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.