jonetta rose barras: On Kennedy Street, a lethal cocktail of desperation, greed and government incompetence

“Anybody can choose to operate a rental business in the shadows. That’s just a reality,” Ernest Chrappah, director of the DC Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs (DCRA), recently told The Washington Post. His comment came after a deadly fire, in what was supposed to be a commercial building but was essentially an illegal rooming house riddled with housing code violations, claimed the lives of two people, including 9-year-old Yafet Solomon, a student at Barnard Elementary School in Ward 4.

“This is a wake-up call, not only to landlords but to tenants,” Chrappah added.

That sounds like bureaucratic push-off: an overused linguistic technique designed to redirect the public’s focus away from government failures. Indisputably, the indifference and incompetence of DCRA staffers, combined with the greed of an unscrupulous landlord and the desperation of low-income tenants, produced a lethal cocktail that resulted in the deaths last month at 708 Kennedy St. NW.

If there is a wake-up call, however, it should be for the government.

The circumstances at Kennedy Street underscore the District’s housing crisis. They highlight the ineffectiveness of DC’s previous and current regulatory enforcement regimes, the lack of an innovative rental housing preservation program, and the absence of any sustained citywide media campaign designed to educate renters about their rights under local laws.

Apparently Chrappah would like residents to believe that what happened on Kennedy Street was beyond his control. He may have been unable to stop the fire, but an appropriate, aggressive regulatory process could have halted the owner of a commercial property from stacking people inside his building as if they were slaves in the hold of a ship, thinking only about each person’s contribution to his bank account — and not the quality of their lives.

Besides, the DCRA did know. An attentive Metropolitan Police Department officer, Ernie Davis, with the 4th District station, sounded the alarm. He should receive a commendation for his demonstrated understanding that public safety extends beyond obvious criminal activities.

Davis responded to a call at 708 Kennedy St. on March 21. While there, he asked owner James Walker whether he was operating a rooming house; the police report indicated that Walker said yes. Davis found no working smoke detector and no lighted exit signs. Further, the two certificates of occupancy he saw — one from February 1993 for office space, the other from March 1995 for a pharmacy — did not authorize the building’s use as rental housing. Officer Davis ended his report by “strongly recommend[ing] both DCRA & DCFD Code Inspectors respond to the listed location.”

A DCRA inspector claimed he couldn’t get in when he subsequently visited the building. In fact, however, he could have entered if there was a “reasonable basis to believe that exigent circumstances require immediate entry into that portion of the premises in order to prevent an imminent danger to the public health or welfare,” according to Section 14-104.4 of the DC housing code.

Chalk it up to DCRA indifference, which has been well documented. It was on display when tenants at Park Southern were living in squalor and dealing with an unscrupulous landlord and management company. It was there at Congress Heights where residents for years pleaded for DCRA to rescue them from Sanford Capital, which refused to follow the law. It was there at Dahlgreen Courts, whose plight was captured in a report by DC Auditor Kathleen Patterson.

Those problems existed under previous DCRA director Melinda Bolling. Chrappah began his tenure in November 2018. The agency has remained troubled.

Traditionally, the government has been expected to provide, using taxpayers’ money, four prime services: public works (trash collection, infrastructure construction and maintenance); public safety; quality public education; and regulatory enforcement. Over the past several years, District residents have seen a lack of improvement in each of those areas.

There have been consistent complaints surrounding the poor condition of city roads and sidewalks even as Mayor Muriel Bowser’s administration has developed an inexplicable fascination and perverse attachment to running a free Circulator system. When Bowser took office in 2015, she contracted out a portion of the emergency ambulance service, under the guise of introducing reforms. The majority of District children attending public schools — traditional or charters — continue to perform below proficient on a key standardized test. The Kennedy Street fire has reminded residents that DC’s chief regulatory agency is a mess.

Chrappah told me in an email exchange that he has developed a transformational strategic plan that should be fully implemented by the end of 2020. He said the two DCRA employees who had responsibility for inspecting the Kennedy Street building have been placed on “paid administrative leave” pending an investigation, and he is conducting a review of 67 cases from December 2018 through August 2019 involving at least one of those individuals. “We will very likely be expanding our review to far more cases over the coming weeks,” said Chrappah.

Since the fire, he has required the “head of our Consumer Protection Unit … to thoroughly review the [record] and the actions taken before the investigator” can close a case. “This is just one example of a robust list of other changes underway that will be announced in the coming days,” continued Chrappah. The agency has launched “public outreach focused on vulnerable communities who are more likely to be living in unlicensed buildings to ensure renters know what fire safety measures their landlords are required to provide.”

Considering the agency has been under his leadership for nearly a year, I asked Chrappah whether he held himself responsible for what happened. The agency has “cut down on the number of days it takes to respond to a tenant housing complaint from months to three days,” and “regulatory investigations from 60 to 30 days, but the type of transformational change myself and the Mayor are committed to for this 450+ person organization takes time,” he said in his email to me.

Chrappah appears expert at bureaucratic push-off.

The DC Council has talked of splitting the DCRA in two. The idea may have gained traction after the Kennedy Street fire.

“Nobody argues that the size and scale of companies like Amazon and Google are hindrances to their ability to work efficiently,” said Chrappah in our email exchange. “The size and scope of the agency can actually be leveraged to deliver a better level of service to residents, provided the agency has the resources it needs.”

DCRA collects fees for certain services; the law limits how it can use those funds. “We’d like to remove some of the shackles and invest that money where it’s needed most,” Chrappah added.

What happened on Kennedy Street wasn’t about resources, however. It was about government incompetence. Period.

If there is a money factor involved, it’s this: poor people were living in what could be described as a crawl space, unable to afford rent at a legitimate apartment building. Equally important, DC taxpayers continue to cover the salaries of people whose negligence proved a significant factor in the death of two people, one of them a child.

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jonetta rose barras is an author, a freelance journalist and host of The Barras Report television show. She can be reached at thebarrasreport@gmail.com.