Early Friday morning, October 17,1 got a telephone call: 1301 Fairmont Street, a building I had just begun working in as a tenant organizer, was on fire. Leaving breakfast still to be made, I ran up the block toward the building, guided by the thick black smoke that rolled from all its windows.
The next several chaotic hours I remember as a disjointed series of vividly drawn vignettes. A fireman carried a smoke-blackened 3-year-old from the building and sat him down. When the boy began shivering from cold and shock, I lifted him into my arms and looked for his mother. After half an hour we found her, writhing on a stretcher with the terrible pain that smoke inhalation causes.
A teenage boy was wandering in a daze; he had fallen from a third-story window and hit the ground head downward, breaking his arm, jaw, and nose. Last of all, firemen brought out 65-year-old Elsie Dailey, who has only one leg. She had tried to escape down the stairs from her second-floor apartment, but the fire's heat and smoke drove her back. She then attempted to open a window onto the fire escape, but her windows were all stuck shut. She was struggling to crawl under her bed when firemen found her.
A total of five residents of 1301 Fairmont were hospitalized because of the fire, and seven families were suddenly without a home.
From the moment I saw the fire, my concern was mixed with anger at the building's owner, a corporation called Rental Associates, Inc. I had recently begun organizing in four buildings all within a block of each other in our Columbia Heights neighborhood and owned by Rental Associates. All four buildings are large rowhouses that in the 1930s and '40s were converted into apartments--the kind of buildings most rapidly turning over to upper-middle-income whites as Washington, D.C.'s wave of rampant gentrification washes through our neighborhood.
All the buildings had similar conditions. Some tenants, lacking heat for four winters, kept their stoves and ovens lit to try to keep warm. None of the buildings had mailboxes or locking front doors. All had leaking roofs and walls, so that people living on the top floors were forced to put out buckets whenever it rained. Requests for repairs for these and numerous other problems were generally ignored.
I was certain that the fire at 1301 was caused by landlord negligence. That feeling proved correct: The fire was caused by overloaded and defective fuse boxes, which ignited nearby piles of discarded rugs and furniture.
Employees of Rental Associates began boarding up broken windows to keep out vandals but didn't bother to finish the job before the weekend. On Monday morning, tenants discovered that the unsecured building had been broken into and thoroughly ransacked. All their electrical appliances and dishes, as well as some clothes, records, and other personal possessions were missing.
Despite these tragedies for the tenants, the building is worth more to its owners after the fire than before. Now empty of tenants with rights, 1301 Fairmont can be resold at a vastly inflated price to some affluent "back-to-the-city" renovator.
The fire was a profit-making opportunity not lost to the company's eyes. Tenants of 1301 had for years asked Rental Associates to put a lock on the front door, to no avail. After the fire, the first thing the company did was to install a front-door lock. Tenants saw that act as further evidence that their landlord cared more for the property than it ever had for the tenants.
The company refused to help relocate the tenants. The city government also would not get involved. The displaced tenants of 1301 scattered throughout the city, cramming into already crowded apartments with family and friends. My household found itself involved once again in hospitality, providing temporary shelter for two young men, Bill Dailey and Tim Hawkins.
Tenants began the discouraging task of looking for places to live in the city's extremely tight housing market. Washington, D.C., has a vacant apartment rate of less than one per cent; below five per cent is generally considered a crisis situation by housing experts.
On Saturday, a week after the fire, the displaced tenants and I met together. Before the meeting, I had researched Rental Associates further. I found that the company owns at least 250 buildings around the city--each building usually the worst on its block. Rental Associates has owned the buildings in our neighborhood for 35 years, gaining profits by deferring maintenance over the years and letting the buildings deteriorate.
Recently, the company has begun to evict lower-income tenants and sell off its buildings one by one to more affluent newcomers as the city is "reborn." Real-estate industry members have told us that some of Rental Associates' executives are among the biggest and toughest speculators in the city.
At the meeting, the tenants talked about their need for a place to live; their hope of recovering their lost property and damages for injuries they suffered; and their desire to prevent the landlord from turning a large profit from their misfortunes. They decided together to hire a lawyer.
They also decided to ask tenants of the other three Rental Associates buildings within a block of theirs to join them in a common effort to win better housing from a landlord who was breaking city housing laws with impunity. Recognizing that their chances of winning against a relatively big and wealthy company stood largely in their numbers, they felt that they would be willing to help other Rental Associates tenants win repairs in their buildings if those tenants would help them win their needs.
We soon called a planning meeting of tenants from all four buildings. There we decided to invite Mr. Wyatt, the landlord's property manager in charge of repairs, to a meeting with tenants from all four buildings, and we discussed strategies for that meeting.
Meanwhile, the 1301 tenants settled on John Lunsford from Community of Hope, a nearby Church of the Nazarene, as their lawyer. He began preparing several court actions for them. But court decisions take many months, and we felt that we needed to work publicly as well. Rental Associates, wanting to end all residents' claims to tenancy in 1301, became increasingly coercive in trying to get people to move all their belongings out, though most had no place to put them. For example, the company called Elsie Dailey while she was still in the hospital suffering from smoke inhalation and a heart attack, and told her she had to remove her possessions and return her keys.
Bill, and then Tim, tried calling Mr. Wyatt several times to invite him to the meeting we were setting up. At first the company would not put their calls through to him. When Bill at last did talk with him he said flatly that he would not come.
Several tenants and I finally in exasperation hand-delivered a letter to the Rental Associates office asking Mr. Wyatt to come to the meeting. We were met by Joseph Shifrin, a higher-up in the company, who told us, "Those are marginal buildings; if tenants complain too much, we'll close them down."
Though city laws do not allow such treatment, many low-income tenants do not know their rights, and landlords often succeed in frightening them into submission. But we were not so easily put off. We had a 45-minute dialogue that ended with Mr. Shifrin agreeing to send Mr. Wyatt to the meeting. The tenants had won a big victory.
The meeting on Saturday was rather wild. Mr. Wyatt did come--as did several local TV stations' news camera crews. For many tenants, this was their first experience of a tenants meeting, the first time they'd met their landlord, the first they'd met many of their neighbors; it was the chairperson's first experience at chairing a meeting.
Nothing went as planned. We all made mistakes. But by the end of the meeting, tenants had won concessions from Rental Associates for repairs in three of their buildings--but no repairs for 1301. Mr. Wyatt had refused to even discuss 1301 Fairmont Street: "Mr. Shifrin is the one you need to talk to about that."
But Mr. Shifrin wouldn't talk with us. He refused to meet with the tenants. The tenants, however, were not ready to give up. The next Saturday when Mr. Shifrin didn't show at a tenants meeting and time ticked by, we decided to go out to his house in the Maryland suburbs and try to meet with him there.
As I drove out to his house, my leg was shaking so that I had difficulty with the clutch. I was frightened and tense and excited, and surprised that I was doing this; but it felt right. It was what the tenants wanted to do, and seemed the only way to get their landlord to sit down and negotiate honestly with them. Mr Shifrin wasn't home, so we passed out a few leaflets to his neighbors, explaining the situation to them and asking their help in our struggle for decent housing.
Since then we have received a letter from Mr. Wyatt and Mr. Shifrin explaining that they are not the ones to talk with about 1301, that their lawyer Ken Loewinger is the "authorized agent and spokesman" for the building. Meanwhile, repairs began to be made in the other three buildings. Some people got a warm apartment for the first time in four winters.
Six weeks after the fire, after persistent calling, I found a compassionate person in the city bureaucracy who committed the city government's resources to help find relocation housing for those of 1301's displaced tenants who needed assistance. Three months after the fire, only one family has found permanent relocation housing. Bill and Tim are still with us in my household.
Mr. Loewinger insisted that he most certainly was not the agent or spokesman for 1301. We called Mr. Shifrin again. This time he tried hard to stay out of our way yet be cooperative. He was just an employee about to retire, he said; his boss, Jerome Golub, was the person we needed to see.
So now we are trying to meet with Mr. Golub. Several tenant leaders are emerging and gaining experience with organizing methods. Relationships of friendship and trust are growing among tenants, and between them and myself. The tenants association formed by residents of the four buildings is becoming stronger. We have not yet won any victories at 1301 Fairmont, but we continue to work together toward winning there too.
Thanksgiving weekend I was out of town on retreat with Sojourners Fellowship when a local Washington TV station called me. The station wanted to do a story on the tenants at 1301 Fairmont. I realized, and told the reporter, that the tenants did not need me there helping in order to do a good job.
The reporter asked the tenants what they were planning to do in response to their landlord's callousness. Tim Hawkins replied for all of them: "We're not going to just sit around and let them get away with this. We're not going to give up."
Paul Brubaker was a member of Sojourners Fellowship and a tenant organizer in the neighborhood when this article appeared.
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