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].”

Good news for those renters still clinging to the fantasy of owning a home: According to Standard & Poor’s just-released and sexily named “S&P/Case-Shiller® Home Price Indices,” real estate in Washington is down 4.8 percent compared to March of last year. Where these super-cheap homes around here are isn’t exactly clear, since there’s no breakdown of neighborhood or, well, surrounding states, but who needs accuracy with fantasies anyway?

Rooms with a view in Detroit are down a lot more—8.4 percent—but they’re in Detroit, so there’s that. But forget about Seattle, folks. Prices are up a whopping 10 percent there.

Also poking a hole in Open House elation: The National Association of Realtors reported two weeks ago that there was actually an increase of 1.2 percent compared to a year ago.

Guess we’ll have to wait for some blogger to call us a dying city to see any meaningful plummet. There’s always hope.

Move into an old laundry building! In ever more clever ways to draw in those sassy downtowners, the new Yale Steam Laundry Condominiums going up at 4th Street and New York Avenue NW urge prospects to “Live Like an Icon.” (The graphic includes a va-va-voomy woman with a building on her skirt. She’s extra.) According to Webster’s, that means you could become “any of various stylized figures, as displayed on a microcomputer screen, representing available functions or resources.”

Sign me up!

And not only will you, sassy downtowners, represent available functions and resources (starting in the low 300Gs for a studio), according to an e-mail I just got from the Yale Laundry staff, you’ll also:

• be able to play “billiards” in a glass-enclosed room!
• be blocks away from a “New Starbucks”!
• have access to a “New Urban Safeway” (apparently Safeway’s jumping the gun on the nickname. What? They didn’t like “Soviet Safeway: Where nothing’s on the shelf and there’s always a line?”)
• lay claim to living in and/or near a historic building that was still a laundry until 1976!

All that and exposed brick will be yours, in the “fourth quarter of 2007.” Unless, of course, the Yalies don’t buy into that icon b.s. and the developers have turn to retail.

Late Monday evening, while lounging on the couch, perusing the Internet, drinking a beer, and watching Stanley Cup Playoff hockey on my 37-inch LCD HD television all from the comfort of my own bedroom, I found myself reading this ABC News report, entitled, “Men Say Bye to the Bar, Hang Out in a ‘Manspace.’”

Sports bars and pool halls used to be the haunts of men craving time alone.

But now, some men are creating guys-only spaces in their own homes.

Tired of being sidelined to the neighborhood pub, basement or garage, they’re creating chic retreats for their enjoyment—and no one else’s.

These spaces include an old water cistern in California, a backyard barn outside Boston, a room in a Harlem apartment—each different, each a “manspace.”

Of the many supposed “manspaces” ABC News would have you believe populate the United States at an ever-increasing rate, the article goes on to specifically mention, uh, the same old water cistern in California, backyard barn outside Boston, and Harlem apartment room mentioned in the beginning. Which is not actually all that impressive a list. It’s the last of those three that I find the most disconcerting, however: Sure, an entirely separate building completely redesigned and/or refurnished with one man’s manly needs in mind could, arguably, make a case for “totally awesome, brah!” But a fucking room in an apartment that somehow climbs above the status of “study,” “den,” or “hobby-area” to earn the dubious distinction of “manspace?” In my book, that screams of Grade A-level douchebaggery. And yet, it’s a crime that—after casting a quick glance around my immediate surroundings—I now begin to worry is one of which I am guilty.

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Judge Gerald Fisher ruled last week that convicted slumlord David Nuyen has broken his promises to get out of real estate. As part of a 2001 plea agreement, Nuyen agreed to sell all of his holdings; Fisher ruled that he hasn’t. The ruling means Nuyen now will face all 2,368 charges that were dropped in 2001. If convicted, he could serve 90 days on each count.

That’s 213,120 days—almost 584 years.

Nuyen maintains that he was never really guilty in the first place. He plea-bargained, he says, because he didn’t have time to fight the charges. Now he welcomes them. “I have a strong case. I like to have a chance to prove I am innocent,” he says.

Nuyen has a well-recorded history of ignoring repairs. He even wrote a book on his Scroogelike methods. But he lays the blame for his crumbling buildings on the tenants. About one building in Southeast: “It’s like the headquarters of drug people.…I can’t do [repairs] because of drugs there. If I go in there, they’re gonna kill me.”

It’s still unlikely Nuyen will be sentenced to spend the better part of a millennium behind bars. “If he’s found guilty, what’s gonna happen? I don’t know,” said Robert DeBerardinis, assistant attorney general. “You get convicted, there are only two things that happen. You get probation or you go to jail.”

In Nuyen’s case, though, he says, it’s clear that “probation doesn’t work.”

Convicted slumlord David Nuyen has been trying to show he’s reformed. At age 70, he claims to have turned over the family business to his 23-year-old son, and he’s poised to move back to his native Vietnam. “I want to get out. From the bottom of my heart, I want to get out. I’m tired of it,” he says. “I just want to be quiet and read books.”

There’s just one thing keeping him: his continuing legal problems.

A plea bargain in 2001 required him to sell his properties in D.C. and Maryland, but he still owns two buildings in Brightwood that he wants to sell as condos. The building’s mostly Spanish-speaking tenants had the chance to buy the building, but Nuyen posted notices only in English.

Rather than lose their homes, the families sued. A D.C. Superior Court judge ruled on Jan. 24 that Nuyen’s sales were illegal.

“For now, the good news is that our clients will not be tossed out of the building,” says Mark Patton of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, which filed the suit with community nonprofit Bread for the City. “It would have been nice if the city had been paying attention.”

Nuyen was facing 2,368 charges when he took his initial plea bargain. Tenants had fought rodents, contracted lead poisoning, and been hurt in a ceiling collapse before he pleaded guilty. Because he still appears to be breaking his plea agreement, the city could reopen his criminal case—a move which is under consideration, says Tracy Traci Hughes, spokesperson for the D.C. Attorney General’s office.

Nuyen, who wrote a book that in part explains how he cheated his plea agreement, maintains a sunny disposition. “If they reopen the case, it be great, because I be clear completely,” he says. “I hope they gonna reopen the case so that I clear my name.”

Living in Brentwood’s Dahlgreen Courts apartments, tenants say, means living with peeling wallpaper, gaping holes in the walls, leaky plumbing, and treacherous flooring.

After residents formed a tenants’ association last summer, it documented the poor conditions and discovered that the city didn’t have a certificate of occupancy for the buildings. Michael Huke, president of building manager CIH Properties, says the city lost its copy of the 70-plus-year-old document. Tenants believe that certificate was voided when ownership was transferred some 15 years ago.

“The thing is, we just want to live in habitable conditions,” says Vaughn Bennett, the association’s president. To that end, the group arranged visits from mayoral staff and incoming Councilmember Harry “Tommy” Thomas Jr. and filed a legal complaint.

City inspectors have assessed nearly $70,000 in fines since October, but that amount hasn’t been collected. A Dec. 12 letter from the city to the building’s owner, Willis Limited Partnership, explains that the city is giving more time for repairs before the “possible imposition of fines.”

Thomas says he intends to force the landlords to devise a 100-day plan for fixing their buildings. Huke says most of those repairs have been made, but he doesn’t think the city or the tenants played fair. He says vandals ripped up the halls just before inspectors showed up without warning. “There were armies of inspectors,” he says. “We had inspectors coming back daily. We had inspectors inspecting the same things and reissuing violations.”

One thing has definitely been fixed: the missing certificate of occupancy. On Nov. 21, building management applied for a new certificate. On Dec. 8, a new one was issued, along with a $2,000 fine.

This fall, Alexandria’s city council approved plans for a new project at the still-developing Potomac Yards site along Route 1. As a blurb in the December issue of the city’s citizen newsletter FYI Alexandria pointed out, the development will feature 216 condos, the city’s first new fire station in 30 years, and 60 units of affordable housing—to be built right on top of the station.

Those involved in the project insist it’s an innovative way to provide housing for the city’s workforce, not a case of sticking poor people in noisy, undesirable units that no one else wants. “I think that’s a very rational sort of comment initially, but certainly there are examples, historic examples, of where people live over fire stations,” says Jeff Farner, of the city’s Department of Planning and Zoning.

Among the measure being taken to ensure that the housing is as noiseless as possible are special doors for the truck bays that open and close quietly, advanced building technology that will abate noise, and a plan for trucks not to turn on their sirens until they’re actually out of the station house.

“We’re not thinking of it as a negative at all,” says Farner. “Through construction and programming at the fire station, there are ways to deal with these things.”

When operating a large apartment building under the city’s radar, it’s probably best to stay out of court-bound squabbles with tenants. So when married couple Ciprian and Daniela Berghea asked their landlord, June Layne, to repair a rotted bedroom floor, the smart move would have been to do it quickly and quietly. Instead of prompt repairs, they got an eviction notice.

Researching for the hearing, the Bergheas discovered that their 33-unit building in Columbia Heights has no business license and is not registered as an apartment building with the city. The couple won the hearing, but a day later someone slipped a rent increase under the Bergheas’ door, printed on Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs letterhead that, according to one city housing inspector, was forged. When they called to report further code violations and notify the city that the building was itself illegal, the Bergheas say they were told by a DCRA official that because Layne didn’t have a business license, the building was not a business that the agency could regulate, and so it couldn’t send an inspector out.

“That is not department policy,” says DCRA spokesperson Karyn-Siobhan Robinson, who suggests that the Bergheas might have been confused by the complexity of DCRA’s mandate. As a result of the inquiry, she says, the agency has opened an investigation. Reached by phone, Layne immediately hung up on a reporter.

Residents of the Park East building in Adams Morgan, managed by Carmel Partners, came home yesterday evening to find an area in front of the building strewn with the belongings of now-former tenants. Residents say U.S. Marshals emptied at least three units. Diane Coates, who has lived in the building since 1984, said this was the first such eviction she could remember. “I haven’t seen this before, with all the stuff piled up,” she said.

Possessions of evicted tenants line the area in front of 1845 Summit Place NW yesterday evening. Photo by anonymous.

One of the evictees, who declined to give her name, pleaded with two District police officers to help her carry off her microwave, photo album, toaster, desk, mattresses, and the rest of her pile. She argued that the cops have the resources to help. “I’ve seen those paddy wagons,” she said.

“They’re specifically for people to sit in when we transport them to jail,” said an officer. The woman then switched tactics and asked the officers to return with their personal vehicles when they were off duty. They declined and she walked away.

“I have a damn Ford Escort,” said one cop to the other.

Carmel Partners regional manager Carlyle Swafford says his company had no say in the all-at-once timing of the evictions. Though some Park East residents sympathized with the homeless tenants, they were also concerned that the area around their building might resemble a landfill. “What’s funny is they did all this landscaping last week. It must have cost them a couple grand and then they dump all this shit on it,” said Pete Mason, surveying the scene. “They knew this was coming down—bureaucracy at its finest.”

By a unanimous vote yesterday, the D.C. Council passed emergency legislation introduced by Ward 1 Councilmember Jim Graham that will quicken the date that rent control will be tightened. The reform passed June 6 will now go into effect August 4.

Two weeks ago, we reported that Graham was considering such a move because tenants were seeing an increasing number of rent hikes as landlords moved to jack up rents while they still could.

Graham says those hikes were part of his decision. “In fact, there was an impact on tenants occurring. We’ve reduced the time for that impact,” he says. The colonial nature of District governance contributed, too. Had Congress not taken an extra day of recess over the 4th of July, says Graham, the legislation would have become active around Aug. 4. But because of the long recess, it wouldn’t have gone into effect until the end of September or early October.

“We know we have a 30-day layover requirement, but when it becomes 60 days, I think we have to act on an emergency basis,” he says. “It’s an example of the burden that the congressional review process places on the D.C. legislature.”

Slain community activist Chris Crowder was the final witness at a March 31 hearing of the D.C. Council Committee on Consumer and Regulatory Affairs.

Introduced by Ward 1 Councilmember Jim Graham only as “Brother Chris,” Crowder, in one of his final public statements, showed a glimpse of the spunk that once pissed off the likes of Bill Cosby but made him a memorable presence in neighborhood debates.

Spoke Brother Chris: “I’m gonna overlook that I heard there were threats to certain people if they organize in tenant groups, because I know we do have some tough guys in this city who can help some of you citizens if you are being threatened. So I’m not even gonna pretend I heard some of that tonight. I end saying thank you, thank you, and thank you.”

In last week’s paper, we wrote about a loophole that has been allowing developers to convert buildings to condos while avoiding a hefty 5 percent conversion fee. They vacate a building, or at least claim it’s vacant, and then apply for a “vacancy exemption” from the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs (DCRA). It may be, though, that this dodge is too clever by half. Declaring a property vacant, though, should mean the owner has to pay a special vacant-property tax rate, which is more than five times the standard fee.

Last week, Matthew Forman, federal real-estate attorney and vice president of the Kalorama Citizens Association, e-mailed Ward 1 Councilmember Jim Graham, alerting him of the contradiction. “Would you please investigate how, if the owner of 1342 Vermont is claiming the property to be vacant, they were not charged the $5/100 real property tax rate for vacant properties? The property isn’t paying the vacant tax rate and in fact is still receiving the homestead exemption, giving them a further, significant reduction in their property taxes.…In this case, it would appear that the property owner needs to be sent a bill for either the conversion fee or the back taxes - they can’t have it both ways,” he wrote. Besides the City Paper, he cc’ed Eric Goulet in Councilmember Jack Evans’ office and Thomas Branham, the District’s chief assessor.

Graham forwarded the e-mail back to Branham asking for an opinion.

“In the future,” Forman writes, “you need to make sure that the branch of DCRA that is accepting filings stating that properties are vacant is passing this information on to [the Office of Tax and Revenue] to make sure that the property is paying the full vacant tax rate.”

Forman says he has been working with the council trying to increase collection of the full vacancy tax rate, and the contradiction in the latest loophole jumped out at him. Either the property’s vacant, he says, or it’s not. “It’s just the total, perfect irony,” he says.