Lease Common Denominator Does your landlord have a marble foyer?

This has been the year of the slumlord. In early March, the Washington Post published a three-part series drilling into the practices of landlords who let their buildings rot, forcing out low-income renters to make way for wealthy condo buyers. As if on cue, real life provided an example of why the story mattered. On March 12, a fire ripped through a modern-day tenement in Mount Pleasant, displacing about 200 residents and drawing immediate scrutiny of the owners who’d neglected the building.

District residents wanted a response, and within weeks, the city delivered. On April 4, Interim Attorney General Peter Nickles filed a lawsuit against 23 of the very worst “slumlords,” asking the court to put many of the properties into receivership so the city could make sure rents got spent on making repairs. A few weeks later, Nickles released a revised list, touting the addition of several more landlords.

The slumlord is a classic urban character, a keeper of the class divide and a reminder of our occasional fears that the entrepreneurial spirit can go too far. We imagine a turn-of-the-century fat cat who stays in the money because he forces the cramped masses to live in squalor. Jacob Riis described these men 120 years ago in How the Other Half Lives, writing about wealthy, absentee landlords, “the worst offenders,” who lived out in the still-idyllic countryside and didn’t know or care to know about the conditions of their buildings. The idea hasn’t changed much since. But do the District’s alleged slumlords live up to the old description?

1. Rufus Stancil

Stancil’s rental at 7th and Varnum Streets NW






Rufus Stancil is the absent-minded warlord of D.C. slumlords. He has a famous temper, an omnipresent crew of handymen/henchmen and a tendency to forget about a few late rent checks. In the city’s receivership suit, the attorney general cites Stancil, and several of his family members, for hundreds of housing code violations (damp ceilings, rotten woodwork, infestations, holes in walls) at 18 rental properties across the city. The 73-year-old Stancil is used to the attention: In 2001, he was forced to live in one of his dilapidated properties for 60 days after pleading guilty to 70 housing code violations. Stancil bought his first property 40 years ago, according to his son Gary, and now owns hundreds of rental units across the city. And still, he relies on himself rather than a management company to care for his crumbling empire.

He spends his days traveling from building to building, often, according to tenants, verbally harassing renters he doesn’t like. Jose Longo, who rents an apartment from Stancil at 7th and Varnum Streets NW, says Stancil once broke into his place by knocking the lock off the door with a hammer. More recently, he says, Stancil threatened to blow his head off. Longo didn’t take the threat seriously, but he does wonder if someday the old man will snap. Longo rents a one-bedroom but sleeps in the living room because holes in the ceiling of the bedroom dump water on the carpet and furniture whenever it rains. He says Stancil doesn’t scare him, and he doesn’t think he should have to leave to get better living conditions.

I visit the building one afternoon and find Stancil upstairs, grumpily enduring a visit from a city lawyer. When I try to snap a photo of the scene, Stancil shoves an arm in my face and pushes me out of the way. I go outside, and Stancil follows me. He stands at the door with his phone. “She’s standing outside,” he says. “Come quick.” I leave.

A few days later, I come back and get a tour of the basement from a tenant, who asks not to be identified. In two abandoned apartments we find a ceiling dappled with black mold, a dead mouse, a live man curled up on the floor with his hand in his pants, and a freezer full of rotten lettuce. The room with all the electric meters has an inch of water on the floor.

Stancil’s tenants love to joke about his temper—it’s a nervous kind of funny and they love to tell people where he lives. Stancil’s home is part of his mythology. Of course, people probably don’t know that the handsome $1 million house on upper 16th Street NW is owned by Delores, Stancil’s wife. I stop by twice and get Dolores both times. She says she doesn’t know much about the city’s legal campaign against bad landlords but thinks it is unfair. She doesn’t want to let me into her house, she says, because she hasn’t cleaned. Inside, all I can see are dark floors and a tall staircase. The two-story wood and masonry home was built in 1937. It has a deck on the second floor, four bedrooms, three bathrooms, a fireplace, and hardwood floors. It’s a big, beautiful house, and the paint is peeling.

2. Steven Madeoy

Madeoy's rental on Georgia Avenue NW

Like Stancil, Steven Madeoy has spent his adult life hustling affordable housing in D.C., and he’s also drawn persistent challenges to the propriety of his business practices. But Madeoy’s done a better job of managing his reputation. Stancil spent two months in his own ratty apartment building because he let it fall apart; Madeoy spent two-and-a-half years in federal prison because he scammed the government out of hundreds of thousands of dollars, yet he made his way back into the mainstream business scene, even doing business with the federal government again.

In the early 1980s, Madeoy and a partner descended on black, low-income neighborhoods in D.C. and started buying up cheap houses. Madeoy had the properties assessed by his father—whom he bribed with kickbacks— and flipped the newly valuable houses at a hefty markup to buyers with mortgages insured by the Federal Housing Administration. Some of the new homeowners got cash rewards for their time and effort. Madeoy was convicted of fraud in 1987 and sentenced to up to 8 years in prison. After an appeals court upheld his sentence in 1990, he spent 31 months and 16 days behind bars.

Madeoy, 55, now lives in Potomac in a mansion-filled neighborhood of interlocking lanes with names like Iron Gate Road and Sotweed Drive. Residents here put their house numbers on little stone towers by the road. Instead of driveways, they have bricked courtyards and U-shaped tarmacs. Stopping at his house, an austere, two-story manse of gray stucco, I walk across the open stone entry and knock on glass doors. A woman hurries over and opens up with a smile. A nice, bright pink smile, framed by platinum blond hair and taut, well-rouged cheeks. I ask for Madeoy. He’s not here, she says, “I’m his wife.”

These men, it seems, are never home.

Mrs. Madeoy, in Lycra workout gear, uses one manicured foot to keep a fluffy white dog from escaping. She says the lawsuits are unfair. The city targets the only people willing to provide affordable housing, she says. And when the buildings get rundown, it’s usually the tenants who “don’t have respect for the property.”

It’s not like she’s being totally heartless. In a few weeks visiting slum properties, I’ve met a few slobs. But leaving food on the counter doesn’t cause a leaky roof.

I don’t enter into this debate with Mrs. Madeoy. She lets me stand in her cool foyer, where I have to take off my shoes so I don’t scratch the marble floors. Next to the sneakers and flip-flops lined up by the door, there’s a little tub of tushie wipes for the dog. After chatting a bit more, Mrs. Madeoy lets me use the bathroom, which turns out to be one of those powder rooms with untouched doilies for hand towels and an etched glass sink that’s lit from underneath. I’m afraid to wipe my hands or use the six-button panel that controls the lights. I say I should be on my way and, after politely declining the offer of iced tea for the road, leave Mrs. Madeoy with my business card.


Madeoy's home in Potomac

I get a call from her husband the next day.

Only one of Madeoy’s properties, a 21-unit brick complex at 7444 Georgia Ave. NW, is listed in the receivership suit, and the city lawyers appear to have bungled the paperwork. The suit names as defendants the company that owns the property and two of its principals, one of whom died several years ago. (The receivership suit names another dead defendant: Mabel Edwards.) Missing from the list is Madeoy himself, although he is mentioned within the body of the complaint.

Madeoy blames tenant advocates at the Latino Economic Development Corporation for siccing the city’s inspectors on his building.

He had decided to sell several of his rental properties last year and, as required by law, gave his tenants first right of refusal to buy their homes. When the tenants at 7444 Georgia offered less than he was willing to take, he says, he turned them down. Within days, someone slipped notices under every door in the building, encouraging tenants to report problems to the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs. The receivership suit followed shortly after that.

Farah Fosse, a program director at LEDC, says her office does offer technical assistance to tenants trying to preserve their affordable housing, although she could not say for sure whether her staff had slipped notes under the doors on Georgia Avenue.

Madeoy says he’s proud of the building and offers to give me a tour.

When I arrive, he’s waiting outside with a tenant who has agreed to show me his apartment. Both men swear they’ve never met before and I believe them: Once alone with me in his dingy bathroom, where the wobbly door scrapes against uneven tiles, the tenant says it takes weeks or months to get repairs. His walls are filthy—perhaps because he smokes and hasn’t cleaned in seven years—and the brown carpet is ragged and slides around, a problem I’d be more likely to pin on Madeoy. The place looks a bit dingy, but not bad. And the price is right: about $500 a month.

Outside, Madeoy talks, a little reluctantly, about his past. He says he’s stopped speculating on homes and now just rents out a handful of properties, most of which, according to local tenant advocates, are neither the worst nor the best in the city. Madeoy says he’s done “three small condo deals,” one of which was cited in the Post’s series on condo conversions.

Of his time in the pen, he says 25-year-old mistakes don’t make him a bad person now.

“I was a kid out of college,” he says. After graduating from the University of Maryland, Madeoy returned to his hometown and found something of an apprenticeship with the city’s best and most notorious speculators. Then, he says, he did what everyone else was doing: He made it easy to buy a home with no money down. “When I learned it on the street, it was OK,” he says, adding, “You can do it legally now.” (It’s sort of true, of course. Shady-but-legal mortgage companies are still, despite the housing crisis, giving homebuyers cash back in exchange for some funky interest-rate business down the road.)

Back then, the rumors were that Madeoy’s first wife was a woman of expensive tastes, which drove him to make risky deals. He says that’s BS. “She was a trust-fund girl,” he says, and it didn’t matter whether he made money or not. Eventually, he says, they both realized they came from different worlds and didn’t belong together. It could have been the jail time, but I don’t go there.

Madeoy says he still prefers the buzz of the city to life in Potomac. “I leave early and come home late,” he says.

3. Scott Herrick and Bernadette Manara

Scott Herrick and Bernadette Manara could teach their fellow landlords a helpful trick: Stay out of the papers, and you might stay out of trouble. The real-estate partners rarely find their names in the press, despite public scrutiny of the properties they own. They did land on the first list of slumlords cited in the city’s receivership suit for failing to abate dozens of code violations at apartments at 1630 Park Road NW. The problems included pests—bedbugs, lice, fleas—and safety hazards, like inoperable fire extinguishers and smoke detectors. By the time the amended suit came out, Herrick and Manara had vanished from the list.

The office of the attorney general responded in an e-mail: “Park Lee Associates LLC, Herrick and Manara were taken out of the lawsuit because the property that was named, 1630 Park Road, NW, did not have many unabated violations remaining.” The OAG may consider adding other Herrick/Manara properties in a second receivership suit it plans to file in the coming weeks.


Herrick's home in Bethesda

Like many major landlords, Herrick and Manara keep off the radar by organizing their businesses under dozens of limited liability companies. Their partnerships own or oversee hundreds of rental units in D.C., many with reputations for poor upkeep, according to tenant advocates. At one Herrick/Manara building, the Norwood Apartments at 1417 N St. NW, a tenants’ organization claims the landlords have allowed the building to decay in the hopes of forcing them out and converting the spaces into condos. A tenant-run Web site documents the evidence: snapshots of mold, bed bugs, and an elevator that frequently traps its passengers. The tenants don’t blame Herrick or Manara; they never tracked them down as the actual owners.

Several of the Herrick/Manara LLCs (Landmark DC Holdings, the Palms of Bay Harbor, Fleetwood Management) list their address as 2700 S. Nelson St. in Arlington. The small building off an industrial strip is furnished with two levels of glass-fronted offices and a small meeting area with a round table and samples of tile flooring. The men inside, in button-downs and jeans, tell me Herrick and Manara aren’t in. When I ask what kind of business they run, they say “real-estate business.” I leave a message, but neither Herrick nor Manara call me back.

Herrick lives in a home on a cul-de-sac in Bethesda, close to the Potomac border. I visited twice, once in the evening and once on a weekend. He was never home. Manara also did not answer the door to her home in Alexandria, where a neighbor said she left early and got home late. Her answering machine makes it clear she only takes calls from pre-approved contacts: “Hi. I know you actually didn’t expect to find me here.…If it’s really important, you know how to get ahold of me on one of my other communication devices.”

I finally catch the business partners at Herrick’s home in Potomac, where they pull up in a Mercedes SUV just as I’m leaving.


Herrick's and Manara's rental on Park Road NW

Herrick invites me inside. His house has all the trappings of a fancy new home—a marble foyer, a crystal chandelier, and a bank of floor-to-ceiling windows facing the woods out back—but the kitchen is the only room that looks lived in, with a collage of photos of his two young kids and a Family Guy poster. Herrick and Manara don’t come off like secretive real estate tycoons. He has a belly and a bald pate, she’s petite and shy. Herrick does most of the talking. He says he’s not in the business of forcing people out. “We don’t believe in displacement,” he says. But his logic is a little confusing. He says he operates most of his buildings—many of which are old and rent-controlled—at a loss. Since they were purchased with debt, he says, upkeep and utilities eat up his entire profit margin. I ask why he would buy a property with debt if he didn’t plan on selling it, and kicking the residents out in the process. He says he does want to sell the buildings - but to their own tenants. He’s partnered with the Tenacity Group, a condo-conversion company which has developed a reputation for neglecting the interests of low-income tenants. Herrick says that criticism is unfair, as are accusations that he doesn’t care for his rental units. “They’re old properties. And at times, the tenants are hard on them,” he says. “We’re just hard working people who actually care.”

4. David Tolson

Tolson's brownstone in Capitol Hill

David Tolson cashed in on the real-estate flush of the ’90s, scooping up run-down buildings and turning them into bright new condominiums. His investments earned enough to let him play banker; he began lending money to other developers who needed quick cash for projects in the city. But Tolson didn’t just profit from the recession-immune D.C. elite. In 2006, he bought eight crime-ridden buildings in Washington Heights and replaced them with affordable condos for working-class buyers, a large-scale project that won props from the Washington Post. Tolson felt pretty good back then—he’d made a fortune in real estate without soiling his reputation as a decent human being.

Then came the story, the fire, and the lawsuit. First, the March 2008 Post series blasted Tolson for evicting tenants after he bought the eight blighted buildings in Washington Heights—the same project for which the paper had praised him two years earlier. Then, after the fire in Mount Pleasant, word quickly spread that Tolson was one of the owners. The city named Tolson in its receivership suit, citing him for failing to obtain a business license for the building.

When I reach Tolson at his Capitol Hill office, he says he can explain. To begin with, he didn’t own the building on Mount Pleasant Street. He’d lent the owners money so they could make emergency repairs. Tolson guesses his name appeared in the suit because he was listed as a lender in property records, but he’s not really sure. “Beats me,” he says. “Bottom line is the city was in a rush to respond to the Washington Post article.” When the new version of the suit appeared, his name wasn’t on it.


What's left after the fire

As for the evictions in Washington Heights, Tolson says there were only a few residents left when he bought the building. He planned to gut the units, which meant he needed to get everyone out. Since he didn’t want to bust in on an occupied apartment, he says, he sent out a raft of notices before he started knocking down walls.

Even the tenant advocates I spoke with said they wouldn’t call Tolson a slumlord. Sure, his business model involves clearing people out of busted-up properties—but he’s not the one letting those buildings fall into decay.

Tolson lives in a handsome brownstone on 8th Street SE near East Capitol. He was never home when I visited. The only face at the window was that of his springer spaniel, Faith.

5. Vincent Abell

Abell's home in Silver Spring

Vincent Abell and Marta Bertola bought their big white house in Silver Spring in 2004 for $1.2 million. The 1982 wooden house, with plantation columns and rows of shuttered windows, has six bathrooms, three fireplaces, a four-car garage, and a pool out back.

I ring the bell and wait. The vestibule is cluttered with garden implements and household bric-a-brac, a Buddhist statue, a can of WD-40. The paint on the front door is chipped. A teenage boy opens up, then closes the door in my face to go fetch his father. A moment later, a balding man wearing a bluetooth headset and broken glasses asks me to come inside. Abell, 54, says he’d be happy to talk about the city’s case and leads me through his shabby-chic home—honey woods, pastel upholstery, faux Colonial wallpaper—to a little sitting room with two small couches. He explains that the suit dings him only for failing to obtain business licenses for two dozen properties—not for housing-code violations.

I remember coming across a few nasty rumors about Abell on the Internet—a conviction for fraud, a critical story in the Post. I ask him if he’s had legal troubles before or found his name in the papers. He shrugs and says sure he’s been written about, but he can’t really remember. I’ve read about so many landlords in the last few weeks, I figure I got him confused with someone else. Abell’s wife and business partner, Marta Bertola, comes in then, and Abell assures her I’m not to be feared. We have a few laughs, and I head home.


Abell's rental on Q Street NW


I plug their names into the computer again. Abell was being modest. He gets lots of attention in the papers. In 1989, he served six months in federal prison for lying to federal housing officials. More recently, he’s been sued several times for scamming senior citizens out of their homes. Most of the cases accuse Abell of approaching the owners of homes at risk of foreclosure, offering to help erase the debt, and walking away with the deed.

This January, five elderly D.C. residents settled with Abell for $500,000. And in February, 72-year-old Walter Malone, who also lost his home to Abell, testified before a Senate hearing: “People like Mr. Abell,” he said, “make their living by hitting you when you’re down, all the while pretending they’re helping you.”

Abell was right about one thing: The city’s suit accuses him only of failing to obtain business licenses for his rental properties. I visit one of his listed buildings, 424 Q St. NW. No one answers the door. It’s a beautiful brick building that stretches far back from the street. As recently as six months ago, neighbors say, Abell was renting out six units. But he never kept the place up, and people slowly moved out—which perhaps explains why Abell isn’t in bigger trouble. Neighbors believe one woman still lives in a back unit, but she doesn’t come out very often. Meanwhile, the front stoop has become a late-night gathering place for local hoodlums, and the piles of trash are growing.

When I call Abell back to ask about his record, he tells me, “You should write your article about positive things.” He says his criminal conviction resulted from his own benevolence; he forgave the down payment on a house. “That was 25 years ago,” he says. As for the Q Street building, he says he’s been planning on making repairs for months now. Late last year, he says he offered to let the tenants live in another of his buildings while he did the work. They didn’t want to wait, then mysteriously moved out over the next six months. Abell claims it had nothing to do with his upkeep. He says no one lives there anymore and he’s just waiting for the city to approve his building permit.

6. Talley R. Holmes Jr.

Holmes' house in Shepherd Park

In 1977, the Washington Post described Talley R. Holmes Jr., then 54, as a “self-professed slum landlord.” Now 86, he still owns about a dozen D.C. rental properties. Between the two buildings with recent inspections, there are about 100 violations. He was not named in the receivership suit, perhaps because he’s such a giant pain in the ass: Holmes says he has filed four or five suits against the city—most questioning the legality of housing regulations—and he plans on filing another soon.

Holmes lives in a grand brick home on the slope of a verdant street in Shepherd Park. He answers the door in a white golf shirt, pristine 1960s Levis, and house shoes, and he invites me in. The house smells of dust and something vaguely organic. We walk into a dimly lit living room filled with stuff: paintings on the walls, couches and ottomans, ornate light fixtures, glass tables, statuettes, glass sculptures, and a bowl full of reading glasses, all reflected by a bank of mirrors surrounding the fireplace.

When I tell Holmes what I’m working on, he acts as if I’ve taken on the mob. He predicts dire consequences.

“I’m gonna wake up dead, and you’re gonna get fired,” he tells me.

As we talk, Holmes shows me around his mausoleum of a home, including a sun room filled with stuffed parrots and a backyard swimming pool that has been decked over and covered with lawn furniture and a small wooden windmill. He has two dogs named Ginger and Chango and a lot of midcentury-modern furniture.

Holmes says no one wants to hear the truth about housing in D.C. What truth? The truth about whites and blacks, he says.

“I suspect the whites still want to get the blacks out of the city,” he says.

Do you think they’re justified? I ask, leading.


Holmes' rental on Holbrook Street NE

He nods. “Whites have a different mentality than blacks. It’s a cultural thing,” he says, adding, “Well, at least low-income blacks.”

By now I’ve noticed some African American art on the walls, and an African sculpture on a table. Holmes smiles a little. “I’m black, you know,” he says. “Don’t worry. You’re not the first one.”

Holmes grew up in a D.C. real-estate family and graduated from Cornell University in 1947. He got a law degree from Robert Terrell Law School and joined the family business, which he still runs out of the first floor of the home he grew up in on T Street NW.

Over the years, the buildings Holmes bought and sold have had a funny way of overlapping with the news. In 1980, he sold the Whitelaw Hotel, long an icon of black prosperity that had lately become a shooting gallery. The sale was a harbinger of gentrification near the intersection of 14th and U Streets NW—it reopened, all shiny and new, in 1992. And in 1986, Holmes sold a house to Karen K. Johnson, the convicted drug dealer accused of covering up for Marion Barry.

Holmes says he’s been around long enough to see through the city’s actions. He blames Mayor Adrian Fenty.


Inside Holmes' rental


“He’s too young to know what happened before,” Holmes says. “This is the same thing.”

Holmes likens the city’s crackdown on slumlords to urban renewal in the 1950s and ’60s, when entire neighborhoods were bulldozed to make way for modern public housing. The projects failed, Holmes says, and this plan will too: He says low-income landlords will be forced out of the city, and with them, the black population.

The answer, Holmes says, is to let the market do its thing.

“Let the tenant move. Let them complain to the landlord. If the landlord doesn’t do the work, let them call the housing division.” Holmes says he keeps his buildings in decent condition, but doesn’t go out of his way to make them nice. “I mean, they’re livable,” he says. “Any complaint a tenant has, I take care of.”

I visited one of Holmes’ properties, a building on Holbrook Street NE in Trinidad. A few days earlier, a 13-year-old boy had been shot down the street. The squat courtyard apartments have seen better days. Residents show me cracked tiles in the bathroom, holes in the floor, cracks in the ceiling. Jaqueline Phifer, 54, the head of the tenant association, grew up in run-down apartments owned by Holmes. “As a kid, he was nice to me,” she says. “But he’d rather sell a building than fix it.” When she moved in here in 1977, she didn’t realized she’d ended up under his thumb once again until she saw mice running up her curtains and tracked down the owner. Her own unit is in decent shape because she does her own repairs. Her husband installed new linoleum and hooked up the new refrigerator she bought. Now that he’s sick and on dialysis, she’s not sure what will happen.

The resident manager, Joe Johnson, 66, takes us into the basement. He shows me a storage area strewn with toys and tools and says the fire marshal told him to clean it up. He told Holmes to get it done. Johnson earns $75 a month from his boss, who just raised his rent to $175. “He’s an old-fashioned evil man,” Johnson says.