As I was drifting off to sleep last night, I was startled by a chorus of emergency sirens. This morning on my way to work, I found out what happened: A
five-alarm fire, still smoldering, had gutted an apartment building on Mt. Pleasant Street four blocks from my house, leaving hundreds of people homeless, many of them low-income Salvadoran immigrants. And cruelly, the fire also destroyed the roof of the nearby Meridian Hill Baptist Church, which had served as the nearest homeless shelter, but is now uninhabitable. The building in question, 3145 Mt. Pleasant Street, had been the subject of a pitched battle between tenants and an absentee landlord over living conditions. The
Washington Post reports:
In 2004, tenants from that building and three others in Mount Pleasant and Columbia Heights joined with two advocacy groups and forged a deal with the city to increase building inspections and force repairs. Many of the problems had been fixed, and tenant association president Yasmin Romero said this morning that the tenants were one week away from signing a legal agreement with the building owner to say their dispute had been settled.[City councilman Jim] Graham said the problems at the building had been typical of those described in a recent Washington Post investigative series about landlords who let their buildings deteriorate over the last two decades in an effort to force low-paying tenants to leave. Once vacant, the buildings are often converted to higher-priced residences, skirting the District's tenant-protection laws."This is a building where every effort has been made for many years to force the tenants out. To make conditions so miserable that they would leave. This is the classic example of eviction by neglect," Graham said.
For those of us who live in the neighborhood and see everyday the appalling conditions some buildings are kept in, the fire is, unfortunately, not a shock. But that doesn't lessen the extent of the hardship our 200 homeless neighbors are now feeling. If you live in the D.C. area, please consider making a clothing donation at Neighbors' Consejo, 3118 16th St. NW, just north of Irving St. I will be headed there after work tonight.--
Dana GoldsteinPhoto of Mt. Pleasant Street fire from Flickr user brandonwu, used under a Creative Commons license. 
