DC is violating federal law by overpaying landlords tens of millions of dollars

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You say that there were posts defending the voucher program on there. Show us. We will wait. We will be waiting a long time because there weren’t any.

I'm not going to post everything from a 25 page thread, but here are people engaging in the debate about vouchers and attacking the criticism of them:

Anonymous wrote: Silly PP, the racists in this thread are engaged in "what-about-ism" on vouchers. Anything that can be loosely associated with a voucher program can and will be weaponized by the NIMBYs of Ward 3 to keep it as lilly white as possible.

Anonymous wrote:Let’s see what we can do with this logic . . .

1. Protected bike lanes are built on CT Ave, as was previously decided many moons ago by DDOT

2. Families living along CT Ave have an safe alternative to using their vehicles to run errands in the neighborhood and around NW DC

3. Deandre Pettus is not reliant on his car for running errands etc.

4. Deandre doesn’t suffer the frustration of being immobilized due to a flat car battery and so never gets angry that morning.

5. Deandre Pettus doesn’t beat his son to death.

You might find the assumptions underlying this hypothetical chain of events to be ridiculous, but those assumptions are no less so than your own.

Just like you don’t see bicycle safety advocates exploiting the deaths of these two children to call out the NIMBYs for blocking the CT Ave bike lane, you should similarly exhibit a modicum of decency and refrain from trying to make stupid arguments about how the tragic deaths of these two children were caused by DC residents using housing vouchers to move to Upper NW.

Anonymous wrote: You - and/or your ilk - have been demanding for pages that Frumin put a pause on the use of housing vouchers in Ward 3. Those demands are apparently serious.

Since you apparently can’t figure it out for yourself, I’ll have to spell it out for you. No one is making a serious argument that the deaths of the children were due to a lack of bike lanes. That would be ridiculous.

What they are showing is that the logic of tying these deaths to the voucher program is just as ridiculous and just as offensive.

I trust that you now understand how sick it is to exploit these deaths for pet causes.

Anonymous wrote: If the dad could have gotten around on bike lanes or bus lanes, he wouldn't have needed a car, and the kid would be alive.

Literally none of those posts (or the dozens of other comments like them) are about the kids, at all. If you don't want to debate things there, fine. Don't debate. But engaging debate over several pages where you're arguing against criticism of the vouchers, and then saying that the other side shouldn't respond out of respect for the dead kids, is truly amazing.

Anonymous wrote:That thread was locked because you couldn’t stop exploiting the deaths of these two children for cheap political gain.

You were directed to this thread, which was the appropriate place to discuss the voucher issue, yet you kept posting to the thread about the dead children.

It's truly fascinating how you feel that bringing up dead children as a way to attack your neighbors (repeatedly, dozens of times) is perfectly legitimate, but people saying they don't want to have the city house child murderers in their building is a disgrace.

It's also fascinating that you think people who are concerned about the city putting child murders next to them need to move to a thread to discussion how the city is overpaying landlords, or how you think you're the arbiter of what is allowed and isn't allowed to get discussed.

I’m not sure whether your apparent obliviousness is a product of a lack of perceptiveness or simple disingenuousness. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume it’s the former and will be try to be nice.

The posts that you’ve quoted were responding to attempts to link these two children’s deaths to the voucher program. Such claims were logically ridiculous - given the facts of the cases - and morally bankrupt. Those making the claims were cynically seeking to exploit the two children’s deaths for their own political ends and were - deliberately or not - deflecting attention from the failings that were actually contributing factors.

It’s a shame that these comments were not quickly flagged and removed. But as long as they were they stood, they had to be exposed for the nonsense that they were. Which is what the posts you have quoted were doing. They were never, as you apparently asserted, defending the voucher program. Rather they demonstrated that the voucher program was essentially irrelevant to the twin tragedies and chastised those who - deliberately or otherwise - sought to diminish the accountability of the two agencies that failed those two children.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Yes, making counter arguments to criticism of them is defending them. Even if you want to say that it’s not, all those comments are engaging in arguments about vouchers, something you claimed was disrespectful to the dead kids - except for when you are doing it.

It’s my fault for actually engaging you and spending the time going back through that 25 page thread to get examples. Judging by your other comments, I shouldn’t have been surprised that it wasn’t a sincere request. The discussions here would have been better if all of us just started ignoring the trolls, so I appreciate the reminder. Going back and reading it, the other discussion was actually pretty civil for the first 10 or so pages until the discussion vandals showed up and succeeded in getting it locked. And of course they didn’t start another discussion for the memory of the kids (which they pretended to be so concerned about) either - that whole line of attack was just a cynical way for them to shut down the discussion.

You and your ilk were the trolls. You and you your ilk were the “discussion vandals”. You and your ilk were the ones who managed to get the discussion locked by writing incredibly stupid, embarrassing things.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Voucher program is a mess with no recourse for the landlord. I am a small landlord and don't rent to section 8. So much is expected from the landlord where there are little consequences of the tenants getto behavior.

Someone by our house rented toma homeless mom and it was 2 yrs of hell from our block, constant loud music, weed, kds being yelled or beated, shooting, ambulance, and over 15 people living in a house.

Voucher on its own is not enough their needs to be done consequences for these families and support to learn to live in a civil manner.

You realize that if you are in DC, refusing to rent to Section 8 tenants is illegal? It is because "source of income" is a protected class under the DC Human Rights Act identical in importance to race, gender, religion, ethnicity or sexual orientation. Nor are there any "small size" carveouts for small landlords like there is for the rent control program. That's why we promptly sold the single family rental property we had in the DC as soon as Section 8 tenants started applying. I didn't want to deal with the hassle that participating in a government rental program brings, on top of DC's already extremely favorable tenant laws, which prevent a landlord from evicting a tenant no matter how they behave or damage the property so long as the government continues to pay their rent.

So I took property out of the rental housing stock and sold it to "gentrifiers" thus reducing the availability of affordable rental housing. Had there been a small size carveout for landlords who own fewer than 4 units, then we might have continued to rent the place out.

Prove it

It's proven when some tenant maybe with some scammy legal aid lawyer or advocacy group files a complaint against you and then you have to pay damages to them in addition to being forced to rent to them. I have seen it happen.

Are landlords allowed to run credit checks?

You can look all of this up online.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:"Source of Income" should never have been elevated to a protected class under the DC Human Rights Act on the same level as race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation. Because it is, landlords cannot legally limit the number of voucher tenants that they accept. Two policy changes that would immediately improve the Conn. Avenue chaos: (1) remove "source of income" as a protected class and instead require that landlords accept at least 10% voucher tenants but do not have to accept more. That would put the brakes on buildings slowly being converted to privatized public housing, which neither the landlords nor the market rate residents want, and enable LLs to be able to manage negative externalities while still making sure that building owners "do their fair share" with respect to accepting subsidized tenants. (2) modify the LL tenant laws to permit immediate eviction of violent tenants. No revolving door of second chances and cure periods for the violent who terrorize their neighbors.

Eviction does not = losing voucher, they move next door or across street and may seek to retaliate. DC does not pull vouchers, see WP article re: Sedgwick Gardens.

[Anonymous]

The silver lining of Trump winning, is that his administration will not tolerate this out of control voucher program.

[Anonymous]

It was fully operational in his prior term. And his USAO for DC was lax, no reason it would be different if he gets in again.

[Anonymous]

Bowser wants all of DC to be a shithole.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The silver lining of Trump winning, is that his administration will not tolerate this out of control voucher program.

And a million other things.

[Anonymous]

ANC meeting tonight, 10/28. Zoom details on Forest Hills Connect.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:ANC meeting tonight, 10/28. Zoom details on Forest Hills Connect.

There already have been numerous ANC meetings on this subject. How, exactly, will this ANC meeting lead to any different outcome? I can already predict what will happen

-- Someone will ask for more oversight of the voucher program (better screening, less concentration of vouchers in the same building, etc.).

-- Someone else will call that person racist for demanding oversight of the voucher program.

-- Someone will talk about how their apartment building has become unsafe because of vouchers.

-- That person also will be called racist.

-- The ANC commissioners will hem and haw and maybe think about drafting some sort of resolution that will be ignored by the powers that be.

-- If Frumin is there, he will shrug his shoulders and say it's a complex issue and that there's not a lot he can do. At the end of the meeting, he'll duck out and walk the two blocks to his car, which he parked far away enough so that hopefully no one notices that he drove and didn't ride his bike.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:ANC meeting tonight, 10/28. Zoom details on Forest Hills Connect.

There already have been numerous ANC meetings on this subject. How, exactly, will this ANC meeting lead to any different outcome? I can already predict what will happen

-- Someone will ask for more oversight of the voucher program (better screening, less concentration of vouchers in the same building, etc.).

-- Someone else will call that person racist for demanding oversight of the voucher program.

-- Someone will talk about how their apartment building has become unsafe because of vouchers.

-- That person also will be called racist.

-- The ANC commissioners will hem and haw and maybe think about drafting some sort of resolution that will be ignored by the powers that be.

-- If Frumin is there, he will shrug his shoulders and say it's a complex issue and that there's not a lot he can do. At the end of the meeting, he'll duck out and walk the two blocks to his car, which he parked far away enough so that hopefully no one notices that he drove and didn't ride his bike.

What exactly would you like Frumin to do that is within his power to do?

[Anonymous]

Deandre Pettus is due back in court 12/2 per court documents. He is still free and per doc on Sup Court site, appears to be living in SE. Hope his girls are safe from him. Hope there will be justice for his son. He appears to have a new lawyer (not PD) who has entered a variety of motions. Ironically the new lawyer used to work at The Children’s Law Center.

https://www.elitelawyer.com/profile/11164-aj-amissah

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:ANC meeting tonight, 10/28. Zoom details on Forest Hills Connect.

There already have been numerous ANC meetings on this subject. How, exactly, will this ANC meeting lead to any different outcome? I can already predict what will happen

-- Someone will ask for more oversight of the voucher program (better screening, less concentration of vouchers in the same building, etc.).

-- Someone else will call that person racist for demanding oversight of the voucher program.

-- Someone will talk about how their apartment building has become unsafe because of vouchers.

-- That person also will be called racist.

-- The ANC commissioners will hem and haw and maybe think about drafting some sort of resolution that will be ignored by the powers that be.

-- If Frumin is there, he will shrug his shoulders and say it's a complex issue and that there's not a lot he can do. At the end of the meeting, he'll duck out and walk the two blocks to his car, which he parked far away enough so that hopefully no one notices that he drove and didn't ride his bike.

What exactly would you like Frumin to do that is within his power to do?

Publicly call for a pause in the voucher program until the Mayor and police certify they have the resources in place to absorb additional recipients?