It’s supposed to rain again on Friday, and all Carlton Moxley can think about is his stuff: several guitars, drums, clothes, and irreplaceable family jewelry lying under the swollen, fire-damaged, caved-in roof at the Arthur Capper Senior Center in Southeast.

“Every time it rains, it gets worse. The chances of the walls caving in are even worse,” Moxley says from the Fairfield Inn hotel room where he’s been living since a three-alarm fire collapsed the Arthur Capper building in September. He pulls a piece of paper from his desk showing all 162 units in the subsidized building, some unit numbers highlighted in red and some in green—his unit number, 206, was in red, marked “not accessible.” He has not been able to retrieve anything from his apartment since the fire displaced every family living in the building, including his brother’s poetry and watch.

On Thursday, Moxley was among dozens of residents at the Fairfield who attended an event put together by Edgewood Management, the building’s management company, and the Community Services Foundation to provide residents with a suitcase to help them carry things and pack for their new permanent homes and a $100 gift card to help them replace some of the belongings they lost.

“It might seem weird we’re giving them suitcases, but we asked residents what they needed, and they said they needed these suitcases because they’re collecting stuff from all over the place and they have no central place to put everything,” says Cindy Sanquist, the president and CEO of Edgewood Management. “We want to make sure they know that they haven’t been forgotten…and this is a small gesture in many things to come until they’re placed in permanent residence to show them that we’re here.”

Sanquist says that Edgewood and a few other community partners are helping plan a Thanksgiving celebration for displaced residents at The Anthem over at The Wharf.

But despite today’s offerings, residents and members of the D.C. government alike have remained skeptical of Edgewood’s competency in managing Arthur Capper, both before the fire and in the wake of it.

Five full days after the fire broke out—and after Edgewood had assured Mayor Muriel Bowser and members of D.C. Fire and EMS that all residents of the building had been accounted for—74-year-old resident Raymond Holton was found trapped in his second-floor apartment, unaware that a fire had even happened or why he was unable to open his door. Additionally, the building’s fire alarms and sprinkler system did not work when the fire broke out; a large number of residents were notified about the fire by neighbors or by Ward 6 Councilmember Charles Allen’s staff calling them on the telephone. 

Allen has been a vocal critic of Edgewood’s since then. When Holton was discovered, Bowser told the press it was an open question why the management company informed officials he was accounted for, when later they admitted they had not seen him since the fire broke out. Edgewood said it had launched an internal investigation into the incident, but last week declined to testify before the D.C. Council at a joint hearing headed by Allen oto discuss the fire. The fire department is also conducting an investigation into the question of the fire alarms and sprinkler system.

“We were just, we were advised not to [go to the hearing] because there’s not much we can say … everything is still under investigation,” Sanquist says.

But several residents have spoken out about the problems they had with Edgewood even before the fire. At the joint hearing last week, Helen Douglas, a resident, testified before the Council that she was wholly unsurprised to hear that the building’s fire alarms and sprinklers weren’t functional.

“I was at Arthur Capper for nine years, and my overall experience of the management company has been poor at best,” she said. “When we see the lack of fire alarms and sprinklers not working … it just fits the M.O. that we already have for this building … only under duress did we get any attention.”

Aside from the investigations underway, Edgewood doesn’t have a lot of say in what happens next for residents, many of whom are waiting to get word about their belongings from building owners Urban Atlantic and working with the D.C. government to find new subsidized housing. On Thursday, resident Cherie Gibson is getting the keys to her new apartment and could not be happier, she told reporters. Urban Atlantic is helping Gibson and other residents with some costs, in particular apartment fees, moving costs, utility set-up, and new furniture and furnishings, if they find housing, says Julie Chase, a spokesperson for the company.

But not everybody is having as good a day as Gibson.

Moxley, for one, is getting desperate—desperate enough, he says, that he’s considering trying to go into his second-floor apartment and retrieve his belongings himself. He makes some money busking in Metro stations and on corners across the city, and many of his musical instruments are trapped inside his apartment growing more and more water damaged with each rain. He said he knows some people whose apartments started out highlighted in green, but after enough rain, slipped into the red, and what once were retrievable possessions have become unsalvageable. Moxley had only been living in Arthur Capper for less than a year when the fire happened, he said, and had managed to accumulate a lot of possessions he worries he can’t get back.

Chase says that some people truly have lost everything—crews will never be able to retrieve their belongings. They have access to 53 apartments and have almost completed searching them for things residents directed them to, she says. One unit was vacant, and the tenants of two others have declined to give crews access. All the rest are probably lost.