.

Maryland:National Foreclosure rating-10; Number of foreclosure properties-4,275

The District of Columbia:National Foreclosure rating-not ranked; Number of foreclosure properties-307

Read the rest of this entry »

A couple weeks ago, my roommate and I enlisted your help in ridding our basement apartment of the mouse that had taken up residence there (many thanks for your advice, archived here, here, and here).

Our mouse has since disappeared, so, thanks! And since we’ve detected no rotting corpse smell emanating from beneath our dishwasher, we’d like to think that the little critter’s just moved on, very much alive, from our subterranean dwelling. Hey, I don’t want to live in my basement anymore, either.

But living underground isn’t all rodent-free bliss. Introducing a new installment in our Basement Livin’ series:

Upstairs Neighbors, What Is Going On Up There?

Read the rest of this entry »

Vets can’t get a break. They come home from Iraq, and we stick them in sub-par medical facilities. Then, we ignore their emotional needs. And sometimes, rarely but occasionally, they go crazy.

That right there seems to be a fairly accurate summary of coverage of suffering returning soldiers. In the last year, the media and the entertainment world has jumped on this topic.

Dana Priest and Anne Hull have led the charge with their spotlight on Walter Reed. (Priest has a story out today about soldier suicides.) James Gandolfini produced his “Alive Day Memories” documentary featuring wounded Iraq War soldiers. And injured ABC anchor Bob Woodruff completed a compelling series of reports on soldiers with traumatic brain injuries and their inadequate medical care. It’s good stuff. But, it’s also trendy.

But, here’s one type of vet story (from a press release from the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans and U.S. Vets) that’s not circulating these days:

Formerly Homeless DC Veterans About to Lose Housing

“Fifty-one formerly homeless veterans who live at Ignatia House on the grounds of the Armed Forces Retirement Home (AFRH) in Northwest Washington must find new homes by the end of next month to make way for a $2 billion redevelopment effort on the grounds of the current housing site. The men and women of Ignatia House, some of whom have been living at the House for years while seeking employment and permanent housing, receive important health care services from the VA Medical Center which is located across the street.”

Most of the vets living at Ignatia are from the Vietnam War and the Korean War, and the average age of a resident is 57. The oldest resident is in his 70s, says U.S. Vets spokesperson Stephanie Buckley. The press release goes on to say that the “although the AFRH redevelopment plan includes space for a 100-bed facility for homeless veterans, it is unlikely that the facility can be planned, constructed and opened for many years.”

The Newseum’s restaurant–The Source by Wolfgang Puck–started serving people this fall. The Newseum Residences–135 luxury apartments–already has tenants. And the Newseum’s conference center has been available for events and programs since last summer. Now, it seems all that’s left to open in this Newseum quartet is the actual Newseum itself.

According to an old Newseum press release, the museum, which was once situated in Arlington, was slated to open at its new Penn Quarter location last fall. The new deadline is spring 2008, and Newseum officials will be setting an official date by the end of this month, says museum spokesperson Tina Tate.

According to Tate, most of the exhibits are not in place yet since temperature levels and dust control standards are not set yet. But, here’s one promising sign the Newseum will make good on its spring 2008 opening promise: it’s looking for volunteers. Here’s some info from the museum’s website:

Volunteers are needed to assist Newseum staff in the following areas:

• • Visitor services
• • Public programs and educational workshops
• • Collections management and artifact processing
• • Research and/or writing
• • Word processing, mailings and other administrative functions
• • Testing/evaluating ongoing programs

To learn more about the volunteer program, please fill out the volunteer application form. Or contact the Newseum’s volunteer manager, Ron Crocheron, at 202/292-6516 or rcrocheron@newseum.org.

The Washington Post reported today on Mayor Fenty’s press conference heralding the removal of families from the decrepit shelter and their placement into transitional housing.

That’s good news. But city officials should have closed D.C. Village as homeless shelter years ago. Councilmember Marion Barry, who attended the press conference, should be ashamed of himself. D.C. Village, located in the far southwest corner of Ward 8, was part of his domain. He has presided over that shithole, and should have done more and worked harder to shutter that facility.

D.C. Village has been the city’s traditional dumping ground for decades. You wanna know some of the backstory on that place, go here and here and here.

So before officials start patting themselves on the back, they should remember that they let its most vulnerable citizens live in a roach-infested, fire trap located in the middle of nowhere for years.

And in the not too distant future, they will do it again.

It is commonly known that bad smells have the ability to ruin a person’s mood. What may be less known is that a continuous foul odor may have the ability to destroy a person’s sense of empathy.

At least it is so in my case. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how the new chain-smoker living in the apartment below mine has dropped my voice several octaves and knocked out my nasal passages.

The problem is seepage, the technical term for the passage of smoke from one apartment to another.

How bad can it be, you wonder? Think yellow smoke, the yellow fog of T.S. Eliot’s Prufock. It rubs its muzzle across my floors, licks its tongue into my closets, and lingers.

On Saturday morning, I had my first extended conversation with the smoke generator. I was in the basement fixing a flat tire on my bicycle when he came down carrying a load of wash.

After asking me if I wanted to borrow his air compressor, he kept talking (about what I can’t remember) until we started on his medical history.

In my previous post, I suggested that maybe I could wait out this fella’s death from emphysema. I was slightly off. The lungs, it seems, are serviceable. The pipes, however, are corroded.

As I pumped up my tire, the smoker told me he has terminal cancer of the colon and rectum.

I stood pumping air into my tire. What do you say to that?

“Really?” I asked.

Standing at the washing machine, he yanked up his yellowed white t-shirt and showed a distended watermelon of a belly hanging below a sunken chest. I’m not sure what I was meant to see; there were no scars, but something was clearly amiss.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said.

Soon, he shut the top of the washing machine and walked back upstairs. For the rest of the day I considered the power of addiction and wondered how the man could smoke himself to death.

But what I was really thinking was this: How long will it take?

The cockroaches I could stand. The mice too. But in the last couple of weeks, a new type of vermin has invaded my third-floor apartment: the smoker downstairs.

I’m not the kind of reformed smoker who’s absurdly sensitive to a whiff of tobacco smoke. Truth be told, I’m the kind of reformed smoker who’s often tempted to bum a Marlboro, especially after a few beers.

But the atmosphere in my apartment has become noxious. When the multiple-pack-a-day man downstairs lights up, the fog wafts up through chinks in the floors and fills my space. When I open a closet, I’m hit with a blast. I wake up in the morning with a sore throat and a burning nose as if I spent the evening in bar and went to bed in a North Carolina trailer park.

In the lingo of anti-smoking zealots, smoke flow from dwelling to dwelling is called “seepage” and for now, it seems, there’s nothing a renter can do about it, aside from buying an air filter and waiting for their chain-smoking neighbor to die from emphysema.

I have no particular ambition to become a press critic, so I don’t have to whip up a boatload of outrage over how soft and heavily promotional real-estate sections in daily newspapers are. Sure, the features are practically advertorial, but the pillow-soft prose is benign as these things go. In fact, it can be perversely entertaining. Are parks good things? Why, yes they are! Is Gunston Manor an unpolished jewel? Indeed it is! How do people respond to the large, verdant lots in Quaint Acres? By gum, they’re drawn to them!

Still, I feel a bit oily about my enthusiasm for this piece in last Sunday’s Post Real Estate section. It’s soft and heavily promotional. And while this should generate at least some mild contempt from me, its about the town where I recently bought a house.

So, somewhat embarrassingly, I’m thrilled—or, rather, the part of my brain that stresses over home-resale values is thrilled. Yes, everything it says all great and correct: There’s lots of greenery, there’s a speedy public-works force, and I have excellent neighbors. But reading a piece about your hometown can also reveal how neatly flaws can get downplayed. Post Real Estate writers have mastered the fine art of calling out the bad stuff, and then proceeding to bury it three-fourths of the way through the piece. (F’rinstance: “[Clifton] Holmes said he hears about occasional break-ins. But with a 15-member police force, ‘the response time’s much quicker,’ he said.) Downtown Washington is allegedly “10-20 minutes by car,” though having experienced Route 50 as it becomes New York Avenue, I can only assume they mean, “10-20 minutes by car at 1 a.m.”

Most tellingly, here’s the sole dining establishment listed as “within walking distance” in Cheverly: 7-Eleven. But, really, don’t let that stop you from putting in for a large mortgage there.

In the last six months, the residents of the Phyllis Wheatley YWCA in Shaw have put up with a sudden change in management, threats of eviction, and 54 lawsuits—most eventually dropped—for nonpayment of rent . Now the residents of the single-room-occupancy facility—mostly older disabled and mentally ill women—are getting eaten alive by bedbugs.

“The whole building is infested,” says Sharon Rhoner, president of the newly formed Phyllis Wheatley Cares Tenants Association and a four-month tenant of the building. Rhoner says tenants have complained about the infestation to city agencies to no avail. Resident Vera Arrington says her bedbugs got so bad, she started treating them with a heavy-duty spray she got from the fire department.

Antonia Mathos, 53, who has lived at Wheatley since 2000, has had frequent complaints about the upkeep of the building. “These people refuse to do needed repairs,” Mathos says, referring to Vision Realty Management, the company that recently took over responsibility for the building.

“Landlords are legally required to keep the building in compliance with the housing code, and it’s not,” says Rebecca Lindhurst, an attorney for nearby non-profit Bread for the City who has represented several tenants.

Sam Lowery, a Vision Realty partner, says his company is aware of the bedbug problem and has hired a pest-control company, but he says it takes everyone’s involvement to kill the bugs. “This is an ongoing problem,” he says. “We’ve asked that the treatment in place be buttressed by the residents with cleanliness and housekeeping.”

Lowery says a list of recommendations was sent out in April that included notes on laundry, vacuuming, and keeping rooms sanitary.

Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner Alex Padro says he used to refer women who had no other place to go to the YWCA for temporary housing. Now, he says, he’ll think twice about making any referrals. “The board has abdicated its responsibility,” he says.

Editor’s Note: Earlier this year, Justin wrote Iceland, a blog about his band’s American tour. Justin isn’t on tour anymore, but Iceland continues, twice a week, on City Desk.

“Lo! Come hither and hearken to my testimony!” exclaimed the termite inspector. We huddled in my basement among drumsets and broken synthesizers. “Do you see the labyrinthine tunnels chewed into this deteriorating staircase? This is termite handiwork!”

“Who are these termites?” I queried. “Are these termites like the ones that plague the city of New Orleans?”

“How lucky are we not to live in the termite nightmare that is the Big Easy!” the termite inspector exclaimed. He tore at his thin white hair and rolled his eyes to heaven. “Oh, do not speak to me of New Orelans!”

“Tell me,” I begged. “‘Twas it Hurricane Katrina or termites that destroyed the House of the Rising Sun?”

“The damnable termites of New Orleans live and breed in wood, Cajun-style!” shouted the termite inspector. “They will leave your home in ruins! Do not doubt that the District’s termites will bore into wood they find pleasing, destroying staircases with tunnels lined with spit! However, these Mid-Atlantic termites live in the earth and return to the earth after entering your home and munching on arboreal delights. A simple chemical treatment will eliminate them.”

“I am impressed with your knowledge of the termite realm,” I remarked. “How termites must live in fear of you!”

“You’re absolutely goddamn right!” exclaimed the termite inspector. He looked around the basement at the drumsets and broken synthesizers. “Are you a musician?”

“I prefer the term ‘visionary artist,’” I replied.

“I used to live with a musician,” the termite inspector said. “Sleep all day, up all night! This man kept the worst hours of any man in the world!”

“Those of us pursuing visions live in a realm beyond time,” I explained. The termite inspector ignored me and stared at the walls.

“These walls are made of plaster,” the termite inspector said. “Termites have eaten the wooden stairs, but they dare not eat these fine plaster walls!” The termite inspector blinked back tears.

“I see that you are moved by this glorious plaster,” I observed.

“Oh plaster, fine plaster!” the termite inspector exclaimed. “At the turn of the century, American artisans routinely constructed such plaster walls as these. Now, drywall is favored for its low cost and can be installed by Spanish-speaking persons.”The termite inspector glared at me. “I hope my remark about Spanish-speaking persons does not offend you,” he said.

“No, ” I lied. How easily a racist remark can ruin an informative exchange about building materials! I thought. I really should rebuke this inspector for his “Kramer” moment. Instead, I reached at and touched the plaster walls that held up my home. Though I had lived in my home for eight years, I had never noticed this plaster before.

In mid-March, residents of the Phyllis Wheatley YWCA in Shaw, a refuge for abused and mentally ill women, got a rude surprise. Vision Realty Management, which recently started managing the building, filed suit against 54 residents of the 116-room facility, claiming they owed thousands of dollars in back rent. Most of the women protested, saying they were paid up.

Now, months later, it seems they were right. The overwhelming majority of the suits, says Rebecca Lindhurst, an attorney with nonprofit Bread for the City, have not held up in court. “We have done an exhaustive search of all the cases that came out of that initial wave of suits, and according to my findings, it looks like everything except maybe five cases were dismissed,” she says.

Sam Lowery, a Vision Realty partner, admits there were some recordkeeping issues on his company’s end.

“When [tenants] produced the evidence that they’d paid based on evidence that we didn’t have in our possession,” Lowery says, “we asked that those cases be dismissed, and rightfully so.”

“A few residents” still owe money, he says, “but we’re working with them.”

Alex Padro, a Shaw advisory neighborhood commissioner who’s been involved in the dispute since March, claims Vision took advantage of the fragile state of some of its tenants by suing without proper cause.

“The fact that you had a new management company…come in, and records that were in disarray, prompted them to overreact,” he says. “It was very cavalier, very unprofessional, and demeaning [to the YWCA residents].”