Activists and residents took their complaints about the conditions at a Congress Heights apartment complex to a developer’s doorstep in December. (Photo by Rachel Sadon)

It took two years of a steady drumbeat of complaints about the squalor at four buildings in Congress Heights for the city to step in. Four months after the Office of the Attorney General sued owner Sanford Capital over the conditions at the complex, the tenants are seeing some results: a court-monitored abatement plan.

Sanford plans to turn the four apartment buildings, plus a fifth that is currently vacant, into a gleaming mixed-use apartment complex next to the Congress Heights Metro station. The residents have accused the company of trying to push them out, via unlivable conditions (and other tactics), before they can exercise their rights to buy the building under the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act.

Amid a bedbug infestation that lasted for more than six months, “I had to get rid of all my living room furniture,” Ruth Barnwell told DCist in December, listing a litany of other complaints that ranged from safety to sanitation issues. Barnwell has lived in the complex for more than three decades, and she vowed to stick it out despite conditions that she said significantly deteriorated in the past few years. The Washington Post ran a long story in the fall about the conditions at the building, and fears that development would push longtime neighbors out.

Barnwell, other residents, and a group of activists took their complain straight to the doorstep of Geoffrey Griffis, the developer who is partnering with Sanford Capital on the new project (though Griffis doesn’t have any control over the buildings’ current conditions).

A few weeks later, Attorney General Karl Racine announced that his office filed a complaint against Sanford “for multiple violations of the District’s housing laws.” The city has only sued a landlord for neglect a handful of times in the past few years.

“Our goal has always been to seek justice for the tenants, who have been forced to live in deplorable and unacceptable living conditions as a result of willful neglect,” Racine said yesterday in a statement. “The abatement plan the Court approved yesterday holds the owners of the buildings accountable to maintain livable conditions and improve the quality of life for residents.”

Negotiated by the OAG and the buildings’ owner, the agreement includes provisions for routine exterminations, vacant apartment inspections, an evening security guard, a management office/meeting space for tenants, and a hotline for emergency repairs. The court will receive quarterly status reports to ensure that Sanford complies, and the case will remain open.

“The Office of the Attorney General has accomplished two very important things,” said Will Merrifield, the tenants’ lawyer. “First, they have ensured that the tenants’ units are safe and habitable. Second, they have prevented Sanford Capital from constructively evicting the tenants and have ensured that, moving forward, the tenants will have the opportunity to exercise their rights under the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act.”