Apartment City

Darrow Montgomery When  Matthew Pfaff was looking for a rent- controlled apartment in D.C. last year, he thought he could find one within his budget and in a convenient location—without much ado. But more than a year and a half later, Pfaff is reflecting on how much of a headache that process became. After applying for a one-bedroom unit at the historic South Cathedral Mansions apartment building in Woodley Park, property management staff repeatedly delayed his move-in date and made conflicting statements about what his rent would be, according to a lawsuit Pfaff ’s attorney Aaron Arce Stark filed in D.C. Superior Court this summer. The Silver Spring resident is suing for damages he allegedly suffered because he had to go month-to-month on his existing lease at a higher rate, hired movers, and sold some furniture. “I didn’t want to move every year to stay in an affordable unit,” says Pfaff, who remains in the same apartment he was living in when he applied. “I’m not entirely sure...

A loophole that allows landlords in Washington, D.C., to get around the city’s rent-control policy is going to court. A legal case between a local, named Matthew Pfaff , and Woodley Park’s South Cathedral Mansions apartment building will be one of the first in local civil court to directly address the issue of rent concessions, according to Washington City Paper , who further reported: “The practice goes like this: A landlord of a rent- controlled building offers an applicant a discount on monthly rent as an incentive for that person to move in. That landlord registers a higher rent amount with the city, even though the tenant usually has no idea there’s a second value in play. (Or if they do, they don’t know what it means.) When the lease comes up for renewal, the landlord raises the rent based on that higher number ... The tenant must decide whether to move out or try and negotiate down.” Generally, the maximum standard annual rent increase is 0.3 percent for tenants living in a...

In Reseda, an elderly couple fret about where they will go at the end of the month, when they are forced out of the one-room apartment they have lived in for 29 years. In Tujunga, a retired woman lives in a backyard shed, treating her high blood pressure with tea made from her garden and bathing in an outdoor tub with water heated by the sun. In Arleta, a supermarket employee rents a makeshift room in a house that is home to 10 people, and often waits in a long line to shower before work. I didn't set out last Wednesday to tie these stories together; I was following leads in search of the small dramas that play out daily, beyond the headlines, in homes that do not make the Hot Property column . I traveled the 101 and the 405, the 118 and the 210, and the stories intersected as the highways do, here in a land where all too often plans fall apart, and the daily challenge is to adapt, to endure, to survive. :: "Help!!!!" Caroline Malloy pleaded in an email to me. Her pa...