Residents of a 10-story apartment building in downtown Washington, most of whom are senior citizens and low-income, say they have been without elevator service since mid-December and have been given no time frame as to when it will be restored — despite a Dec. 29 court order to fix at least one elevator within 24 hours.
The outage at the Museum Square apartments at 401 K Street NW is the latest in a series of problems with elevators that residents say have made living in the building dangerous. Residents in wheelchairs or who cannot use the stairs have missed medical appointments and have been forced to rely on volunteers to do their shopping, laundry and other errands. Other residents, many in their 70s and 80s and some with significant health issues, must use the stairways if they want to leave the building.
Ownership has been unresponsive to complaints and has provided little to no information about when repairs to the elevators will be made, according to interviews with multiple residents and tenant advocates. No representatives for the building owners, Parcel One Phase One Associates, an affiliate of Virginia-based Bush Companies, appeared at the December D.C. Superior Court hearing where Judge D.W. Tunnage issued an order mandating emergency repairs within 24 hours.
Tunnage ruled that “the lack of a functioning elevator in Plaintiff’s apartment building creates a life safety hazard. Further, there is a continuing potential for immediate, irreparable harm.”
Despite the court order, the situation at the building hasn’t changed.
“They keep saying they’re going to get parts to fix the elevators, but nothing’s happening,” Joseph Liggins, 70, said last week as he sat in his wheelchair in his fifth-floor apartment.
Liggins has lived in the building since 2002 and wants to stay. But he says the ongoing problems, including a fire alarm system that no longer works, are becoming difficult to bear. The elevator outage, he said, has forced him to miss four doctor’s appointments and his nephew’s funeral.
“It’s frustrating and depressing,” he said.
Representatives for Bush Companies did not respond to requests for comment or questions about when it would restore service to the building’s four passenger elevators and one freight elevator. The company owns several other buildings in the District, including the Carmel Plaza apartments two blocks from the Museum Square location.
Shani Shih, founder of the Save Chinatown Solidarity Network, a nonprofit umbrella organization formed to address issues for tenants brought about by the gentrification of Chinatown, has worked with the residents as an organizer since 2015. She said repeated appeals to the owners for repairs have been unsuccessful.
“It’s a prolonged pattern of abuse,” she said. “The city has to do something.”
The District’s Department of Buildings issued Bush Companies an infraction notice on Jan. 12 that gives the company 60 days to make at least one elevator operational in the building. DOB typically doesn’t issue emergency 24-hour repair notices for elevator outages.
“Elevators cannot be used for fire egress and so are generally cited as non-emergencies,” spokeswoman Gwendolyn Cofield said in an email.
Since November, DOB has inspected the building seven times and issued the building’s owners $28,813 in fines. DOB records show that the building received violation notices for having all of its elevators out of service six times between Nov. 5 and Jan. 20.
Lin Yun Ru, 79, has lived in the building for 20 years. Like many of the residents, she is a Chinese immigrant who likes the proximity to Chinatown. Ru says her daughter, who lives in Maryland, wants her to move, but she says she loves the neighborhood and the people in the building. But “no matter what we say, there is no one listening to us,” she said through an interpreter.
D.C. Council member Charles Allen (D-Ward 6), whose ward includes Museum Square, said he is familiar with the long-running disputes at the building and called the owners “the absolute worst.”
“They are trying to force these residents out by not making any investments,” Allen said in an interview last week. “They just let the building go into neglect and won’t do their job and take care of [the residents], and make it so terrible that they eventually move out and give up. If you can’t manage to keep one of your five elevators operating, that’s on purpose.”
Allen said that if DOB can’t compel the owners to fix the elevators sooner than in 60 days, he will explore emergency legislation to impose major penalties.
“I think they’ll only do the right thing if it costs them too much to ignore their responsibility to their tenants,” he said in a text.
Shih said city officials have previously promised to address the elevator issues, but residents have seen little change. The building has rarely had more than one elevator working over the past three years, she said.
“We have tried to convince the council that there is an egregiously weak regulatory mechanism around elevator operation in the District,” Shih said.
Museum Square has been at the center of a long legal dispute between residents and the owners, who have sought to replace the building — home to a number of low-income tenants who rely on housing vouchers — with a high-end building more in line with new developments on the bustling block in Mount Vernon Triangle.
In 2014, Bush Companies informed residents that it would stop receiving the Section 8 government subsidy for low-income residents and replace the building. Under the District’s Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act, residents have the right to buy their building before it can be gutted or sold to a third party. Bush Companies told tenants the building would cost them $250 million, or about $830,000 per unit, an amount the residents couldn’t afford.
Residents pushed back and in 2016 sued the company in D.C. Superior Court, alleging their rights had been violated. The court agreed, and an appeals court later concurred, saying Bush Companies based its asking price on what the building would be worth once it was renovated, not its current value.
Despite the legal victory, declining conditions in the building have led more renters to leave, residents say. A decade ago, most of Museum Square’s 302 units were occupied. Today, all but about 50 are empty.
The walls of Vera Watson’s fourth-floor apartment are covered with photographs of her six grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren. She’s lived there for 43 years.
“Nothing but love in this home,” said Watson, 70, sitting in a Washington Commanders-themed reclining chair in her tidy living room.
Watson, who is the president of the tenants association, is undergoing radiation and chemotherapy treatment for lung cancer and said that making it up and down the stairs is a struggle. But like others in the building, she doesn’t want to leave.
“I can’t sleep at night thinking about what we’re dealing with here,” she said. “How can the owners sleep?”
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