This fall will mark five years since the Anacostia Economic Development Corporation completed the conversion of the psychiatric hospital on St. Elizabeths East Campus into more than 200 units of affordable housing.
While these new apartments, known as The Residences at St. Elizabeths, promised to accentuate a burgeoning Congress Heights neighborhood, some residents continue to complain about broken doors, clogged sewage systems, basement flooding and a bevy of other issues.
Some residents, like Donald Williams, said that not even the launch of a tenants association earlier this year has moved the needle on improving conditions.
“They haven’t facilitated solutions in a timely manner,” Williams told The Informer about Anacostia Economic Development Corporation and Serenity Management, the property manager.
When he spoke to The Informer, Williams was in the throes of battle about fruit flies he said congregated in his apartment after Serenity Management didn’t clean out the neighboring apartment formerly occupied by residents.
That problem, he said, counted among several others involving cleanliness and an inability to keep sewage water and rainwater out of the basement.
“They find themselves coming back [after it rains] when things can be done more proactively,” Williams said. “The hallway smells worse with all the flooding and mold. You can smell it [while] walking down the hallway.”
Williams moved into his basement-level apartment in 2021 after two years of housing instability. Though his new dwellings allowed for the pursuit of higher education and entrepreneurial activities, Williams said he experienced problems within months of moving there.
As he recalled, when a neighbor’s apartment caught fire a couple of floors above in 2022, the water from the sprinklers trickled down into his apartment. Months later, the sewage system malfunctioned and Williams and other residents living on the basement floor had to walk through several inches of toilet water and feces that flooded the hallways and many of the units.
By that time, many of Williams’ neighbors had already complained about the several inches of rainwater that pours into the basement during storms. He said that attempts to address that particular issue with Serenity Management and Anacostia Economic Development Corporation earlier this year proved unsuccessful.
“I asked Stanley Jackson [president and CEO of the Anacostia Economic Development Corporation] if he knew if the foundation was reconstituted,” Williams said. “This building was made in the 1850s. Did they consider [the effects of] erosion and land shifting when you’re dealing with underground [units]? They didn’t dig it out and reconstitute it to waterproof the walls from outside and inside.”
Stanley Jackson and Serenity Management Explain the Issue at Hand
While Jackson didn’t hesitate to acknowledge that The Residences at St. Elizabeths hadn’t been sufficiently waterproofed, he said that the problem fell at the feet of the developers, Flaherty & Collins and GCS Sigal, who facilitated the conversion of the psychiatric hospital to apartments.
Jackson told The Informer that he learned about the lack of waterproofing and use of yoga pipes, what’s considered relatively inferior material, after several attempts to inquire about the flooding with Flaherty & Collins, who also served as the property manager at The Residences at St. Elizabeths.
“We couldn’t get clarity [from] the developers so I brought in inspectors from the D.C. Housing Housing Finance Agency to walk the property with me,” Jackson said.
As Jackson recounted, what he intended to be a beneficial relationship between the Anacostia Economic Development Corporation and Flaherty & Collins turned out to be a disaster due to what he called a misalignment in values.
Jackson told The Informer that, in the years up until the replacement of Flaherty & Collins as property manager, he continued to press his investment partners to make changes. He said he did so while taking on some of Flaherty & Collins ‘ duties, like weekend trash collection, that the company said they couldn’t complete without permission from its Indiana headquarters.
Another qualm that Jackson said he had with Flaherty & Collins involved the caliber of employees and contractors brought in to directly engage residents and manage the facility.
“They couldn’t relate to the residents,” Jackson said. “There was a sense that because 80% of our projects were affordable that [residents] should be happy to have anything. We were dealing with a market developer whose preference is market development. I thought it would be a major opportunity to reimagine the St. Elizabeths East Campus.”
Flaherty & Collins didn’t immediately respond to The Informer’s request for comment.
Last November, Serenity Management, a Black woman, native Washingtonian-owned property management company, replaced Flaherty & Collins.
Jackson told The Informer that, at the time that Serenity Management came on, Flaherty & Collins hadn’t paid contract vendors and failed to collect more than $1 million in overdue rent payments. He also said that Flaherty & Collins mismanaged residents’ paperwork, much of which they needed to qualify for subsidized rent.
“Every manager that Flaherty & Collins brought in here went downhill. It was a question of who they were hiring,” Jackson said, telling The Informer that he thought it best to go local. “Our community doesn’t lack talent, it lacks opportunity. I saw the chance to help a Black woman-owned organization that has a connection to D.C.”
The co-founders of Serenity Management, Jenay Richardson and Evette Morton, have a combined 20 years of experience in the management of commercial and residential properties.
They told The Informer that, since including The Residences at St. Elizabeths East in their portfolio, they initially kept on, and terminated the relationship with Flaherty & Collins’ leasing assistant and assistant property manager after a 90-day probationary period.
They also recounted spending much of their time recovering documentation from residents, more than 100 of whom they said hadn’t been recertified for rent-subsidized housing.
“When we got here, several files and documents were in disarray,” Richardson told The Informer, noting that recertification documents must be dated within a certain time frame. “We requested that they provide updated pay stubs or complete an updated addendum.”
When it came to residents who are behind on rent, Richardson said that she and Morton went as far as establishing payment plans, consulting them on which paperwork to compile for lease renewal and helping them apply for emergency rental assistance.
For those who decided to leave The Residences at St. Richardson said they implemented move-out agreements to protect the residents’ rental history. In situations when residents withhold rent due to building conditions, she told The Informer that she and Morton work to resolve the issue with the expectation that residents make payments in accordance with the lease agreement.
“It takes a lot of TLC (tender loving care) to be here and offer the [residents] what they need after what they experienced with the previous management company,” Richardson said, emphasizing that she and Morton maintained a consistent presence on site as they experienced property manager turnover in their search for someone who cared about residents. “If someone had a valid complaint, we were here to address it.” Richardson told The Informer.
Serenity and Burgeoning Tenants Association Clash on Security Issue
On Aug. 10, residents from The Residences at St. Elizabeths East gathered in a parking lot on the property in demand of better security measures on the premises, including functional door locks and onsite security personnel.
With the support of housing organizers and tenants from other apartments, residents explored organizing tactics and learned how to file suit for suitable housing conditions. They also walked through the Entertainment & Sports Arena and Sycamore & Oak retail village, asking patrons to email Serenity Management, Anacostia Economic Development Corporation and the D.C. government.
This act of nonviolent resistance took place just weeks after D’Andre Dixon, a 32-year-old tenant, was fatally shot on the premises. It also happened amid discussions that, by the spring, had fizzled between Serenity Management and the tenants association, which launched in January.
Serenity Management maintains that they attempted to address tenant association members’ concerns individually, but that request was denied. The property management company also said they hadn’t received any documentation from the association. An employee told The Informer that, since November, the property management company has facilitated the replacement of nearly 95% of the yoga pipes in the building, secured new apartments for residents who experienced flooding, and hired Black contractors that cleaned carpets and applied liquid rubber around the base of the building to repel rainwater, among other jobs.
As it relates to waterproofing The Residences at St. Elizabeths, the employee told The Informer that consultants advised them that digging along the foundation would damage the integrity of the building.
Damiana Dendy, a housing organizer with D.C. Jobs With Justice, who has been helping residents at The Residences organize, told The Informer that Serenity Management made no offers to address members’ issues individually. In regard to documentation, Dendy called that issue irrelevant when residents are organizing against unsafe conditions.
“This is at least the fourth shooting on the property. A resident lost their life and it doesn’t get much more serious than that,” Dendy said. “Change needs to happen immediately. Tenants are making sure the public knows about this so they can be mobilized.”
Nathaniel Brown, a service manager who lives at The Residences at St. Elizabeths East, counted among those who ran directly to the scene of the shooting on July 21. As he recounted, what he discovered further highlighted ongoing security issues that he and his colleagues have tried to address for several months.
“The security footage showed a black hanger holding the door open,” said Brown, a former Flaherty & Collins employee with whom Serenity Management maintained a professional relationship.
Brown told The Informer that, since November, he has worked with contractors to fix 17 out of the 20 doors that were broken. He went on to note that, in the months leading up to the shooting, he had to call in-house contractors and outside vendors to repeatedly fix the wooden doors.
The ongoing door repair project, which Brown estimated to cost at least $30,000, involves the replacement of crass bars, magnetic locks and falcon locks.
All doors, he said, are scheduled to be fixed before the end of August. This process happened in tandem with the hiring of an armed security officer who lives on site and implementation of a door log, on which Serenity Management documents the daily inspection of exterior doors and actions taken in the event of tampering.
“When I was with Flaherty & Collins, people were breaking doors,” Brown said. “Now they’re leaving wood chips and bottles. We have to unprop doors that residents are propping open for girlfriends and families.”
Even with such changes, some residents, like one who spoke to The Informer anonymously, continue to question the degree to which Serenity Management maintains a suitable living environment.
“People are able to yank the front door open and the parking lot is completely open,” the tenant said. “It just leaves the apartment open for any and everybody. Where is the safety? It would be good for tenants to know when security is going to be here. We’re paying our hard-earned money for peace of mind.”
The tenant, who lives on the first floor near one of the building entrances, is in their third month of withholding rent. They said they came to this decision after trying for an entire year to get Serenity Management to fix a crack in their ceiling.
They also grimaced as they spoke about how their apartment windows, a holdover from the building’s original design, don’t provide enough insulation. That’s brought on higher utilities costs during the extreme winter and summer months.
Such expenditures, they said, prove too much for what they called a dangerous living situation. Addressing the issues at The Residences, the tenant said, requires all hands on deck.
“If I’m having issues, I’m thinking there’s other stuff going on here,” the tenant told The Informer.
Tenants Take Their Case to the Courts
During the earlier part of August, tensions between residents and Serenity Management reached a boiling point when Darren Duckett, property manager, called the police on a resident and attempted to ban them from the leasing office in response to their alleged belligerence.
Video footage obtained by The Informer shows the resident pacing back and forth and yelling at Duckett, who then retreats into his office and closes the door. Morton told The Informer that, days after the incident, the resident acknowledged that they could have handled the situation better.
Both parties have since entered mediation, Morton said, with the resident being allowed into the leasing office on the condition that they maintain a positive attitude.
“This is where residents live and you need to have that open relationship with management,” Morton said. “Because of the things they may be experiencing [such as maintenance request, recertification, ledger or general questions]. We have an open-door policy for tenants to express themselves [so we can] work out a resolution for residents and management.”
For Tonya Hawkins, such mediation isn’t possible.
Hawkins, a tenant since 2021, counted among those who, at one point, were facing eviction. She said that experience taught her about her rights as a tenant fighting for the proper living conditions.
“I feel [like they’ve] taken advantage [of me] especially when they took me to court,” Hawkins told The Informer. “It seemed very predatory, like they’re trying to order everyone to move out.”
Not long after moving into The Residences at St. Elizabeths East, Hawkins reported flooding in her basement-level apartment. When the rainwater clogged the sewage line, raw sewage flowed into her apartment and that of several of her neighbors.
This would continue to be the case for years to come.
As Hawkins recounted, staff members from Serenity Management told her last year that she would be transferred to another unit. That arrangement never came to fruition, she said, because Serenity Management lost documentation that she submitted, on different occasions, to each of the three property managers who previously worked on behalf of the property management company.
Hawkins said that, to this day, Serenity Management and her are at a standstill about the move to another apartment, due to Hawkins’ refusal to pay rent on her current apartment. Serenity Management offered a different take, telling The Informer that residents often decline relocation, with the property management company going as far as consulting the Department of Buildings on how to, or whether they could, force residents to go to another unit.
On Aug. 27, Hawkins will appear in Housing Conditions Court to demand that Serenity Management addresses her unit’s structural issues. She counts among dozens of residents at The Residences at St. Elizabeths who want to hold Serenity Management and the Anacostia Economic Development Corporation accountable through these legal channels.
“Everyone has an oppositional approach to our issues when the building is an issue for everyone,” Hawkins said. “We have suggested several resolutions to the issues…but management and [building owners] are more interested in evicting tenants than abating the building’s many code violations.”
Great article. Unfortunate for the Residents of this property. I hope that they will prevail. Peace and blessings.