What is A Slum condo?
Show Summary:
Josh and Liane discuss the concept of a slum condo by exploring what’s happening at Ridgecrest Condominiums. This segment was played on WPFW’s Voices with Vision on Tuesday, September 26th, 2023 from 9am to 10am.
Follow along with Grassroots DC’s reporting to see what happens next with the resident’s of Ridgecrest Community Campagin.
Join us on the lawn at 4000 E St. SE Washington, DC 20019 on Saturday September 30th at 11am for the launch of the Ridgecrest Community Campagin to take back control of the condominiums!
Transcript:
Josh (00:00):
It's, hello, this is Josh
Liane (00:01):
And Liane
Josh (00:02):
From Grassroots DC and we're here today to have a conversation about slum condos in DC. So right, there are two words that I wanted to find before moving forward. I've heard of condos, but what are they really? How do they work?
Liane (00:16):
Okay, so condos, they're basically apartments that you can own individually. Like you own a house, you can own an apartment. Now the thing is, when you rent an apartment, it's owned and managed by either the person who owns it or the company that owns it, right? With a condominium. The building itself is owned by all of the people who own individual units. So when you buy a unit in a condominium, you become part of the condominium association, and the condominium association elects an executive board. And the executive board then is responsible for collecting the condo fees and maintaining the building and doing all of that. A lot of times they'll hire a management company, sometimes they do it themselves.
Josh (01:17):
That makes sense. You pay your condo fees so that your management company can be paid to clean the common areas. Right? Sounds pretty basic. So how does a condo become a slum condo?
Liane (01:35):
I only know of one slum condo very specifically. So let me tell you this story about that. That's my condo, Ridgecrest Condominiums. And it's funny because now I think about it, with the exception of my condo, I always thought of condominiums as luxury apartments that only wealthy people or young professionals who assume they'd eventually be wealthy, could afford. And I'd never heard of the term slum condo, even well after mine fell into disrepair.
Josh (02:11):
Alright, well, tell us about Ridgecrest condominiums, where you live.
Liane (02:15):
Well, let's hear from one of the residents. Marcy,
Marcy (02:20):
When I first moved in, our heat always was functional, but after Marcus Little became the president of the condo association, the lack of maintenance heaters didn't work. Our hot water didn't work. There would be weeks when it was below zero, and we had no heat.
Liane (02:40):
Jay also has something to say about the conditions at Ridgecrest.
Jay (02:46):
Neighborhood is quiet neighbors as well. The building, it's a whole different story on the inside, the interior, the mold, the heat. I can only speak for myself. The electrical is terrible.
Liane (03:05):
And here's Pat.
Pat (03:08):
What's it like living without electricity? It's dread. And it's because you have to, just like I was every morning, sometimes within the day, I have to go and buy food, pre-cooked food, and it's like you're double dipping. What's it like living without air conditioning, sweating like a Hebrews slate. Why don't you just pick up and leave? Because the A, could you afford it? In today's market, no. You can't afford date the rents that they charge. Yeah, it is outrageous and it hurts. And I'm 65, but I still work. I won't give up. I won't give up. I'm going to keep going.
Josh (04:11):
Geez, that sounds so horrible. I can't even imagine living in those conditions. How did this happen? How does that happen? Anywhere?
Liane (04:18):
What happened at Ridgecrest is something that happens to a lot of condos. When the unit owners start to fall into hard times. You have a recession or something and the place that you thought you could afford, you can't afford anymore. And so you can have just a few folks stop paying their condo fees, and then the condo association doesn't have the money to make repairs. The condo association board, the executive board, decided to fix this by putting an assessment on the unit owners.
Josh (04:59):
And what's an assessment?
Liane (05:00):
An assessment is additional money that you have to pay on top of your condo fees in order to make a repair to the common areas of the building that may have been unexpected. Right.
Josh (05:15):
Okay, cool. So if your boiler breaks down, then you might have a pretty big assessment to chip in to basically fix the boiler, since that's a super necessary repair that is in the common area.
Liane (05:29):
Exactly. And here's the thing. So you go into home ownership, you buy this little apartment thinking that this is going to stabilize your housing cost, but then all of a sudden this assessment gets put on top of your condo fees and your mortgage. So what happens is what happened with us, and what happens with other condos is that people can't pay the assessment and they get disheartened. Do they stop paying their condo fees? Demands are made and they stop paying and they say, oh, I can't afford this. And sometimes they will just abandon the unit altogether, go someplace that they can't afford. But ultimately you end up with less money coming into the association.
Josh (06:28):
That sounds really bad. Is there a way to get out of that situation?
Liane (06:32):
Well, in 2016, the Ridgecrest Condominium Association got a president, a man by the name of Marcus Little, and he had a plan, and his plan was to hire an attorney, Vanessa Carpenter, Laurie, to foreclose on owners who had gotten behind on their condo fees. Now, in full disclosure, I sure enough was one of those owners, but I managed to get them to accept a payment plan. Others were not so fortunate, but the idea was that we would foreclose on folks who had gotten way behind on their condo fees, buy up their apartment, fix it up, sell it, and then we would have the money to fix up the complex.
Josh (07:26):
Alright. I mean, that sounds like a solid plan. It's a little unfortunate to have to foreclose on a lot of people who are living there, but But what are you going to do if people can't pay for it? Or if they are able to find new places, then maybe even some of them would want to sell.
Liane (07:48):
Right. Okay. Yeah, it did seem like a good plan. It seemed like a good idea at the time, and all of us who were paying were happy to go along with it. But Mr. Little actually had another plan in mind. His plan was to foreclose on folks, put their properties up for auction, and then buy them himself at discounted rates. He didn't put out hardly any advertisements for the foreclosures that were happening, and he and the lawyer would go into the auction and purchase these properties for sometimes as low as 10,000, 20,000, $30,000, which was nuts because it wasn't even always as much as the condo fees that were owed to us. So he was just collecting properties. And when people would try to sell to someone other than Mr. Little, that didn't go well. So for example, let's hear what happened with Samantha Hayes when she tried to buy a property from the Parkers,
Samantha (09:21):
The transaction wasn't going well. The Parkers were unable to obtain the condo, sir, and documents for us to actually close. In order for me to purchase the unit and to obtain financing, I needed the condo, sir. And so I'm inquiring on Parker. Well, I mean, what's the problem? And so he said, I don't know. I'm trying to talk to this H O O President. He's telling me that we're backed on our dues, that we owe h O a fees. And so I entered into a lease purchase with the partners in the lease purchase. I retained rights to the unit, even if I wanted to pass it to a third party. And the agreement I was going to pay off the existing mortgage, which was 20,000, the assumption was that the condo fees was handled by the Parkers. So I had a notice on the door of foreclosure, and it tells me that I must act now that on Tuesday, December 18th at 11:00 AM the offices of Harvey West Auctioneers will auction off the property.
Josh (10:43):
Wait, so they sold her property right out from under her?
Liane (10:48):
Well, remember, she actually wasn't able to buy it because she could not get from Mr. Little or anybody in the association the documents she needed in order to secure a loan. And by 2021, he'd acquired 22 units out of 83.
Josh (11:09):
Wow. That does not sound legal.
Liane (11:11):
It isn't. But he did it dealing with the courts. It is not an easy thing to do at this point. A lot of people felt like they had no choice but to sell their units because the property was in disrepair and he wasn't fixing them. He was the only one who had access to the bank accounts, and he wasn't fixing because he was trying to force us out.
Josh (11:42):
Yeah, this is awful. What else can you do?
Liane (11:45):
Well, the other thing to do, obviously, is to fight him. And there have been, people have tried to fight him individually. And this is the thing, you can't fight this thing individually. We have had to come together in order to do this. So this is the thing. We're at a critical point. We have been trying to get him into court for two years. We have a suit against him that is two years old. We finally got into court and had an evidentiary hearing, and it's looking positive, but the property has continued to deteriorate. We currently have two seniors who don't have electricity, and we need to get that electricity turned back on. And the buildings where that's happening, there are 25 other units that are at risk of losing their electricity. Oh my gosh. And so if that happens, then we will be forced out before we can get him through court. So we need to raise the money to get this electricity, the electrical panel replaced.
Josh (13:12):
And if someone wants to find out where they can donate money, they can go to our website, grassrootsdc.org. There are buttons and links everywhere. There's links in the show description. You can follow us on Instagram at grassroots DC to find out more. And yeah, we're just going to keep fighting this, right?
Liane (13:45):
Yeah, we're definitely going to keep fighting this. And in fact, we're having a cookout slash fundraiser at Ridgecrest property this Saturday, September 30th.
Josh (13:59):
Yeah, join us out there. There's going to be tours of the property. You can meet some of the residents. There'll be some food, there'll be a raffle with some prizes. And yeah, we just want to come together as a community to really be able to keep everyone housed.
Liane (14:22):
Ultimately, we want to bring in a nonprofit developer and have all 83 units designated for affordable housing.
Josh (14:36):
We need that in the city. We don't need more luxury apartments. We desperately need more affordable housing.
Liane (14:44):
Exactly. So if you can support this, cause you'll also be supporting 83 affordable units. So the event starts at 11 o'clock. Yeah, 11:00 AM It's at 4,000 E Street. Southeast. Yeah. Okay. Hope to see you there. See you. Thanks for listening. Thanks for listening. Bye.
