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Editor's Note: This story was supported with a grant from SpotlightDC: Capital City Fund for Investigative Journalism.

I.

In the waning days of 2021, Andre Hunter, a 59-year-old resident of an apartment building at 4001 1st St. SE, found himself responsible for containing a flood.

Standing in the building's narrow central stairwell, where he'd been mopping up dog feces and other detritus that littered the floor, he watched water spill out in a steady gurgle from under the front door of his neighbor, John. Then it began to rush.

John's downstairs neighbor ran upstairs as Hunter frantically unlocked John's apartment. Water was raining out of the light fixtures in the neighbor's kitchen; seeping through her walls; oozing from the smoke detectors. Inside John's apartment, the scene was grim: a bathroom flooded to the shins, a current of water pouring out from holes in the ceiling.

"It wasn't a little [water]. It was a whole lot," Hunter says. "It was horrendous."

For the tenants of 4001 1st St., the plumbing debacle of December 2021 was garden variety horrendous – the kind that might have left them without water for days, but at least didn't end in any injuries. They had plenty of experience with the truly dangerous kind of horrendous, four tenants told DCist/WAMU: plumbing issues that left a tenant's 12-year-old stepdaughter concussed when a bathroom cabinet fell off the water-soaked walls onto her head; pervasive mold that caused a resident's asthmatic young daughter to stop breathing.

The catastrophes that have plagued the eight-unit apartment building at 4001 1st St. are relatively new. Not the foregone conclusion of a building that's reached the end of its natural life, they are instead the consequences of a series of failures wrought by a fledgling developer from Maryland named Sam Razjooyan, who took over the place in 2019 and is, in all likelihood, trying his best to flip a building near you.

Thirty-five-year-old Razjooyan is a real estate developer with a strategy: acquire rent-stabilized buildings at rock-bottom prices; buy out remaining tenants; carve up units by adding drywall to create more bedrooms; and then market them to participants in the Housing Choice Voucher Program or other housing subsidy programs, where, because of local and federal regulations (as well as poor management on the part of D.C. agencies), property owners can command double or triple what they would otherwise collect. He could employ this model perfectly at 4001 1st Street SE, an older building full of deeply affordable studio and one-bedroom apartments.

But according to lawsuits and interviews with more than a half-dozen tenants across four properties, Razjooyan has left many of the tenants in the properties he's flipping living in abject squalor.

"Emotionally, he has drained me," Andre Hunter told me, tears welling in his eyes. "And I thought I was a strong person." Hunter now spends most of his time near family in Michigan.

In the seven years preceding Razjooyan's acquisition of 4001 1st St., the building received four letters detailing property code compliance issues from the city. Since Razjooyan entered the picture four years ago, it's received 18. Agency records show that city inspectors have levied at least $65,176 in unpaid fines against 4001 1st Street, S.E. as of March 2023, and cited it for at least 45 individual housing code violations since Razjooyan took it over. Those include citations for a lack of heat, rodent infestations, and the failure to maintain the premises "in safe and sanitary condition."

But $65,000 is paltry compared to the sums that other buildings tied to Razjooyan owe the D.C. government for housing infractions – one, at 109 Wayne Place S.E., racked up $95,000 in fines.

Based on publicly available information about Razjooyan and his business partners, including his home address, DCist/WAMU has identified 33 buildings with governing documents registered to Razjooyan and his associates, acquisitions topping more than $30 million.

The full scope of his acquisitions and ownership stake in these properties is effectively shielded from public view: Ownership information on sale documents we obtained from multiple city agencies is either redacted or absent, naming only the LLCs registered as building owners. But based on court documents and interviews with tenants and tenant representatives, the developer appears to be the linchpin in many of these transactions, identifying which buildings are ripe for redevelopment and helping manage their sale and construction – with the end goal of creating units rentable to voucher holders.

Units in at least 10 of the buildings tied to Razjooyan have rented to DCHA clients, housing contracts obtained by DCist/WAMU show.

In response to a five-page list of questions detailing the allegations levied against him by current tenants, Razjooyan said in an email that he addresses maintenance requests in a timely manner. While he often buys buildings out of bankruptcy already in poor condition, conditions "improve greatly over time," he said.

"Your statements are inaccurate and don't reflect the amount of my actual involvement, the condition of the properties or the specific events that occurred with respect to specific tenants identified," he wrote. Razjooyan did not comment on his rental history with voucher programs and did not confirm which of these buildings he owns outright.

The vast majority of the apartments in the sprawling kingdom of buildings Razjooyan has helped redevelop are located in Wards 7 and 8, the poorest areas of the city. This is no accident: These areas have the highest concentration of buildings potentially subject to rent control, and have not enjoyed the kind of commercial or residential investment seen in more affluent parts of D.C. They are also where the majority of people who use housing vouchers currently live.

And as traditional public housing complexes continue to decay with age and attrition, housing vouchers – which provide government money to pay a portion of a person's rent – have become an increasingly important tool to combat homelessness amid a worsening housing crisis.

D.C.'s waiting list for public housing closed a decade ago with 20,000 names on it; 37,000 more people currently sit on a waiting list for subsidized housing assistance. But D.C. often fails to properly vet and manage landlords who provide what was once a government service – and the city's unusually high rent thresholds for vouchers attract enterprising landlords who see a profit incentive to gut affordable buildings specifically to rent them out to voucher holders.

"The immediate effect [of this business model] is, there's now a force in the market that is actively displacing tenants who do not have vouchers," says Eliana Golding, a housing and workforce policy analyst at the DC Fiscal Policy Institute.

About 12,000 D.C. families rely on the Housing Choice Voucher Program, formerly known as Section 8, to pay for their homes. Ninety-five percent of voucher holders are Black, and the majority of participating households are seniors and people who live with a disability. (D.C. has also funded a local version of housing choice vouchers; in fiscal year 2023, the city allocated about $14 million for additional subsidies.)

"Vouchers are a good thing. And right now we need them because we don't have a better way to supplement people's income...especially in really hot rental markets like Washington, D.C.," Golding says. "That said, we would be remiss to not think about the overall effect of vouchers [on the rental market] and how that impacts these business models...we should really be thinking about enforcement and good oversight, to make sure that there aren't bad actors who take advantage of tenants in precarious financial situations."

Yet it has proved unwieldy to manage D.C.'s decentralized pool of subsidized apartments.

Despite multiple legal complaints alleging poor maintenance or illegal construction, dozens of letters detailing property code compliance issues, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines levied by D.C.'s own housing inspectors, buildings managed by Razjooyan continue to house low-income renters.

He's far from the only one looking to cash in on the city's subsidized housing programs: DCist/WAMU has identified nine real estate companies that target rent-stabilized apartment buildings for redevelopment, marketing them toward renters in the Housing Choice Voucher Program. From Mount Pleasant to Congress Heights, developers are turning the scarcity of deeply affordable homes into a profit opportunity, making the most vulnerable citizens compete with one another for a precious resource — and in the process, eroding the city's stock of affordable housing. Golding believes that hundreds, if not thousands, of naturally-occurring, deeply affordable apartments are lost to this business model every year.

The DC Housing Authority, which manages the Housing Choice Voucher Program, has struggled to administer its most basic programs in compliance with federal regulations. The Department of Housing and Urban Development, DCHA's parent agency, found in a Sept. 2022 report that DCHA overpays property managers who rent to housing choice voucher holders, and that its executives have demonstrated "inadequate management and knowledge of HCV program functions." DCHA Director Brenda Donald has since committed to creating a standard for "rent reasonableness" – a metric that HUD requires public housing authorities to use, and which determines how much those authorities will pay landlords for rent.

But one policy expert who works in affordable housing development, who requested anonymity to speak freely about conversations with D.C. officials, tells DCist/WAMU that for at least three years they have raised concerns to DCHA executives about how voucher overpayments have encouraged predatory development practices.

As DCHA weighs how to improve its administration of vouchers, developers continue to leverage the program for big payouts.

At 4001 1st St., Razjooyan's tenants still live in a never-ending construction zone. For nearly a year, Razjooyan's team erected new walls to create additional bedrooms, converting studios into 2-bedroom units and junior 1-bedrooms into 3-bedroom units. There was drilling from dawn to dusk, tenants say, causing walls to vibrate so violently that their framed artwork and shelves would fall to the floor, dust swirling in a flurry through the central stairwell. Three residents of the building tell DCist/WAMU that the construction crews didn't erect tarps to contain the dust and debris, and Hunter, who has asthma, says he could barely breathe when he walked through the building.

Desiree Williams, a 30-year-old mother of three who lives in a renovated three-bedroom unit on the top floor of 4001 1st St. SE, says she's seen some of the vacant one-unit apartments that Razjooyan's team hadn't yet flipped. "I've seen the one-bedroom. It's the same size as my unit. It's just that I've got more walls," Williams says. "[My bedrooms] are very small. I could fit, like, a refrigerator in here." Williams pays more than $1900 in rent for her unit with the help of another subsidy program. (She says she moved into the building in May 2020 and has been "trying to get out of here since May 2020," thanks to poor housing conditions).

By the winter of 2022, a year after his friend John had been forced out of the building by poor conditions, Hunter's own apartment was in such disrepair – his climate systems on the fritz, water damage growing by the week and appliances that kept breaking – that he feared the worst when an inspector from the D.C. government arrived to look at it and called it uninhabitable.

"I had to beg him not to condemn the apartment," Hunter says, "because I didn't have anywhere else to go."

II.

Razjooyan was only in his twenties when began flipping homes for a living, but he likes to present himself as a Renaissance man, former business associates say: To colleagues, he has claimed to have been a male model, a prospective medical student at Howard University, and a researcher at the National Institutes of Health. His entrepreneurial endeavors have run the gamut, from a now-defunct restaurant on the ground floor of the French Embassy in Washington to an automobile dealership on Evarts St. NE. A Washingtonian writer's DIY kitchen renovation in 2017 featured Masterpiece Remodeling, another of Razjooyan's since-shuttered enterprises.

But Razjooyan, who lives in a 3,200-square-foot, $1.35 million home in Potomac, Maryland, has since built a name for himself by flipping homes in the D.C. area. His approach is consistent, typically seeking silent partners to finance the down payment for a property and construction loan while he serves as the general contractor and contract purchaser.

Yet Razjooyan has burned bridges with the people financing his endeavors as they've learned he's largely uninterested in hewing to the letter of the law, two lawsuits filed against Razjooyan by former business partners allege.

One of those suits, filed by a father-son duo investing in a remodel of buildings on 31st St SE and Wayne Place SE – at least one of which rented to a voucher program participant for more than $2,200 per month as recently as last year – characterized Razjooyan's behavior as "a made-for-television story of intentional deception and criminal conduct." (Razjooyan and the plaintiffs settled the case.)

In a separate project, court documents say, Razjooyan worked with another investor to embark on a large project: buying, remodeling, and leasing out two investment properties in D.C. Through mutual contacts, he knew of a couple living in Virginia, Ron and June Broadwell, who wanted to make a smart investment that could help fast-track their retirement. As the couple would allege in a 2017 lawsuit they filed in D.C. Superior Court against Razjooyan (and his mother, his close friend, and his wife), the plan soon proved disastrous.

[He] came up with the idea of renting the property to the DC Housing Authority to maximize rental income and to create a stable revenue stream.

Per his own recounting of their arrangement in court, Razjooyan promised the couple that if they provided a down payment to buy the properties and secure construction loans – for a duplex on Victor Street N.W. and an apartment complex on 51st Street, N.E. – he would take care of everything else, from finalizing the purchases to overseeing construction and managing the buildings.

Razjooyan also planned, his attorney told the court in 2018, on moving existing tenants out of the building and finding voucher tenants to move in. "[He] came up with the idea of renting the property to the D.C. Housing Authority to maximize rental income and to create a stable revenue stream," his attorney wrote to the court.

In his initial business plan, the Broadwells say in their suit, Razjooyan also proposed adding more bedrooms to existing units at the 51st Street properties. This could get them dramatically higher rent payments from the government, which calculates its rental caps based on the number of bedrooms in an apartment, not the square footage. A landlord leasing a 500-square-foot apartment with two bedrooms in Brightwood, for example, could command $2,400 for that unit, while a studio of the same size would get only $1,300.

Housing contracts between the DC Housing Authority and the LLC that owns the 51st St. building, obtained by DCist/WAMU, show that the city has rented units there to low-income tenants at rates of up to $1,900 a month.

The Broadwells would ultimately allege that Razjooyan embezzled $150,000 in rental income from the 51st Street properties for his own benefit; charged at least $100,000 in personal expenses to their personal credit cards; and performed "construction so illegal and shoddy that [D.C.] has ordered much of it to be torn down in what it has described as one of the most egregious violations ever seen."

The couple alleged further that Razjooyan used between $300,000 and $500,000 in construction loans to expand his burgeoning real-estate empire. (In a filing with DC Superior Court, Razjooyan called the claim that he took $500,000 in construction funds "patently false" and said that "an unfortunate series of events, perpetuated by the Plaintiffs' interference, have delayed construction progress." He also settled with the Broadwells; DCist/WAMU's requests for comment from their lawyers went unanswered.)

Meanwhile, Razjooyan kept adding to his real estate portfolio, maintaining a growing list of property' addresses on a whiteboard in the back of his 51st Street office, the Broadwells say, like trophies in a display case.

But it's difficult to track them.

Chief Operating Officer Rachel M. Joseph tells DCist/WAMU that the agency's records "do not reflect any landlords" under the name Sam Razjooyan, although DCist/WAMU separately obtained housing contracts between LLCs governed by Razjooyan and the agency.

DCist/WAMU asked the DC Housing Authority whether it has a mechanism in place to prevent it from executing Housing Choice Voucher Program contracts with developers like Razjooyan, who have a scattered history of managing buildings with documented code violations. DCHA's Joseph said only that DCHA conducts an inspection prior to any participant moving into a new unit, and that it "[doesn't] have any direct information" about whether there are outstanding fines for housing code violations.

While the housing authority has drafted extensive new contract procurement guidelines that lay out when it can stop doing business with poor performing contractors, those guidelines don't appear to apply to the kinds of contracts that landlords execute with housing choice voucher recipients. Instead, those landlords are subject to local contracting regulations, like D.C.'s "Clean Hands" mandate, which stipulates that agencies – including DCHA – deny licenses or contracts to those who owe debts of more than $100 to the city.

But because business operators often create single-purpose LLCs to manage property acquisitions – a way to reflect changing rotations of investors involved in any given real estate project – it's possible for property managers with poor performance histories to evade meaningful scrutiny from regulators. (Under a law that went into effect in 2020, business owners are required to register the names of most partners with D.C.'s business licensing agency, but that doesn't always happen.)

At 4305 Wheeler Road SE, emails from Razjooyan to DCHA executives show he has solicited the agency to lease all 42 units to voucher holders. The LLC that owns the building, registered to Razjooyan's home address, owes more than $26,235 in fines for housing-code violations on the four-building complex.

The same is true for three other newly "renovated" buildings that Razjooyan is trying to lease to the Housing Authority: As of mid-January 2023, LLCs tied to Razjooyan have been assessed at least $21,000 in fines for an 11-unit apartment building at 4480 C Street, S.E.; more than $57,400 for a sprawling apartment complex at 4559-4569 Benning Road S.E.; and, as of Feb. 2022 at least $25,400 in fines for a 12-unit apartment at 5058 Astor Place, S.E. (Joseph says there are currently two units active in the housing choice voucher program across these buildings.)

Razjooyan provided no comment on the fines assessed to these LLCs. In an email to DCist/WAMU, Razjooyan says that "out of the properties I have an interest in, their purchase was from owner/operators who have had long standing issues maintaining the properties, leading them to bankruptcy and receivership. These properties needed extensive renovation at a considerable expense, but over time, and with significant effort, the condition of these properties have greatly improved."

III.

DCist/WAMU has identified nine real estate businesses cashing in on this business model, using buyouts to clear rent-stabilized apartment buildings of existing tenants, then explicitly soliciting voucher holders in public marketing materials; most have acquired between three and nine buildings each.

Anita Ballantyne, a program manager at Housing Counseling Services – a local organization that receives money from the D.C. government to help mediate the sale of apartment buildings under the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act – says that while this business model is nothing new, it has become appreciably more common in recent years. Developers who use this business model have represented the "vast majority" of TOPA cases her organization has managed in the last year, she says.

In marketing materials for a complex on 63rd St. NE in Deanwood, provided to DCist/WAMU by someone with access who asked to remain anonymous, executives from real estate agency Greysteel boast: "Value-Add Opportunity: The Property offers new ownership the ability to raise rents by leasing units to the Housing Choice Voucher Program tenants upon turnover. Current rents can grow upwards of 50%."

Another flier issued by an agent at Greysteel for a 12-unit building on Irving St. NE offers: "New ownership can continue the reconfiguring of two bedrooms to three bedroom units. HCVP rates for three bedrooms ... are $2,628." Yet another, for an apartment complex in Hill East for sale by Marcus & Millichap, says: "The current gross potential income is approximately $13,500 per month with rents over 50% below nearby renovated one-bedroom market-rate units. The property...features the city's highest voucher rates for one-bedroom units, $2,467 (tenant pays utilities), and $2,648 (owner pays utilities)." Spokespeople for Greysteel and Marcus & Millichap didn't return DCist/WAMU's requests for comment.

Developers have also targeted major commercial areas in Ward 1 like Georgia Avenue NW and Park Road NW. (In the course of reporting this story, real estate company District Growth acquired my old apartment building on Park Road NW., offering tenants $32,500 buyouts; several seniors who spent their adult lives there ultimately moved out.)

In a phone call with DCist/WAMU, Adam Lobene, a partner of District Growth, says he believes this business model solves housing problems, giving developers a financially viable way to renovate often-dilapidated buildings. Because D.C.'s TOPA law allows tenants to weigh in on who buys their building and what benefits they'd like to see from a sale, "the system is working pretty well for tenants that are in there," Lobene says.

"I can only speak for my experience, but the buildings we've been purchasing, most have been in disrepair. The tenants don't want to live in those buildings ... and they're looking for a better solution," Lobene says. He says his company is investing $11 million in the renovation of its building on Park Road, which it ultimately plans on marketing to renters with and without housing vouchers. "Tenants are the ones dictating how the process goes. [And] in order to renovate a building and bring it up to code and make it livable for everybody, it requires an investment." (Lobene says District Growth as an entity has effectively dissolved, and that some of its operations will continue under the name American Housing.)

Many of these companies are offering tenants in newly acquired buildings staggering sums to move out, an indication of how much they believe the units could be worth long term using this business model. One source with knowledge of a building sale on Colorado Avenue, who requested anonymity to speak freely about it, says that two such companies – Petra Development and DC Nachito – engaged in a bidding war with tenants over buyout offers. Tenants ultimately accepted Nachito's $70,000 buyouts to vacate the building in exchange for purchasing rights, according to the source.

Petra is now selling the entirety of its 11-building portfolio; a slide deck advertising the deal, obtained by DCist/WAMU, notes that "tenancy throughout the portfolio is exclusively through the Housing Choice Voucher Program." Spokespeople for Petra and DC Nachito did not return DCist/WAMU's requests for comment.

The ultimate effect of this buyout-voucher model is, counterintuitively, to diminish the city's supply of rent-stabilized, affordable housing: D.C. loses one more unit of affordable housing for every voucher used to pay someone's way in a rent stabilized building, for as long as that tenant chooses to live there.

"There's something inherently nonsensical in [this] – taking all of our older, rent controlled, naturally occurring affordable housing stock in the city, and allowing a system that takes those tenants and puts them back in the housing market looking for [other] affordable housing, so that we can house voucher holders," Ballantyne says.

The mechanisms meant to incentivize property managers to rent to voucher holders – an attempt to counter the very real and pervasive discrimination against them – end up multiplying the harm.

The chief executive of a Michigan-based real estate investment firm, Red Oak Capital Holdings, described the business model in detail during a 2022 real estate conference, noting that the model is enticing specifically because of the additional revenue that investors can recoup from high voucher reimbursement rates. "D.C., from what we've seen, is the best at this program," the executive, Gary Bechdel, said. "They have the most money."

Developers take buildings that rent "at fairly low [levels]... and then re-letting those through the DC Housing Authority's program at higher rents, thereby creating a substantial increase in the value," Bechdel said. "It's a great structure for a developer."

He added: "As soon as the [redevelopment] is completed, they go to the DC Housing Authority, which has a waiting list of roughly 10,000 families that are waiting for these units, and they're literally full the next day. I mean, it's a phenomenal program."

DCHA Director Brenda Donald defended the agency's voucher payment practices as recently as last year. It wasn't until a Washington Post story found that the agency spends vastly more money on its vouchers than market rate dictates that Donald acknowledged DCHA's overpayments, telling the paper, "We are going to fix all of this." A spokesperson for HUD confirmed to DCist/WAMU that the agency "will require DCHA to repay, from non-federal sources, any federal funds that were expended by DCHA in violation of federal regulations or laws."

The attempt to wrangle this problem comes as the DC Housing Authority faces yet another crisis of confidence, sparked by a Sept. 2022 report from HUD that characterized the agency as having the worst public housing occupancy rate in the country, among other management and program administration issues.

A spokesperson for the Executive Office of the Mayor wrote in an emailed statement to DCist/WAMU that "Our vision for DCHA is that it functions properly to provide residents with safe, dignified, and affordable housing – not just in moments of crisis or after years of waiting, but as part of our regular housing continuum. The purpose of creating a streamlined reform board was to ensure that DCHA is better equipped to address the issues raised by HUD in the short-term and to set the agency up for success in the long-term."

The DCHA board's new structure, the spokesperson said, allows the agency "to move quickly to offer housing to people on the waitlist and to address other issues flagged by HUD. It is our expectation that these updates are not part of a temporary blitz of improvements for the agency, but a permanent shift in the expectations and operations of DCHA."

But questions remain about HUD's ability or willingness to keep DCHA on a tight leash. A report published in early March by HUD's inspector general dinged the federal agency's oversight of local voucher programs, concluding that, across the country, HUD "lacked assurance that [public housing authorities' housing choice vouchers] met their intended objectives, which include assisting the maximum number of eligible families with obtaining affordable and decent rental units at the correct subsidy cost."

Ousted DC Housing Authority board member Bill Slover told DCist/WAMU that he asked a HUD executive last year why the DC Housing Authority was still classified as a high performing agency with a status called "Moving to Work," which allows well managed public housing authorities to use HUD funding in more flexible ways.

"Their response was, 'Yeah, well, if we took your designation off, we'd have to put you on the road to receivership tomorrow,'" Slover recalls, referencing the term for a federal takeover of the agency. "I mean, that's a crazy response. That was a year ago. And so here we are a year later: The same metrics exist. The same occupancy rate; the same rent collection rate; the same major metrics that they use to measure other agencies. None of those have improved."

In response to a list of questions about HUD's oversight of the DC Housing Authority, a spokesperson for the agency said only that it "continues to work with DCHA to address the findings, recommendations and observations" from its report, and that if it fails to comply with the corrective actions, "HUD has a number of enforcement actions available."

Amid that turmoil, DCHA's inertia in reigning in its spending on vouchers has allowed predation of rent stabilized buildings to flourish, and the pull to redevelop them is so strong that money is flowing in from other states to do so. Some of Razjooyan's larger acquisitions were made with the help of national real-estate finance companies that specifically target multifamily properties in low-income neighborhoods.

Red Oak, for example, financed a $3 million acquisition of the 14-unit Chesapeake Apartments in January 2021, with the stated goal of doing business with the DC Housing Authority's housing choice voucher program. (The mortgage designates the borrower as 400 Chesapeake St LLC, with Razjooyan signing for the LLC.)

Months later, Red Oak provided nearly $10 million to finance the purchase of the complex on Wheeler Road; according to emails sent by Razjooyan to program directors at the DC Housing Authority and obtained by DCist/WAMU, he has since discussed leasing the building out to the agency. A spokesperson for Red Oak declined to comment on the company's transactions or relationship with Razjooyan.

"This is a borrower for whom we have closed multiple transactions and we are confident in their ability to expand the asset via a conversion to three-bedrooms," a Red Oak Capital press release announcing the Chesapeake deal said.

IV.

In Rashida Dinkins' 300-square-foot basement efficiency, directly underneath Andre Hunter at 4001 1st Street, S.E., smoke still hangs in the air.

For 11 years the apartment has been a small refuge for the 47-year-old D.C. native, who pays $480 a month for it and ekes out a living as an Uber driver. She rarely had issues with the building before Razjooyan took it over in 2019, but like her neighbors, says "It's been shenanigans ever since."

While apartment building sales and tenant buyouts are rarely pleasant experiences for the renters who have to uproot their lives and move, Razjooyan's acquisitions are particularly distressing for the tenants who decline buyouts, occupants of his buildings say.

In interviews with DCist/WAMU, exasperated tenants listed dozens of examples of negligence from Razjooyan; many of these tenants decided to stay anyway because they didn't have the money or physical ability to relocate easily.

Ameshia Stukes, a young mom who lived in one of the buildings Razjooyan manages on W St. SE, told me that she wasn't able to use her bathroom sink for more than a year – and that water sometimes rained from the ceiling – because of plumbing issues prompted by construction work on her building. "I didn't have the luxury to leave," she said.

Elderly tenants at the Wheeler Road complex were left without air-conditioning in the summer of 2021, when the building sold and Razjooyan began overseeing construction on the property; they only ever received a box fan to compensate, according to a family member of one tenant who requested anonymity to avoid retribution from Razjooyan.

In response to DCist/WAMU's questions about maintenance requests, Razjooyan wrote in an email, "Generally I can tell you that tenant repairs are performed in a timely manner, once they are reported. Tenants are given an office line, email, and messaging line to notify management regarding repair requests. Once every notice is received, repairs are scheduled at the earliest opportunity. Some issues are created by unforeseen circumstances, which cannot be prevented, but are addressed with every possible resource in a timely manner."

At 4001 1st St. SE, too, Razjooyan himself offered some tenants $1,500 buyouts to move after the building sold in 2019. Some did, leaving Razjooyan's contractors free to undertake construction work on the 55-year-old building. Others, like Hunter, stayed, knowing that they'd never be able to find another apartment in the District for a comparable price — $614 a month for his apartment, less than a third of the $2,000 average cost for an apartment of that size in D.C.

I told him he would never live like this. So why should I?

In 2020, the built-in exhaust fan in Dinkins' kitchen caught on fire, sending black smoke through the room and leaving scorch marks across the ceiling. Her repeated calls to Razjooyan's emergency maintenance line went unanswered.

After the fire came a flood. On a Monday in the last week of February 2022, she noticed brown water rising up from her toilet and tub. Over the course of the day, it slowly climbed to the rim of the bowl, and by the time she woke up on Tuesday, gallons of sewage were flowing into her bathroom—just feet from her bed—and spilling into the rest of the carpeted unit. Frantically ringing the property manager at 9:30 a.m. for a plumber, Dinkins says that nobody showed up to help her until well into the evening. Shortly after a maintenance man arrived, she says, he told her that he needed to leave to get a drink and a cigarette; he never came back.

With the help of a friend, she mopped up the fecal water in her apartment, then spent days scrubbing feces from her closet and walls. She was, she says, on the verge of having a nervous breakdown.

Razjooyan's proposed solution was to move her into his 51st St. apartment, but Dinkins says that she's heard awful things about the conditions there, too, from the maintenance workers who come to both buildings. She'd rather live with the devil she knows.

"I told him he would never live like this," she says. "So why should I?"

A year later, the walls are still lightly splattered in brown. Many of Dinkins' belongings are piled into big plastic bags in the corner of the unit, next to the bed that very nearly takes up the whole apartment. Above her two-burner stove, soot streaks across the low ceiling.

Like others in her building, Dinkins has thought about leaving. But there's simply nothing else she can afford. Like many of Razjooyan's tenants, she's more or less trapped where she is, waiting for renovations she knows will never come.

Story editing: Natalie Delgadillo and Bill Hogan

Audio editing: Deanna Hackney

This story has been updated to correct the amount of Andre Hunter's rent at 4001 1st Street.

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