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Seems like everyone wants a piece of the Department of Housing and Community Development this week after it was discovered the agency spent $5.5 million in city funds for a nonprofit organization to renovate apartment buildings in deals that eventually went very, very bad.

A sweeping report yesterday by The Washington Post’s Nikita Stewart and Debbie Cenziper revealed that Peaceoholics, the youth outreach organization founded by Ron Moten and Jauhar Abraham, defaulted on loans from developers and lost control of three buildings in low-income neighborhoods it had intended to retrofit into housing for at-risk families.

Over the weekend, Councilmember Michael A. Brown (I-At Large), who chairs the D.C. Council panel that oversees DHCD, called for an investigation into DHCD. Yesterday, on the heels of the Post’s story, Councilmember Jim Graham (D-Ward 1) issued his own findings on things gone wrong at the housing agency. And a few hours later, DHCD announced it had fired one employee involved with overseeing the Peaceoholics deals and suspended another.

Now the agency itself is asking to be investigated, according to letters DHCD director John Hall sent to Attorney General Irv Nathan and Inspector General Charles Willoughby.

Earlier, we noted that the Post reported that the request for the inquiries. In fact, said Gray spokesman Pedro Ribeiro, the request to “ascertain if either fraud or ethical misconduct” was committed by DHCD staffers involved with the Peaceoholics projects. The mayor “fully supports the call” for both Nathan and Willoughby to look at the housing department.

Gray, Stewart wrote in the Post today, “said his administration must take steps to ensure that such plans ‘reach the people who need housing’ and ‘do what those programs were designed to do.’ ” The Peaceoholics apartment projects, which were supposed to result in 34 housing units for low-income families spread across three buildings, were initiated under former Mayor Adrian Fenty, Moten and Abraham, Peaceoholics’ founders, were both strong backers of the Fenty administration and are now running for Council seats in Ward 7 and Ward 8, respectively.

Read Hall’s letters to the attorney general and the inspector general:
OIG and OAG Request Letters