Last year, following a tour of buildings where tenants successfully used the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act to improve their housing, At-Large Councilmember Robert White was bullish on the long-standing law.

“It is clear that this tool has been successful at preserving and producing affordable housing for residents in different parts of the city,” White told the Informer in February 2024, adding: “In the coming months, I plan to explore how to strengthen TOPA to both benefit residents and increase affordable housing.” 

He added that he planned to assess how to implement a set of recommendations in a report by the Coalition (formerly the Coalition for Nonprofit Housing and Economic Development).

But by April of this year, as White was standing before a room full of landlords, he was singing a different tune. The chair of the D.C. Council’s Committee on Housing, and former (and likely future) candidate for mayor, aligned himself with the group’s long-held opposition to what has been a cornerstone of tenant rights in D.C.

The Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act, or TOPA, has been law since 1980. It gives tenants the right of first refusal to purchase their building if their landlord decides to sell, or more commonly, the ability to assign their rights to another party.

The law has been a thorn in the side of D.C. landlords almost since its inception, and now there could be momentum to effectively gut it, driven by anecdotal claims that TOPA hinders investment in multifamily building construction.

Mayor Muriel Bowser’s Rebalancing Expectations for Neighbors, Tenants, and Landlords (RENTAL) Amendment Act would eliminate TOPA rights for broad swaths of market-rate and low-income tenants. It would also exempt ownership transfers involving new limited partners—a maneuver that some property owners exploit for profit, sometimes without tenants’ knowledge.

During his meeting with landlords, White said TOPA is “the biggest issue with investment in D.C. housing,” and that Bowser’s bill doesn’t go far enough. He instead advocated for a blanket 15-year exemption from the law for all new construction or substantial renovations.

The District issued its lowest share of multifamily housing permits in more than a decade, White said in support of his position. “It’s not just the big developers and landlords, it’s folks like the Washington Housing Conservancy, it’s folks like Amazon housing that are doing more affordable housing deals around us than in D.C.,” he said.

But tenant advocates strongly dispute the claims that TOPA is the cause of investor flight or the decrease in new construction, warning that it would be “reckless” to pass these “ambiguous new exemptions” in Bowser’s bill. They argue, broadly, that the proposed changes are based on anecdotal data and “flawed and dangerous” assumptions and would significantly gut tenants rights.

Even Amazon disputes some of White’s assertions.

Amazon spokesperson Maggie Sivon tells City Paper that the retail giant’s Housing Equity Fund has financed more than 3,000 units in D.C. (out of the total of 9,500 it’s created or preserved in the National Capital Region). Amazon has invested in D.C. as recently as April, when it provided an $11.6 million loan for a 90-unit affordable housing project in Shaw.

Near the end of the landlord meeting, White discussed his goal to quickly push the proposals through the legislative process.

“As soon as we get the budget from the mayor, I will propose a hearing date. If they say, ‘No,’ I’m going to come back to you and say, ‘I’m gonna need y’all to help lobby and to make sure we get a hearing.’ But I would like to get this passed before we go on recess,” White said.

Dean Hunter, founder of advocacy group Small Multifamily Owners Association, eagerly responded: “We appreciate you giving us that notice. We’re on notice, guys, we got to get ready.”

***

When City Paper requested the data that White is relying on to support his proposed changes to TOPA, his office provided three key sources: a Bisnow article, a report by the Washington DC Economic Partnership, and a 2025 report from the DC Policy Center. (City Paper owner Mark Ein sits on the Policy Center’s board.) Each paints a picture of investor uncertainty and a 79 percent drop in new construction.

“Some people … make programs more sacred than the people the programs are intended to help,” White told the room full of landlords last month. “If we look at the data, these changes to TOPA will not hurt the people who are trying to use TOPA. It will help them.”

Will Rich, co-author of the WDCEP report, acknowledges that the report doesn’t connect the decline in new construction to TOPA. Rich, who testified in support of the proposed bill, says in an email, “It’s industry knowledge that it takes longer to sell a building in DC compared to VA or MD because of TOPA. The report does not state the TOPA is the decline of construction starts.” 

The DC Policy Center report, which was based on an analysis of housing records, sales data, tenant association formations, and interviews with 13 “key stakeholders,” notes a significant challenge in evaluating TOPA’s effectiveness due to the lack of reliable data. Still, the report concluded that TOPA, while effective in smaller, older rent-controlled buildings, deters investment in newer, large multifamily housing due to delays, increased costs, and litigation risks. Those costs discourage long-term investment, leading to less new housing and rehabilitation.

The DC Policy Center’s report, “supported” in part by the Developer Roundtable, an unofficial developer advocacy group that has been long-standing proponents of the conclusions and recommendations that the report now makes. 

A 2023 draft of recommendations on a D.C. “comeback plan,” which was shared with City Paper, includes input from Erika Wadlington, vice president of policy and strategic affairs at the DC Building Industry Association, and Richard Lake, former chair of the Developer Roundtable and former president of DCBIA. The draft argues that newer buildings and those with affordability covenants are “inappropriately brought into” or “ensnared” in the TOPA process.

Liz DeBarros, CEO of DCBIA and former DC Policy Center director, has also advocated for targeting TOPA according to the type of building, noting in an October 2023 letter that “40% of transfer tax revenue comes from newer buildings while only 5% of TOPA transactions involve them.” 

The stakeholders interviewed for the final version of the Policy Center’s report include housing providers, investors, brokers, attorneys, and title agents, according to DC Policy Center Director of Policy and Research Emilia Calma. No tenant advocates were interviewed for the report, Calma has said.

The 13 interviewees were asked “if they were not investing in DC due to TOPA,” Calma says in an email to City Paper, and their responses support the conclusion that TOPA is causing investors to leave D.C.

Despite the claims that developers are disinvesting in D.C., the report’s results leave open another possibility: Some developers simply can’t compete in the D.C. market.

“Many affordable developers we talked to said that they were unable to match market rate offers, in particular the cash offers being made to tenants,” Calma says via email.

But those cash buyout offers have “very little to do with TOPA,” according to housing attorney Eric Rome, who testified during a recent Council hearing that those payments are primarily related to enticing tenants to vacate for renovations—a practice that would occur regardless of TOPA.

Missing from the list of resources that White’s office provided to City Paper is the 2023 Council-funded report from the Coalition. (His office did not respond to questions about why the study wasn’t listed as a source of data.) 

The Coalition report found that TOPA was successful in preserving affordable housing and empowering tenants, including the preservation of more than 16,000 affordable housing units and the formation of more than 425 tenant associations.

The researchers compiled a database of TOPA transactions from 2006 to 2020 using public reports, the Department of Housing and Community Development’s internal database, and records from the Coalition’s partners; they also gathered quantitative data on properties, sales, funding, and affordability covenants. The report also draws from 45 interviewees including developers, tenants, and legal services providers who have experience working with TOPA.

The study recommended increasing and expanding funding opportunities for tenants, strengthening tenants rights, rooting out bad actors, improving accessibility to information, enhancing data collection, and establishing a TOPA Improvement Task Force.

“The data set was incredibly comprehensive and overwhelmingly supportive of the idea that TOPA has been a really effective right that has met the goals of the legislation,” says Kathryn Howell, a prominent researcher on affordable housing and one of the contributors of the study.

Howell notes that while some high-profile individuals may have had negative experiences with TOPA, making policy decisions based on a few anecdotal experiences is problematic. 

“None of these developers would make a decision without good data, and so we can’t make decisions based on a few people’s experiences with TOPA,” she says. “We would never listen to a couple of tenants and say, ‘Oh, well, that’s true.’ … So I think that it’s really dangerous to make policy based on a couple of people’s experiences. Nobody in good policymaking, nobody in good business, makes a decision like that.”

***

In late May, about a month after White’s meeting with the group of landlords, he held a marathon 13-hour hearing covering a slew of bills, including Bowser’s proposed changes to TOPA.

Specifically, the mayor wants to carve out an exemption for buildings with existing affordability covenants and market-rate buildings that are newly constructed or were substantially renovated within the past 25 years. But there is significant confusion, based in part on the way the bill is drafted, over how landlords will show that their buildings qualify for the exemption.

(Ward 1 Councilmember Brianne Nadeau has introduced a competing bill that calls for a three-year exemption for newly constructed buildings and seeks to add tenant protections recommended by the Council-funded study, including accountability for bad actors and a transparency portal to track outcomes.)

At the hearing, developers argued that TOPA creates excessive delays, costs, and legal uncertainties in the building and sale of rental buildings, deterring investment and hindering new construction and preservation. They claimed TOPA’s unpredictability has caused investors to look outside of D.C. for more predictable markets.

Howell observes that the “talking points were very similar” in 1980 when TOPA was first implemented. The bigger threat to affordable housing construction, more broadly, she says, is that D.C. has reached its bond cap, the federal limit on the total dollar amount of certain tax-exempt bonds that a state or local government can issue. 

After the District reached its limit in 2023, affordable housing developers, who rely on the bonds to access crucial 4 percent low-income housing tax credits, were unable to obtain financing. The lack of federal funding “brought numerous shovel-ready affordable housing projects to a sudden, abrupt halt,” according to Cheryl Cort, policy director for the Coalition for Smarter Growth.

Cort stated in written testimony to White’s committee last year that “we should all be alarmed that little to no new rental housing projects are being financed as of August 2023—for an indefinite period. … Now dozens of affordable housing projects—that we and thousands of DC residents and tenant associations fought for—are being sold off, defaulting, or stranded in an untenable limbo.” 

James Campbell, principal at Somerset Development, says while the bond crisis has been catastrophic for affordable housing construction, TOPA has no connection. 

Campbell, whose recent experience with TOPA would be considered a negative outcome by the DC Policy Report, does not agree that tenants should forfeit their TOPA rights just because a developer lost out on a deal.

“Tenants have the right to make their own choice on what’s best for them,” says Campbell, whose firm lost its ownership of the Urban Village, a property it had owned for more than two decades, after tenants opted to assign their TOPA rights to another developer. (Somerset aimed to expand the property under a new ownership structure, which triggered tenants’ TOPA rights.) 

Campbell believes some TOPA reform is required to attract private investment back into the District. But he believes investors are pulling away from the District not because of the law itself, but due to the tolling of TOPA during the pandemic, which temporarily suspended the legal deadlines for tenants to exercise their rights. By pausing the clock, lawmakers intended to protect tenants from losing their rights if they were unable to organize or secure financing during the public health emergency. 

But the pause lasted into 2022 and “just killed the appetite for those Wall Street funds and private investment funds” that typically have five- to seven-year life horizons, Campbell says.

Campbell says the lack of government funding in the District prompted Somerset to make a strategic, and, he hopes, temporary pivot to Maryland, where accessible tax-exempt bonds, 4 percent tax credits, energy funding, and philanthropic support made deals feasible. 

While White and the DC Policy Center report have minimized the impact of these proposed amendments on tenants, the vagueness and fluidity in Bowser’s bill that spells out how a building would qualify for the 25-year exemption has some housing advocates worried that it will completely erase TOPA’s protections.

By the end of the hearing, even some councilmembers were confused. 

Ward 3 Councilmember Matthew Frumin raised concerns about landlords who might attempt to raise rents in order to qualify as “market rate” under the parameters laid out in the law. When he asked DHCD Director Colleen Green how the administration will determine whether a building qualifies at market rate, and is therefore exempt from TOPA, she was unable to provide a definitive answer.

“I don’t think there’s one path to getting to what the requirement is,” she said.

Frumin was unsatisfied and suggested that he would like a clearer explanation in writing. “I’m more confused now than I thought I was earlier today,” he said.

This story is part of a reporting project with The New York Times, The Baltimore Banner, and Stanford University’s Big Local News. These organizations investigated millions of death records to reveal the extent to which drug overdose deaths have affected a generation of Black men in dozens of cities across America. The 51st is one of seven partner newsrooms reporting on the opioid crisis among Black men born between 1951-1970 in cities across the U.S. The data analyzed in this partnership included all U.S. jurisdictions that recorded more than 200 overdoses from 2018-2022. It was reported and photographed with support from Spotlight DC.

Almost three decades had passed since 78-year-old Lance Ward last used heroin, but depression had deepened in his old age. While he’d been out for about seven years, decades of incarceration — and the drug deals and armed robberies that landed him there — cast a heavy shadow. Plus, even after all this time, the cravings still haunted him.

When Ward settled into the passenger seat of an old friend’s car on the D.C.-Maryland border earlier this year, it didn’t seem like a high-stakes decision to use again — he was just looking for a little relief. He’d heard rumors about fentanyl, a synthetic opioid magnitudes stronger than heroin that had overtaken the drug supply in recent years, but he was a veteran drug user. In his heyday, Ward says he routinely used an uncut heroin that he would’ve diluted 15 or 20 times before dealing it.

“I used the pure version of it, so I never thought that some of this stuff that’s out here now could hurt,” says Ward. “Guys who came up like I did in the heroin days — ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s — that drug made you feel good, and when you come out of prison, you think it’ll make you feel good again.”

The next thing Ward remembers is waking up in a hospital bed, surrounded by a frenzy of blue-uniformed medical workers scrambling to save his life. He had overdosed on a single hit. If not for his friend slamming on the gas and rushing him to the hospital, it’s unlikely he would have survived.

“All it takes is one mistake, that’s all it takes,” says Ward of using heroin today – which in many cases means using fentanyl, intentionally or not. Fentanyl has become so ubiquitous in drug supplies that in 2023, it contributed to 96% of  D.C.’s fatal overdoses.

Ward survived his overdose, but many of his contemporaries haven’t been as lucky. Black men in their mid-fifties to mid-seventies are dying of opioid overdoses at a higher rate than anyone else in the city and — according to a new national analysis — more than anyone else in the country. 

Between 2018 and 2022, D.C. saw 2,289 of these men die of overdoses. According to a data analysis by the Baltimore Banner, The New York Times, and Big Local News, Black men born between 1951 and 1970 accounted for nearly 38% of the city’s opioid fatalities in 2022, while only making up about 4% of D.C.’s total population. This disparity is worse than in any other jurisdiction in the data analysis. For context, Baltimore, which has the highest overdose death rate of any major American city in U.S. history, has a smaller overdose death disparity among this cohort.  

The problem for these men spans decades. Many of the men overdosing now were longtime heroin users who suffered the worst of D.C.’s heroin epidemic in the ‘60s and ‘70s. While the media coverage around opioids — and accountability for the pharmaceutical companies that kicked off an addiction crisis among largely white prescription pill users —  has spurred federal action and attitude shifts, the realities for older Black men continue to go largely unaddressed. 

“Black men didn't just start dying,” says Mark Robinson, a 66-year-old who grew up in D.C. and runs a needle exchange and harm reduction services program at Family Medical Counseling Service in Southeast. “We've been dying for decades as a direct result of opioid use disorder. " 

Robinson estimates he’s personally lost 50 people to overdoses, including his best friend and college room mate last year. 

D.C. recorded a decline in overdose deaths for the first time in six years at the beginning of 2024, though it’s unclear if that trend has sustained through the rest of the year. (The city’s most recent available data only tracks deaths through June 2024.)  Still, the emergency among this cohort of Black men appears to be escalating: over the past five years, overdoses among this group have increased at the second-fastest rate in the country, behind only Chicago.

While D.C. has implemented various programs, initiatives, and studies to tackle its opioid emergency in the past 10 years, few solutions have targeted the most vulnerable men. D.C. is receiving millions of dollars from lawsuit settlements with pharmaceutical companies for opioid use prevention, but none of the funds are earmarked for the group that is far and away the most likely to die of an overdose. 

Advocates and historians say this repeats a long pattern of neglect for this generation of Black men.

“Even if [the city] were doing a better job focusing on the poor, I doubt that the first people on their list would be a bunch of old guys … who nobody even recognizes exist anymore,” says George Derek Musgroves, who co-wrote Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation's Capital. “So those guys sort of limp along with a tattered social safety net that they continue to fall through and never really get the type of intervention that will allow them to actually get off of their addiction or to start a new life.”

The situation became more fatal as fentanyl overwhelmed D.C.’s drug supply in the mid and late 2010s — and as the city failed to respond adequately. In 2018, a Washington Post investigation found that D.C. fell woefully behind in distributing overdose reversal drug Narcan compared to other cities with comparable opioid crises, and that the city had failed to execute a federally-funded initiative intended to target long-time heroin users with treatment. 

“Our government did not address the problem seriously,” says Dr. Edwin C. Chapman, who has been treating this generation of opioid users for nearly 20 years in his office in Northeast D.C.

While fentanyl is prescribed and administered in doctor’s offices to treat pain, it’s also illegally manufactured in the form of powder, spray, pills, and liquids. It’s 50 times stronger than heroin and can be lethal in doses as small as three milligrams. In 2015, fentanyl accounted for just 20% of fatal drug overdoses in D.C. In five years, it was responsible for 91% of D.C.’s fatal overdoses.

In a statement, D.C.’s Department of Behavioral Health said that it has “put in place over the past five years all the elements of evidence-based practices and best practices that research and experts say will reduce opioid misuse and overdose deaths.” These include, according to DBH, increasing supported housing and employment services for chronic users, providing free rides to treatment, and expanding the availability of Narcan. 

“The population of our residents most impacted by illegal drug use historically has been middle-aged African American men so it is no surprise that this population continues to be impacted,” reads the statement. It adds that Black men are also disproportionately represented in treatment and support services. 

Advocates say the necessary government solutions for men in this population require going beyond treating the addiction; these men survived not only the onset of the heroin epidemic, but the subsequent crack epidemic, the war on drugs, mass incarceration, and the city’s ongoing and breakneck gentrification. These decades of financial precarity, incarceration, and housing insecurity have impacted not only their physical health, but their mental and emotional well-being. 

“Most of our patients… because of the history of racism and oppression, are using drugs. Not because they got it from the doctor's office, but because of trying to relieve mental health stress,” Chapman says, who refers to what this group has experienced as collective post-traumatic stress disorder.

“Many have been sexually abused, many have been in households where there’s drug abuse and alcoholism, unemployment, homelessness,” he says, adding that many of them witnessed shootings and murders from a young age. “They don’t articulate it as such, but that’s what it is — it’s all a part of trauma.”

Decades ago, a different D.C. 

Ward started using heroin the first time he was incarcerated. He was in his twenties in the late 1960s and a friend at Prince George’s County Detention Center had a way to get drugs inside. When he was first locked up, he says he hardly ever heard about heroin; by the time he got out a few years later, he was using regularly – and it felt like everyone else in his neighborhood was too.

“In a period of a couple years, it blew up,” says Ward. “Everything kind of flipped.”

Those who remember the heroin epidemic of the 1960s say the drug hit certain D.C. neighborhoods, Shaw and U Street among them, like a freight train. The Vietnam War had brought an influx of highly addictive heroin from Southeast Asia – along with many Vietnam War veterans who had gotten hooked while serving – into several American cities. D.C. was among the hardest hit.

“People started experimenting with it and liked the mood-altering feeling that came with them putting the drugs in their system,” says Joe Henery, a 77-year-old Black man who started using heroin in the early 1970s. “That opened a Pandora’s box that is still open to this day.” 

Henery grew up in the city when it was a central hub of the Civil Rights Movement. He remembers regularly seeing leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Stokley Carmichael near his house on U Street. 

But even in the aftermath of desegregation fights, many Black residents in D.C. faced immense financial disparity and discrimination. The median income for Black people in the city was still 70% of their white counterparts’, and housing discrimination meant Black residents paid 50%  more than white residents for similar housing, writes Musgrove and his co-author Chris Myers Asch in Chocolate City. Crime also soared in D.C. around the same time with homicides doubling between 1966 and 1969. 

Orphaned at age 10, Henery supported himself as a teenager by robbing banks, executing six stick-ups before he got caught. “The streets gave you a sense of belonging, gave you a sense of family, gave you a sense of somebody caring about you,” he says.

When he finished a seven-and-a-half-year stint in prison for a heist, the friends he robbed with had mostly turned to dealing heroin. When he first joined them, he was committed to not using himself.  

“But as time goes on, you can only live in an environment for so long and not do what the environment dictates that everybody else is doing,” he says of the start of a thirty-year-long relationship with the drug.

University of Maryland Professor Brian G. Gilmore grew up near the Fort Totten Metro — and alongside the heroin epidemic of the late 1960s and ‘70s. While he never used it himself, he knew people who were addicted and witnessed the grip it had on certain pockets of the city. He’s had friends pass away from heroin overdoses, and he’s also sat at sober-anniversary events for men in recovery from their addictions.

In 2019, Gilmore published a paper comparing the city’s heroin crisis of the 1960s and 1970s with the government’s response to the current opioid epidemic. According to Gilmore’s research, from 1965-1970, the rate of heroin use in Black residents ages 14-25 tripled, far outpacing the rate for the rest of the city’s population. 

This is the same generation of men who make up the majority of D.C.’s overdose deaths today. Some of these young men were returning from Vietnam, according to Gilmore, while others were simply trying to survive a difficult economic landscape. 

“If you didn't go to college, you went to the military or you got a job. But D.C. is not a trade town. The trade in D.C. government is bureaucracy … so if you're not working in government bureaucracy or something related to it, the opportunities dry up,” Gilmore says. “Growing up here, you saw that — you saw a large number of Black men lacking in opportunity.”

The city’s government services to address these issues looked nothing like what we have today; during the 1960s and early 1970s, D.C. was still under federal control without an elected mayor or local council. Asch and Musgroves write that with the District’s budget still dictated by Congress, Southern segregationist members retaliated against the advances of the Civil Rights Movement by denying D.C. much of the money and services needed to address the heroin epidemic, poverty, and rising crime, focusing instead on police budgets. The following decades brought much of the same, ramping up mass incarceration in response to the city’s drug problems.

“Nixon, Reagan, Bush, Bush, Clinton, all of them pretty much took the same approach: lock them up,” Gilmore says. “It wasn't any idea of helping people get off heroin; the approach was not treatment, it was not the betterment of the person.” 

Barriers to recovery  

On a recent Saturday, a group of older Black men met at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church on 15th Street, not far from Logan Circle. It’s fitting that they meet in the church regularly, because many of them say it's only through divine intervention that they’re still alive.

Henery, who hasn’t used in decades, and Ward, who hasn’t used since his overdose 11 months ago, are both part of the group, which calls themselves the Optimistic Gentleman and Ladies, or OG’s, for short. Much of their energy these days is spent doing outreach in schools and on street corners, trying to divert young people from the forces that landed them in prison and on drugs.

“Living in a disenfranchised neighborhood where there’s not a lot of people who are sincerely trying to help you … people who look down on you and they never want to accept you,” says Ward. “I don’t want to see another kid go through what I’ve been through.”

When it comes to drug use, however, it’s their contemporaries who are most vulnerable to an overdose. Barriers like unstable housing, medication dosage limits, and a lack of affordable medical services make just surviving difficult — let alone recovering from a decades-long addiction. 

“It’s almost like a death wish [to use at this age], because you’re old now, your body can’t take that punishment like it used to when we were much younger,” says Horace Fletcher, a member of the group who used heroin every day for 30 years. He’s been sober for two decades now but he has close friends who still use regularly.

Two of his friends live at the same retirement home, where he says dealers often hang around when they know social security checks are about to drop. “When they get their check the first day of the month, it's on, it's hoppin’ and poppin’ in those places,” adds Henery in response.

When one of his friends barely survived an overdose last year, Fletcher was dismayed that it didn’t deter him from continuing to use. It wasn’t until the friend developed mobility issues this year that he was forced to quit — it was too difficult to get to his dealer using a walker.

“That’s what stopped him,” Fletcher says. “He couldn’t get to the drugs.”

Fletcher says that D.C.’s worsening housing crisis is another problem many drug users his age face. Starting next year, only 10 to 11 unhoused residents will receive a housing voucher each month — the lowest amount in nearly a decade.

“If you don’t have stability in terms of your living arrangement, and you’re already subject to addictive behavior, that’s a formula for disaster," Fletcher says.

According to data collected by DC Health, unhoused residents made up nearly 30% of all fatal overdoses in 2023. The majority of fatal overdoses occurred in wards 7 and 8. Certain neighborhoods in wards 5 and 6 are also hotspots, like Trinidad and the Southwest Waterfront. 

“A major component of healthcare is having a roof over your head,” Chapman says. “I've had patients who have had housing vouchers for 10 years and never got housing and died before they got housing.” 

Recently, one of his patients was sleeping on a mattress in the alley behind his office. 

Other impediments to treatments are less complex, according to Chapman. In addition to routine medical care, he prescribes his patients buprenorphine, a medication that staves off cravings for opioids. For years, D.C. government and insurance companies have limited how much doctors can prescribe, and how much of the medication can be covered — preventing some longtime heroin users from receiving the doses their bodies need to manage their cravings, according to Chapman. 

It took years of lobbying by Chapman and other advocates to get the city to up Medicaid limits this spring, but private insurance companies and Medicare and Medicare Advantage still regularly deny coverage of the doses his patients need to stay alive, he says.

“We lost a lot of patients who were on medication with buprenorphine, but were not comfortable and would drop out, or overdose and die,” Chapman says of patients on lower doses than they needed. 

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services did not respond directly to these allegations, but say that in 2025 they would begin paying for a new injectable buprenorphine product.

“Providing equitable access to health care services is a key priority for CMS, particularly for those in need of mental health and substance use disorder treatment," reads their statement.

Some new solutions, many of the same problems

The city’s response to today’s opioid crisis looks, on the surface, drastically different than 50 years ago. While opioid use remains criminalized — and Black residents are more likely to be penalized on drug charges than their white counterparts — the cultural perception of substance use is shifting (both in D.C. and nationwide) away from treating it as a moral failure that should be solved with incarceration, and instead as a medical condition that requires holistic solutions. 

And unlike in the '60s and '70s, D.C. now has its own social service departments, a strategic vision for reducing opioid fatalities, and crucially, the money to address the problems. In addition to the local dollars for DBH and DC Health, the city also receives federal money for substance use care. 

And after lawsuit settlements with pharmaceutical companies, D.C. has millions of dollars to spend on reducing opioid deaths. Over the next 18 years, the city is expected to receive more than $80 million from the settlements to put toward opioid-use interventions. As of this fall, they’ve used $14 million, according to the commission established to advise fund distribution.  

And yet, overdose deaths among these men have ticked up year-over-year — and health advocates have repeatedly criticized city leaders for a lackluster response to a deadly crisis. 

“There's no sense of urgency [by D.C. government] whatsoever in targeting Black men that are older,” says Ambrose Lane Jr., a health policy advocate who’s been working in the opioid space for years. He chairs the Opioid Solutions Working Group, an independent coalition of 28 organizations (including some government representatives) that meets monthly to develop and lobby for policy solutions.

But according to the city, Live Long D.C. (the name of D.C.’s strategic plan to reduce opioid fatalities), has “made progress to save and change lives.” Over the past five years, DBH estimates Narcan — which the city provides in schools, churches, and other targeted locations —  has reversed 16,000 overdoses. In 2023, peer support specialists in city hospitals linked nearly 1,500 individuals to treatment and 278 individuals were placed in recovery housing, according to a city report tracking Live Long D.C.’s achievements.  

But both Lane and Chapman say they have pushed the city to implement several evidence-backed solutions, sometimes to no avail. 

Chapman was appointed to the D.C. committee established to advise the city on how to spend its opioid settlement dollars, but resigned in frustration at how the funds were being handled, he says. He lobbied unsuccessfully for some of that money to go toward contingency management — a treatment program that gives financial incentives to patients in exchange for staying sober. He also wants the city to create a registry for people brought into hospitals when they overdose, so government workers and medical providers can be better equipped to help in the aftermath. Currently, he says it’s a “revolving door,” where patients are often discharged from the emergency department and jail without necessary follow-up care or resources. 

And while the increase in dosage caps for buprenorphine is helpful, Chapman maintains that the city is overlooking clear opportunities to save lives — namely by putting vulnerable patients in stable housing. He often takes it upon himself to pound the pavement, sometimes with members of the OGs, looking for available units his patients might be able to move into. He points to the tens of thousands of vacant properties in the city as proof that there’s just not enough political will to solve a central problem that keeps his patients unhoused and addicted.

“They found $500 million to give to the owner of the Capitals and the Wizards to renovate the basketball arena but they can't find money to house these folks," Chapman says. 

 Lane, who for years pushed the city to declare a public health emergency over opioids (which it finally did in 2023), says D.C. is missing more brick-and-mortar treatment and housing locations for men in impacted wards, and that many of the piece-meal solutions from the city don’t address the full scope of these mens’ realities, which often include financial insecurity, unemployment, housing insecurity, and other mental and physical health issues. He’s lobbying for the creation of a new office in the health department dedicated to health solutions for Black men. 

“Graduation rates among Black boys, homelessness among Black men, unemployment among Black men, all of those things are intertwined,” he says.  

City officials, though, are looking hopefully toward the coming year, after 2024 saw the first decline in overdoses in years. “We are keeping our foot on the gas—doubling down on what’s working and developing new strategies to address new challenges,” reads a DBH statement. As of June 2024, D.C. had recorded 196 fatal overdoses, a 24% decrease from that same point in 2023. Experts are still analyzing the cause of the downward shift.

And while some see it as a promising turn, it could be a sign that many of these men— who accounted for most of D.C.’s deaths over the years — are dying out. 

Henery says he only has two male friends he grew up with who are still alive today. Ward says that these days, he hears regularly about acquaintances who died from fentanyl overdoses — friends of friends around his age that he knew in the drug world, or people who were incarcerated at the same time as him. 

“There were people that had awesome potential and the drugs just took it away,” he says. 

Cristian Santos negotiated in good faith. When Yusef Scott started coming around 741 Longfellow St. NW to get the tenants’ approval to purchase their building, Santos, the tenants association president, took him at his word.

Scott entered into a contract to purchase the building for $6 million in September 2022, and returned with his partner, Ali “Sam” Razjooyan, and their construction manager, Oscar Portillo, a few months later. Scott promised tenants that they would make repairs to the building and improve property management services, among other things. Scott assured that no tenants would be forced to move out, but that those who chose to leave would receive payments ranging from $20,000 to $35,000, according to a development agreement shared with City Paper. Tenants who chose to remain would receive $1,000, the agreement said.

Scott’s courtship of tenants in the 41-unit, rent-controlled building stems from D.C.’s Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act, which gives tenants the right of first refusal to purchase their building if an owner wants to sell. The law also allows them to assign that right to a buyer of their choice, sometimes in exchange for an agreement to upgrade the building, fix housing code violations, or a monetary payment. TOPA, as it is known, is designed to prevent displacement and protect housing affordability.

Scott even provided an email with a glowing review that helped put tenants’ minds at ease about signing over their TOPA rights. In the email, someone named “Tina Flanigan” says she is a tenant in one of Scott’s other buildings on Good Hope Road SE (now Marion Barry Avenue SE). She reports that requests for repairs are typically completed within a day and writes that “Yusef and the managers are always available when we call.”

“That email gave us a sense of security,” Santos says. 

But after following the maze of real estate transactions in the past year, most of which were happening without tenants’ knowledge, the tenants at 741 Longfellow St. NW now believe Razjooyan masterminded a scheme to trick them out of their TOPA rights in order to buy their building without ever intending to honor the agreement, according to a lawsuit that tenants filed in D.C. Superior Court.

To this day, none of the promised repairs and upgrades have been made, none of the tenants have received any payments, and some have been threatened with eviction by a completely different owner who is refusing to honor the promises Scott made, according to the tenants’ lawsuit.

Even the email from “Flanigan” was fake.

“I don’t know who Yusef Scott is, but whoever wrote this email made it up,” the real Tina Flanagan tells City Paper. She does live at one of Razjooyan’s buildings on Marion Barry Avenue SE, but she says the email Santos received did not come from her email address, which contains the incorrect spelling of her name. Flanagan says Razjooyan has not responded to maintenance requests in her building for months.

Razjooyan has become a notorious character among local tenants and housing advocates. By his own count, he has amassed a portfolio of 54 buildings with 600 units in D.C. Multiple lawsuits from tenants accuse him of deceitful tactics and neglect. Many of them live in harrowing conditions and use housing vouchers to pay at least part of their rent. D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb is currently suing Razjooyan for “egregious housing code violations” at two complexes; Razjooyan’s associate Portillo (identified as Oscar Portillo Padilla in the filing) is named as a defendant in the case at Minnesota Commons, an 83-unit complex in Southeast; the tenant association there also filed suit against Portillo’s LLC for alleged TOPA violations.

“Razjooyan’s business model involves forcing tenants to live in deplorable, unsafe, horrific conditions that are shocking to the conscience,” Schwalb said in a statement. “No District resident should have to endure such treatment. The Office of the Attorney General will not allow slumlords, in order to line their pockets, to flout our laws, threaten District residents’ safety, or defraud the District’s housing programs while preying on the disadvantaged families those programs are intended to support.”

Razjooyan has not responded to requests for comment.

Of the 45 Razjooyan-affiliated properties that City Paper examined over the past three months, 28 are in default, including 19 currently in bankruptcy proceedings. Of the more than $70 million in debt extended by lenders on the defaulted loans, more than $30 million was loaned by TD Bank. And while Razjooyan has borne the brunt of the public’s ire, various lawsuits also accuse his circle of partners, including Portillo, Scott, and Jesper Nylen, of exploiting D.C. tenants and the rental housing market.

In the course of assembling his small empire, Razjooyan and his partners have been accused in various court proceedings and by investors and lenders of inflating appraisals, falsifying loan documents, and scamming tenants out of their TOPA rights.

Richard Balles, a developer and one of the defendants in the lawsuit filed by tenants at Longfellow Street NW, is now distancing himself from Razjooyan and his tactics. In a separate building where the two have worked together, Balles says Razjooyan installed doors in front of concrete walls to create the false impression that the building has more units—an apparent attempt to artificially inflate its value.

“I don’t know where Sam comes up with this bullshit,” Balles says.

On Loan

One page in Razjooyan’s playbook involves misleading lenders about the value of his properties. At 112 Wilmington Pl. SE, for example, Balles and Razjooyan refinanced with the help of a $10.1 million loan. A court-appointed receiver for the complex found 10 “full doors with unit numbers as well as doormats have been installed that lead to a wall of concrete blocks.

“This was likely to mislead the appraisers and lenders who analyzed the subject as having 52 dwelling units,” according to the receiver’s report included in a lawsuit filed by the lender. (A receiver is a court-appointed third party tasked with managing a property in default.)

The receiver also claims that Razjooyan submitted fraudulent leases through US Realty, the now-dissolved property management company, which, according to the attorney general, has operated without a license. In a court hearing, Razjooyan claimed that he only managed US Realty. The LLC’s corporate filings with the D.C. government name Scott as a beneficial owner. 

“They are 100% fraudulent documents noting rents in excess of $2,200/monthly while the leases in hand average just around $1,200 monthly,” the receiver notes in their report filed in court.

The receiver’s report says Balles “has been less than truthful to the receiver in his quest for property details.” But, the report notes, Balles has “put the blame on Razjooyan for mismanagement of the property.”

“When I talked to the lender, we’ve both seen a lot of things and we’ve seen fraud before, but I’ve never seen anything like this,” Balles tells City Paper, referring to the fake doors. He says he confronted Razjooyan about misleading the appraiser, and “Sam said, ‘We’ll get out of it, I have deals closing.’”

Fake doors and inflated rent rolls are not unique to the Wilmington property.

At 945 Longfellow St. NW, which is currently in bankruptcy and is advertised as a 13-unit building, City Paper observed 15 doors with apartment numbers on them. Unit 15, with the door slightly ajar, was clearly a storage room.

At 760 Chesapeake St. SE, the boiler room is labeled to look like apartment B4.

“I’m not sure why there’s an apartment number for the boiler room,” tenant Laura Askew says.

The building’s certificate of occupancy under the former owner only lists 13 units, and there is no record of an updated certificate for the building in Scout, the District’s database of housing information.

But in a loan document filed with the Recorder of Deeds in August, Razjooyan’s associate Portillo, who purchased the building through a single-entity LLC in February 2023, says the building contains 16 occupied units with identical monthly rents of $2,277 each. 

Askew, who says she pays $893 per month for her one-bedroom, rent-controlled unit, is conspicuously absent from the list of tenants. Askew’s neighbor Lolita Singh isn’t included on the list either; she pays $1,008 a month for her one-bedroom apartment, according to her lease. 

Shavaughn Plater, however, is listed as one of the tenants in the loan document filed with the Recorder of Deeds.

“They’re liars, I never lived there,” Plater tells City Paper.

Three years ago, Plater was a tenant at Razjooyan’s building on 51st Street SE, where she says there were constant leaks and flooding. “I would never live in another Sam building,” she says.

Like Plater, Melody Simms says she never lived at 760 Chesapeake St. SE. But she, too, is named in the same loan document filed with the Recorder of Deeds. Simms says she knows Razjooyan from her time living at 1620 21st St. SE. She says tenants were ordered to leave after Razjooyan dug under the building’s foundation in an attempt to add more units. The Department of Buildings issued an infraction in 2019 for an “excavation that resulted in unsafe condition of the whole building.” But when she tried to sue Razjooyan, she was unable to locate him or serve him with legal papers. “He’s horrible,” Simms says. “He only cares about money, and he cuts corners.”

US Realty, the property management company tied to Razjooyan, has pressured tenants who pay rent-controlled rates at 760 Chesapeake St. SE to sign new leases under threat of eviction. In October 2023, Askew received a notice to vacate, threatening her with eviction if she did not sign a new lease. She declined to do so because “the notice looked fake,” she says.

Singh, however, did sign the new lease, which explicitly states that it will not be renewed after one year.

It is unlawful to force tenants to sign a new lease, according to Joel Cohn, legislative director at the D.C. Office of the Tenant Advocate, who explains that D.C. tenants have the right to go month-to-month after an initial lease term expires.  

The new lease also includes an unusual buyout agreement that allows the landlord to buy Singh out of her lease with 30 days’ notice. 

This kind of agreement, Cohn says, is likely “one that the courts would decline to enforce for policy reasons having to do with the parties’ unequal bargaining power.”

Andrew McGuire, an attorney defending Portillo against the AG’s lawsuit, denies that Portillo falsified rent rolls or misled tenants. “US Realty is not the property manager for any properties that Mr. Portillo owns, and he is unaware of US Realty issuing any fake eviction notices or illegal leases,” McGuire says via email.

Balles says he intended to buy all of Razjooyan’s properties for cash and stock in his own publicly traded company. (Razjooyan told a judge during a bankruptcy hearing this summer that the transactions didn’t end up going through.)

“But everything was a lie,” Balles says now. “When all of these properties sell in bankruptcy court for a third of the loan, you don’t think those banks are going to open up their books and find out how this happened?”

Sol Kaspi, Balles’ partner and self-described “money man,” says he put up the capital to buy the properties. “I found out later that Sam lied and would embellish the appraisals,” Kaspi says, adding: “Sam is a nice guy, but he’s a con artist.”

Inflated property loans based on “doctored” building financial documents and valuations have attracted the attention of regulators Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. “The drop in property values caused by higher rates and a rise in defaults is exposing more of these schemes,” according to reporting by the Wall Street Journal.

John Griffin, a professor of finance at the University of Texas’ McCombs School of Business, tells WJS that landlords are often incentivized to inflate building profits so they can secure larger loans.

“It’s important to recognize that the way these transactions happen, it’s not like you sit at a local bank, and the banker talks to you about your project,” says Charles Marohn Jr., land use planner and founder of Strong Towns, a nonprofit housing advocacy organization. Even though loans for multifamily buildings involve hundreds of millions of dollars, he says, “they just happen. It’s astounding what is not done when [multifamily] real estate changes hands.”

Flip Fee Fi Fo Fum

“I told him, you’re talented, man, you can get deals. You need to do things right,” Balles says he advised Razjooyan. His first piece of advice: “Stop paying these insane assignment fees.”

The purchase and sale of real estate contracts has become a profitable business model for some. Middlemen sign over a contract to purchase a building to another buyer in exchange for an assignment fee, also known as a flip fee. Many regulators consider the practice, known as wholesaling, to be predatory when middlemen misrepresent themselves to sellers or tenants as true buyers.

Razjooyan and his partners have parlayed these flip fees into a lucrative stream of income by selling artificially inflated contracts to each other, then passing off the cost to lenders or investors, according to multiple lawsuits. The gambit works like this: Razjooyan or an associate (like Scott at the building on Longfellow Street NW) enters into a contract to purchase a property. Rather than actually closing on the deal, they sell the contract to an associate for the value of the property plus an inflated flip fee, court filings and property records show.

Investors have questioned Razjooyan’s flip fees for years. In 2017, June and Ronald Broadwell accused Razjooyan and Nylen, his “best friend” and “right-hand man,” of a scheme to charge fraudulent flip fees, according to a lawsuit in Superior Court. 

Nylen responded to the complaint saying that the Broadwells “seek to place blame on Nylen for their own decisions and blind trust in Sam rather than taking responsibility for business decisions and negotiating a lower assignment fee that they would not regret.” The case was settled in 2019.

In 2020, investors Chuck and Christopher Mak accused Razjooyan of deceiving them into paying $170,000 in flip fees to his “accomplice,” Ahmad Rezahi, without disclosing their affiliation. Rezahi, the complaint alleges, “paid all or part of these concealed assignment fees to Sam.” That case was settled in December 2020.

Razjooyan himself has described being paid $20,000 or $25,000 in “consulting fees” for Nylen’s purchase of 2100 15th St. SE, according to a legal filing in another case filed in June of this year. Razjooyan located and “secured” the property for Nylen in exchange for a “significant consulting fee,” according to the document. 

More recently, Razjooyan and his associates have secured flip fees that stretch into the multimillions of dollars, including a staggering $4 million fee for the purchase of Minnesota Commons (the building where the AG is pursuing a case for housing code violations). The limited liability corporation that purchased Minnesota Commons in August, called 4069-4089 Minnesota Ave NE LLC, is managed by Portillo, according to the attorney general’s lawsuit.

And the man who originally secured the contract and scored the $4 million fee, Farid Jalali, entered into a contract to purchase Minnesota Commons for about $10.8 million on Nov. 28, 2020. Just three days later, Jalali sold the contract for a $4 million flip fee to a now-revoked LLC. The building’s tenants’ association attorney learned who represented the buyer in March 2022, when a broker with Greysteel introduced “Sam Razjooyan from the contract purchaser side.”

Despite the almost immediate sale of the contract, the March 2024 appraisal by Colliers International Valuation and Advisory Services states that “the assignment fee is primarily costs associated with the TOPA process and paying existing tenants to vacate the property, plus a profit margin for the assignor. This is typical in DC for redevelopment projects and is considered a cost associated with renovating the property.” 

Red Oak Capital Holdings ultimately provided a loan of $15.5 million to the LLC that purchased Minnesota Commons. The appraisal determined that the purchase price of $14.8 million, which included the flip fee, “appears to be at arms-length and at market terms.” An arms-length sale is one that takes place on the open market between unrelated parties. But Balles and other sources say that Jalali and Razjooyan have worked together in the past. “Farid and Sam do a lot of business together,” Balles says. And Mel Zahnd, an attorney with Legal Aid D.C., says Razjooyan represented Jalali’s LLC in a separate transaction. 

McGuire, Portillo’s attorney, says Portillo has never received any flip fees and denies being part of a scheme to inflate them. “Mr. Portillo has no knowledge that the [Minnesota Commons] appraisal was based on false information,” McGuire says.

Jalali says in a phone call that he doesn’t remember the multimillion dollar contract at Minnesota Commons. “There’s too many buildings,” he said before hanging up. 

Razjooyan’s exorbitant flip fees have not only artificially inflated the value of the properties being appraised, they may have artificially inflated the value of other properties, including his own.

A $1.2 million flip fee for the sale of the 741 Longfellow St. NW contract was factored into the property’s market value, according to an appraisal shared with City Paper. The contract was sold by Scott to Portillo two weeks before the date on the appraisal, according to the agreement between the two.

Appraisals, which are closely guarded records that are not usually shared publicly, typically examine recent sales of similar, nearby buildings, known as “comparables,” to determine the subject property’s market value.

The building at 221-225 Newcomb St. SE, for example, was used as a comparable with “primary consideration as a value indicator” for the appraisal of 741 Longfellow St. NW, according to a December 2023 appraisal by Colliers International Valuation and Advisory Services. The $2 million flip fee on the Newcomb Street property potentially inflated the Longfellow Street property’s value from a purchase price of $6.5 million to $8.5 million.

The appraisal says that data about the Newcomb Street property was provided by the buyer, MPM LLC, of which Razjooyan was a member, according to the contract. The D.C. government has since revoked the LLC’s authority to do business. Tenants at the building signed their TOPA rights to Scott and his Rebuilding DC LLC. Efforts to reach Scott through his website were unsuccessful.

At the building on Longfellow Street NW, where Santos heads the tenants’ association, Balles and Razjooyan received a $10 million loan from developer Charles Edwards.

Contrary to what Scott had promised tenants, Balles and Razjooyan intended to renovate the 41-unit building into 45 three-bedroom apartments and fill it with voucher holders, according to the loan agreement.

Razjooyan assured Edwards that the building was fully vacant, Edwards says (and an appraisal indicated basically as much). But the assurances soon began to crumble.

“I began receiving more and more violations” while Razjooyan managed the building, Edwards says. When the housing code violations were not promptly corrected, Edwards says, “I finally decided that as the lender I don’t have a choice but to take over the repairs, which is very unusual.”

It wasn’t until the spring of 2024 that Edwards visited the building and quickly realized it was not vacant, as Razjooyan had claimed. 

“It was a terrible shock to meet angry tenants,” Edwards says.

Edwards now says he is not bound by the tenants’ agreement with Scott. “I never met Yusef, never talked to him, and don’t know about any private agreements,” he says. And looking back on the loan agreement, Edwards now questions the extra $2 million tacked on top: $1.2 million for a “flip fee,” and $800,000 for tenant buyouts. (An assignment contract, signed by Balles on behalf of Mt Vernon Properties, contains a flip fee of $2 million.)

“There was a horrible $2 million assignment fee on top of the contract. Where did that money really go?” Edwards wonders. 

Razjooyan’s settlement attorney Kos Johns said in an email to the building’s tenants, which is cited in their lawsuit, that an escrow account contained $480,000 for the tenants’ buyouts. But none of the tenants have received any money. Johns did not respond to requests for comment.

Balles told Santos in an August text message that “the money was never in escrow [Defendant Scott] took it,” according to the tenants’ lawsuit filed this month. When questioned about Johns’ email claiming the funds were in the escrow account, Balles tells City Paper, “He lied.” 

Balles, for his part, acknowledges that the purchase of the building works better for him as the owner if the current tenants leave because they’re paying rent-controlled rates. He says he has secured a loan that includes $500,000 to honor the buyout agreements with tenants.

“I was a victim and not part of Sam’s shenanigans,” Balles says.

“Maybe that’s the game,” Edwards says. “Get fictitious high appraisals and get some lender to pay all this extra money. How that is supposed to work, I don’t know. Sadly, for me, it probably doesn’t work.”

TOPA Rights ’Short-Circuited’

Razjooyan and his crew have engaged in a pattern of circumventing and exploiting D.C.’s TOPA law, according to lawsuits and tenant interviews. By avoiding the tenant protection law, Razjooyan and company have a smoother path to purchasing buildings and, in many cases, displacing tenants.

TOPA is “fundamentally successful in offering tenants a seat at the table in negotiations over sale of their building,” and has facilitated preservation or redevelopment of 18,399 units through assignment of rights, according to a landmark 2023 report by the Coalition for Nonprofit Housing and Economic Development.

But, the study found, “for some tenants, TOPA rights are “short-circuited by misleading actors.”

For the tenants at 3639 Martin Luther King Jr. Ave. SE, the racket began with a fake company, allegedly headed by Razjooyan’s former employee, who says he had no idea his name was on contract to purchase a building.

In January 2020, a company called Toulon Holding Co LLC entered into a contract to purchase the nine-unit building for $900,000, and the sale closed in September 2020. Less than a month later, the building was sold again to an LLC controlled by Nylen for $1.25 million—a $350,000 profit. Razjooyan signed the deed transferring the property.

Under TOPA, tenants in the building should have received a notice before both sales. Tenants generally have 30 to 45 days to respond to the notice depending on whether a tenants’ association is already in place, according to Marc Borbely, senior attorney with the DC Tenants’ Rights Center.

Department of Housing and Community Development spokesperson Tim Wilson says that the second offer of sale was filed with the agency on Oct. 8, 2020, and that the tenants did not respond to the offer. DHCD did not respond to questions about whether the sale, which took place only 13 days after the offer, violated the TOPA law.

The timeline notwithstanding, tenant Ernest Greene, who has lived in the building since 2015, says they only received notice of the first sale. If Razjooyan bought the building and then resold it without offering the tenants a new right to purchase, Borbely says that’s a clear TOPA violation.

As the sole member of 3639 MLK Ave SE LLC, Nylen went on to receive a home equity line of credit of almost $1.3 million from Washington Capital Partners, according to a loan document  filed with the Recorder of Deeds. (HELOC loans, which borrow against a property’s equity, are primarily used by homeowners.)

That document, which was signed by Nylen, incorrectly states that the building is vacant, and TOPA does not apply to vacant buildings.

But potential TOPA violations aren’t the only curious aspects of this deal.

The initial contract to buy the building, which was shared with City Paper, was electronically signed by “Max Jacquet.” The contract lists the Toulon Holding Co LLC’s address as 4101 Reservoir Rd. NW, which is the French Embassy. There is no record of a company with that name in the Department of Licensing and Consumer Protection’s online database. And Jacquet, who has no real estate experience, tells City Paper he never signed a contract for the building. “I don’t know anything about the LLC you mentioned,” he says.

He does, however, know Razjooyan. 

Jacquet worked for Razjooyan at Le Cafe Descartes, a defunct restaurant located in the French Embassy. According to online business records, Nylen was the beneficial owner of Le Cafe Descartes. Jacquet, the restaurant’s former general manager, says the separation was not amicable.

“This is crazy,” Jacquet says. “I’ll have to talk to lawyers if they’ve done something with my name.”

The immediate sale to Nylen for a nearly 40 percent profit raises concerns about an illegal practice known as property flipping. “Generally speaking, there’s nothing wrong with buying low and selling. People do it with stocks all the time,” says Bill Bronchick, a real estate investment adviser and attorney. To fully uncover an illegal property flip requires an examination of the loan documents, “but if there’s collusion between the parties to create an artificial comparable sale in order to get a new loan, then that could be loan fraud,” Bronchick says. Nylen has not responded to requests for comment.

“A particularly troublesome aspect of property flipping is that it taints property sale databases and presents the illusion of rising property values in neighborhoods where the flipping takes place,” according to a FDIC mortgage fraud report.

‘Sam is a bastard’

Kate Wichmann’s building at 1717 17th St. NW went up for sale in fall of 2022. The newly organized tenant association sought to assign their TOPA rights and solicited proposals from developers.

Razjooyan submitted a proposal where he claimed his firm owns and manages more than 54 buildings totaling 600 units. “We pride ourselves in having our residents enjoy a high quality housing accommodations,” his proposal said.

But Wichmann says the tenant association quickly rejected Razjooyan. “I looked up his court cases, and he seemed like a scammer,” she says. 

Instead, the tenant association assigned their TOPA rights to an LLC owned by Richard Cunningham in December 2022. The agreement, signed by Cunningham, promised “immediate repairs and improvements,” including new appliances, windows, ceiling fans, and in-unit washers and dryers; the agreement also said repairs would be made by “appropriately licensed workers” when required.

After the tenants’ association signed the agreement, Wichmann says Cunningham “disappeared for almost four months.” When he finally resurfaced, he told the tenants he “had to get a silent partner for financial reasons,” she says.

“My biggest regret was not asking who the silent partner was at that time,” Wichmann says. 

It was Razjooyan.

In a phone interview, Cunningham tells City Paper that he decided not to buy the building and instead sold his right to purchase it to Razjooyan. He says would have lost his earnest money deposit of $200,000 if he didn’t find someone to buy the contract, and he denies telling tenants that Razjooyan was a “silent partner.” 

In the interview, Cunningham initially insisted that he didn’t know Razjooyan before the sale of the contract and was unaware that Razjooyan had submitted his own proposal to buy the building.

“I had nothing to do with that, and I didn’t know Sam beforehand,” Cunningham claims. “I don’t want my name anywhere near Sam’s name.” 

When pressed, Cunningham says that “there are no LLC documents with Sam and my name together.” But the development agreement that he signed with the tenants’ association identifies him and Razjooyan as members of 1717 17th St NW DE LLC, the single-entity LLC that purchased the building.

City Paper also obtained a video of a tenants’ association meeting where Razjooyan, Nylen, and Cunningham were called to answer questions. When Wichmann asked Cunningham why he didn’t disclose Razjooyan’s role as a silent partner, he replied: “Sam has always been an equitable partner.”

“He’s always been a partner of Cunningham Properties,” Cunningham repeated.

Cunningham tells City Paper he can’t recall how much Razjooyan paid him in a flip fee to sign over the contract. “I’ve done a lot with the mayor, and my name should not be tarnished,” Cunningham says.

Since Razjooyan bought the rent-controlled building, Wichmann says that only eight units are occupied by tenants, and at one point, the building was cited by the Department of Buildings as a vacant property.

The few remaining tenants in the 26-unit building have not had working heat in their apartments since the fall of 2023, she says; instead they were provided flimsy electric space heaters. They are still waiting for the upgrades promised in the agreement with Cunningham.

Last month, lender Genesis Capital filed a complaint in D.C. Superior Court for the appointment of a receiver, due to a $6,871,530 default and mismanagement by Razjooyan’s LLC. According to the complaint, the lender believes that the building contains 30 units and that the majority of units are occupied by tenants receiving assistance from DCHA.

Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner Vincent Slatt, who doesn’t live in the building but has been following the saga with Razjooyan, believes the failure ultimately lies with the D.C. government.

“It doesn’t matter that it’s Sam Razjooyan. It could be anybody,” Slatt says. “This is an example of what happens when bad laws and bad enforcement get married to a bad actor.”

Slatt says he’s helping tenants explore options through the Tenant Receivership Act that would allow the city to seize control of the building. 

At least one of the vacant units is being advertised as an unlicensed short-term rental on Airbnb. A man who stayed in the unit for eight days while on a business trip tells City Paper he paid just over $1,000—far more than the rent-controlled unit would legally go for. Unlike Razjooyan’s long-term tenants, the Airbnb guest says he had heat.

In February, Wichmann wrote an email to staff at the Department of Buildings, the Office of Attorney General, and members of the D.C. Council. 

“We have ten months’ evidence with the DOB, FEMS, OTA, etc. that demonstrates the owners are: habitually not maintaining the property to legal standards, persistently disregard the health and safety of the tenants, and the work they have done is unpermitted and uninspected,” she wrote. “All the agencies on this email know Sam Razjooyan takes advantage of tenants, fractures communities, and plunders city resources. We all know what he does. Let’s stop him one building at a time; let’s stop him now.”

And as of this week, she still has no heat in her apartment.

“Sam is a bastard,” she says.

On the morning of Sept. 20, in an old building on Columbia Road, the gas stove in apartment 31 exploded. Isabel Menjivar felt the boom rock through the whole building like an earthquake, and then she heard her neighbor scream.

“I didn’t know whether to hide or to leave the building,” Menjivar tells The 51st in Spanish. She went out the front door to find a cluster of neighbors huddled around Rosario Aguilar, a 64-year-old woman who had lived in the building for nearly 30 years. Her neighbors fanned her with rags as smoke appeared to come off her clothes, an expression of shock on her face. Aguilar suffered severe burns to nearly 60% of her body in the explosion, her son told The 51st. A neighbor yelled for Menjivar to call 911. 

“It was the most terrible day, I couldn’t even talk. I only wanted to cry,” Menjivar says. 

That day set off a chain of events that resulted in tenants filing into their second hotel shelter Thursday morning, arms loaded with suitcases, bags of clothes, and crates for their pets. After the explosion, the city declared 1433 Columbia Road uninhabitable. Now, the building is caught in a complicated web of bureaucratic proceedings in an attempt to get repairs made. Residents have been let in a few times to collect belongings, but so far there appears to be no realistic route to returning to the building – at least not any time soon. 

Many of these families are in the process of securing new units through Jubilee Housing, a local affordable housing developer that stepped in to match families with apartments just this week. But the process of actually getting families moved in takes time, and in the interim they’re living without most of their possessions, crammed with pets and belongings in hotel rooms. As of the night of Oct. 23, the District government had declined to extend a 33-day hotel stay for the tenants; they'd been expecting to get kicked out onto the street Thursday morning, but were instead moved to another hotel. It's unclear whether this hotel stay is being paid for by the D.C. government, or how long tenants can stay there; a spokesperson for the mayor did not respond by publication time.

Menjivar says she  stayed up most of the night worried about what would happen if the city’s hotel didn’t get extended. Her neighbors made a plan to set up tents and camp outside the building, and she’d planned to follow them, she says. She hopes she's able to secure more permanent housing before she's forced to move again.

The tenants at 1433 Columbia Road suffered a specific tragedy, but their story reflects a larger reality across the city. By tenant and advocate accounts, the building was in poor condition before the explosion. Menjivar says the whole building was infested with rats and cockroaches, and her bathroom ceiling was constantly waterlogged and leaking – something she says happened to other neighbors, too. Rosario Aguilar’s son, who preferred not to be named in this article, said conditions in the building have been poor since he grew  up there in the ‘90s and early aughts. He also named infestations as an issue, and said appliances were often old and broken. The Wash reported that some tenants had to use buckets to flush their toilets and shower. 

Because rent was so low ($670/month for her one bedroom), Menjivar says she didn’t press as hard as she could have to get things fixed. Maybe, she thinks, if she’d insisted, repairs would have been made and the explosion never would have happened. (It’s not clear that the explosion was ultimately caused by lack of maintenance.)

Court filings show that in August, the building’s landlord Herminia Steininger was appointed a guardian ad litem in a foreclosure case involving the property, which was sold at a tax sale last year. The guardian ad litem, Elizabeth Forgotson Goldberg Esq., said she is not the appropriate person to comment on issues related to the property’s condition, as she only represents Steininger in the foreclosure case. Steininger’s son, John Steininger, who is also addressed in paperwork outlining code violations, did not respond to repeated email requests for comment on the building conditions Thursday.

So far, the owners have not been responsive to the city’s letters outlining code violations in the building after the explosion, says Pacyinz Lyfoung, an attorney who has been working with the Central American Resource Center to help tenants assess their legal options with regard to the building. The D.C. Department of Buildings has not received a plan to abate problems at the building.

After the explosion, a DOB inspection found 37 code violations, including an urgent one related to the building’s structural safety. These violations were mostly related to the damage the building sustained in the aftermath of the explosion. An investigation by The Department of General Services and Washington Gas found gas leaks throughout the property.

“The Department of Buildings’ mission is to ensure safety for residents, and the building is unsafe to inhabit. Landlords must obey District law by providing properties that are safe, habitable, and livable,” a DOB spokesperson told The 51st in a statement. “Our goal is to work with property owners so they fix violations. DOB is ready to issue the permits to the landlord to do the necessary repairs and until that happens, the building unfortunately must stay closed.”

The DOB generally inspects properties based on tenant complaints, but does not have capacity to regularly assess D.C. housing stock for violations. So when tenants don’t know their rights or are otherwise not inclined to make formal complaints, poor conditions abound – especially in buildings with lower rents. 

“For some landlords, it’s a very gradual thing, they accrue more and more deferred maintenance and it eventually snowballs and they end up in an ongoing cycle of making patch repairs when what’s really needed is a gut renovation,” says Adam Marshall, the managing attorney for housing law at the Neighborhood Legal Services Program. “Then in other scenarios, you have a more deliberate or calculated eviction by neglect, where it might be in a landlord’s interest to disinvest in a property in order to flip it.” Marshall says the overwhelming majority of people his firm represents live in housing stock that is not up to code. 

Dangerous rental conditions in the city have had tragic consequences. In 2019, two people, including a nine-year-old boy, were killed after an unlicensed rental caught fire. The building had been subdivided to allow for more tenants, who were mostly Ethiopian immigrants. This included unexpected security gates – a major hazard when a fire breaks out. In a press release following the tragedy, a city official reminded tenants that they have rights, and encouraged them to report unsafe conditions. 

But in a city where there’s only affordable housing available for a third of extremely low-income renter households, that can place a high burden on tenants, who may opt for staying in unsafe housing rather than risk losing it entirely. Menjivar says she overlooked serious problems because of the price of her unit. 

For many residents like her, poor conditions seem like the price to pay for affordable rent. 1433 Columbia Road was precious to the people who lived there for lots of reasons, but perhaps chiefly because it was a sliver of affordable housing in a neighborhood where many of them had lived for decades. In those years, Columbia Heights changed around them, becoming more expensive with every passing year. With the building gone, it seems unlikely they’ll be able to find anywhere else they can afford in the neighborhood. 

“It has been extremely difficult to find new housing for these families,” Lyfoung says. “For them to find other housing … it would be double or triple what they were paying.” Menjivar, who works in a local restaurant, says she can’t swing any rent payment over $900 – already a huge increase from what she was paying at 1433.

The loss of these tenants would represent a continued erosion of D.C. neighborhood history, says Ward 1 Councilmember Brianne Nadeau, whose office has also been providing support to tenants. “If people can’t afford to live here, then we lose history, we lose racial and cultural diversity, and we lose some of our beloved residents who built lives here,” Nadeau says. She notes that Ward 1 is the most diverse ward in D.C., which isn’t possible to maintain without the existence of affordable housing. 

The situation at 1433 is further complicated by other issues with the building, including a tax sale, a massive debt to DC Water, and a bankruptcy from one of the owners, according to court filings. Because of the complex ownership, tenants don’t currently have rights under the D.C. Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act, or TOPA, according to Lyfoung. The act provides tenants with first right of refusal to purchase a building that goes up for sale. 

Many tenants understood that leaving the building would immediately throw them into indefinite precarity – per Menjivar, when they were first told the explosion made the building unsafe and they’d have to leave, a group of neighbors chatting via WhatsApp considered barricading themselves inside. Others floated camping on the front sidewalk. This, they thought, might force the landlord (or someone) to fix the building and allow them to return. 

“It’s the familiarity of a place you know,” Menjivar says. “You fix your house the way you like … you know people, and when you move you don’t know anyone, you don’t know anything.”

Her greatest hope is that the building will be fixed, conditions improved, and that they’ll all be able to return, Menjivar says. 

So far, that’s looking like an unlikely outcome, says Lyfoung – at least in the near term.

By a stroke of luck in timing, local developer Jubilee Housing happens to have 23 deeply affordable units in or near Columbia Heights they can soon make available to residents of 1433. This number of vacancies in their housing stock is highly unusual, says Jubilee Vice President of Institutional Advancement Darrel Drobnich.

Without Jubilee’s help, it’s likely that many or all of these families would have had to enter the homeless services system or leave D.C. As yet, families who haven't been matched with units are waiting to hear whether other providers have units for them.

Even with this help, tenants are continuing to experience precarity. Menjivar says she, her 20-year-old daughter, and her pets have been promised a place to live by Jubilee, but there’s no firm timeline for its availability yet. For now, they’re grateful to be in the new hotel.

“At least we have a roof. That’s more than enough,” Menjivar says.

The modest brick house at 703 Emerson St. NE has been in the Jones family since the Eisenhower administration. 

Although Elsie Andrews left D.C. many years ago, she still remembers watching her parents, William and Sarah Jones, tramping up and down the narrow stairs of the two-story house. Her daughter, Tina Jones, recalls having sleepovers with her cousins on the screened-in front porch, waiting for her grandparents to call them in for breakfast the next morning. After William and Sarah passed away in the 1980s, Andrews inherited the house and has kept it in the family. At one point or another, Andrews’ sister, nieces, and even grandnieces have all called the house in North Michigan Park their home.

But even after all that history, Andrews is ready to move on and sell the house. She spent the past 30 years in Kentucky with her husband, Billie, but after he died she became eager to move back to the D.C. area to be closer to Jones and her grandchildren. A big move like that costs a lot of money, though, and at 77, Andrews just can’t get up and down the stairs the way she used to. “I don’t want to lose my momma’s house,” Andrews says, but this is for the best.

Tina found a buyer as soon as she put the house on the market. Who wouldn’t want to live in the lush, quiet neighborhood just a quick walk from the Fort Totten Metro station? Mayor Muriel Bowser herself grew up in a duplex a few blocks over. 

Yet, for more than two years now, Andrews and her family have been stuck in a bureaucratic nightmare, unable to sell the property. Thanks to a bizarre, uniquely D.C. set of circumstances involving probate records, she can’t prove that she has clear title to the property. And, according to several local attorneys, she’s not alone.

“I’m ready to get my picket sign and gather some friends and head down to Congress and yell, ‘Let my people go,’” says Andrews, no stranger to such demonstrations given her past as a union organizer when she was starting her career in D.C. “I just don’t know how to move the government.”

The problem stems from the probate process, in which a division of the D.C. Superior Court sorts through wills, inheritances, unpaid debts, and other financial issues when someone dies. Andrews thought she resolved all that messy business when her parents died, but their names remained on the title to the Emerson Street home for the past four decades. When she tried to remove them from the title so she could sell the house, the court said it needed to locate records of the previous probate proceedings to prove Andrews truly owned the property. That kicked off a Kafkaesque process to demonstrate what ought to be pretty evident: Andrews’ father died in 1981 and left the house to his daughter.

Andrews’ attorney, Michael Forster, put in a request with the court’s probate division for these records in November 2022 and still hasn’t received them. Court officials and local lawyers say this sort of delay happens with some frequency. Decades-old probate records are maintained by both the D.C. Archives and the National Archives and Records Administration, owing to the District’s past under full federal control. It can take the court months, and sometimes years, to track down these case files and get them to people who need them. On some occasions, there are even long gaps between when the probate court secures the records and when they actually notify the people who asked for them, attorneys say.

“My clients will follow up with me months later, and I have to convince them I didn’t do something wrong, because it’s like, ‘Well, how can we not have this?’” says Forster, who estimates he has handled at least four other cases with similar problems as Andrews’. 

But finally last week, Andrews got some good news: A probate court judge is letting her move forward with the sale of the home, ruling that “the probability of recovering additional records at this point remains uncertain.” But the long wait has not been without its consequences. Andrews and her family now owe nearly $73,700 in property taxes on the house, according to D.C. records. A cousin who was staying in the home fell behind on payments amid health issues, Jones says, and those problems have compounded amid all this uncertainty. 

Attorneys who handle similar probate such cases say this sort of outcome is tragically common. D.C.’s system for handling these records moves so slowly that it has frequently put elderly residents at risk of losing homes that have been in their families for decades, pushing them out of the city in the process.

“Many of our clients are living in areas that have gone through gentrification, living in homes worth upwards of $500,000, even $1 million, and their taxes are going up and up,” says Tina Nelson, a senior managing attorney with Legal Counsel for the Elderly, who has handled 10 cases impacted by extended probate delays in the past four years alone. “D.C. is already dealing with a lack of affordable housing and so this just simply exacerbates the problem if we’re not able to maintain home ownership for these people.”

What’s more, there is very little the D.C. government can do to remedy the issue. The National Archives is a federal agency, and doesn’t spend much time worrying about D.C.’s parochial problems. The local court system is also managed by the feds, owing to an agreement struck three decades ago to bail the District government out of its financial crisis. Congress is the only entity that could do anything to fix the problem, and the city’s residents don’t have any meaningful voting representation at the federal level.

“Our lack of statehood has an impact in all these places where people would not have even thought,” Nelson says. 

She notes that Ward 6 Councilmember Charles Allen introduced legislation last year meant to simplify the probate process, after a report from the Council for Court Excellence and the D.C. Access to Justice Commission detailed a series of problems plaguing families. But the bill would do little to address these particular problems, since they have more to do with logistics and communication with federal entities. (It has yet to advance after receiving a public hearing in June.)

In any other city, this process wouldn’t be nearly so complex. The courts and the archives would be part of the same entity, and might even be located in the same place. But, in D.C., the process is frustratingly fragmented. 

For starters, physical probate records are kept in different places based on when a person died. Cases that originated before the city’s Home Rule era, which began in 1974, are managed by the National Archives, according to a spokesperson for the agency. After that, the probate files are overseen by the D.C. Archives, overseen by the Secretary of D.C., Kimberly Bassett.

But there’s another wrinkle: The D.C. Archives doesn’t have enough space in its existing Blagden Alley offices to hold all of the paper files in its custody. It relies on the National Archives to store some of those materials, according to Lopez Matthews, D.C.’s state archivist and public records administrator. This could account for why the probate court believes Andrews’ father’s records are managed by the feds, even though he died after 1974.

“It does cause a lot of confusion,” Matthews says, noting that his agency will be able to consolidate most of these records whenever it’s able to build a new facility, currently set to be located at the University of D.C. in Northwest. 

In general, the National Archives stores D.C. records at the Washington National Records Center in Suitland, Maryland. When the probate court needs to track down case files there, the court’s Administrative Services Division searches the archives’ online database and then submits a request to access them, according to D.C. courts spokesperson Doug Buchanan. Staff at that division often has to physically retrieve those files, then tell the probate court when they’ve done so to let the case move ahead.

“The division has requested records sometimes two to three times” from the archives before receiving them, Buchanan adds in an email.

If only that was the last complication in this process. Buchanan says he has also heard of instances where court workers have track down records held at archives facilities in Philadelphia or Boston to find certain documents (Nelson confirms that she’s handled cases involving trips outside of D.C., too). Archives staff then transfer the files to Suitland, where the courts can pick them up. Attorneys aren’t quite sure why these records would end up transferred to other facilities—after this article was published, the National Archives’ spokesperson emailed to say that “temporary records generated by the DC Courts” are sometimes shipped to Philadelphia “for long-term storage,” stressing that anyone using their online database to track down records can do so “seamlessly.”

The upshot is that the courts, and anyone who needs these case records, are at the mercy of the archives when it comes to actually securing them. At the height of the pandemic in 2020, Nelson says the process slowed to a crawl, with records requests taking “a year or longer” to resolve. Things have improved since then, she says, but it still regularly takes three or four months to track down case files. (And COVID-related delays can’t explain Andrews’ nearly two-year wait.)

The court system is not entirely blameless here, Nelson adds. “We have had experiences where the [court] clerk’s office has misplaced the request that we submitted, and so we’ve had to submit a second request,” she says. Plus, court staffers are supposed to notify attorneys when they’ve secured the records and scanned them into an online portal that lawyers can access. Sometimes they simply don’t do so.

“So now we actually make it a part of our practice just to check periodically online to see whether or not the archive file has been received and scanned,” Nelson says. Buchanan did not answer questions about what accounts for this disconnect. After this article was published, Bassett called to say that her agency has greatly sped up its processes, but that delays have indeed persisted with the courts.

“I don’t want to put blame on anyone else, but the courts have been having a lot of trouble,” she says. “They’re understaffed and their staff changes frequently.”

As the archives, the courts, and the attorneys hash things out, families are left in the lurch. Forster says that his clients confronting the issue tend to be older (since people with long-dead relatives tend to have their records stored with the feds more frequently), and they can’t afford to wait years to resolve these proceedings. Maybe they’re like Andrews and they’re looking to sell a piece of property. Or maybe they’re planning their estates and need to be sure their heirs will have clear titles to their homes. Delays in the process can make it harder for people to pass down wealth to the next generation, a persistent problem in a city where Black homeownership rates are already declining.

“Almost all of the people I’ve interviewed had a history of home ownership in the family, but only a handful still had that home in the family,” says Tanya Golash-Boza, a sociologist who wrote a recent book examining how several D.C. neighborhoods gentrified over the past five decades. She sees D.C.’s probate issues as part of her other findings on how Black families have not been able to maintain the high rates of homeownership they achieved in the 1950s and ’60s (not to mention the attendant generational wealth). “More than anything nefarious I’ve observed in the housing market, it’s a structural problem,” she adds.

But for Forster’s familiarity with these particular probate problems, Andrews could’ve found herself among those struggling to realize her family home’s value and keep that money to pass to her kids. 

With taxes on the property piling up, the city put the house up for a tax sale two years ago—a Florida company that specializes in buying up such properties and then flipping them won the right to purchase it at auction last year. Forster was able to stave off foreclosure proceedings by asking the court to let this probate process play out, but other families might not be so lucky.

“There’s a lot of misinformation or just miseducation about probate, generally,” Nelson says. “Sometimes people think they completed the process, and then they discover all this.”
Jones, Andrews’ daughter, is hopeful that she’ll be able to get things back on track now that the probate case has finally gotten resolved. Selling the house would help her family pay off the back taxes, and she says she still has a buyer interested in the property. But the delay has caused some negative impacts.

“The market has changed a couple of times now, so the offer we had is dwindling,” Jones says. “The rates are up, houses are not selling like they were at that time. So we’re losing all the way around.”

Forster is hopeful that the family’s struggles can shine a light on the problems with probate, and maybe make a difference for others in similar circumstances. Andrews’ aims are a bit more modest: She just wants a new house big enough so she can take her kitchen table out of storage, and maybe see her grandkids a bit more, too.

“The prices are so much higher here than in Kentucky, Tina says she might have to find me a smaller house,” Andrews says. “But that’s OK … I just want to move back home. I was born and raised in Washington, D.C.”