This #TenantTuesday we're featuring Eloíza Chamorro— a fierce Columbia Heights tenant leader and a member of @DCTenantsUnion. Eloíza has lived at 1454 Irving St NW since she came to DC from Nicaragua in 1976, long before the big retailers and trendy bars came to the neighborhood.

Columbia Heights is where Eloíza raised her family and built a strong community. But, for the last 41 years she’s also had cracks in her walls, inadequate heat, pest issues in her building, and buckets lined against her apartment window to catch the water leaking in.

Eloíza's landlord’s neglect is not an accident. For the last 3 years, he has tried to exploit the gaps in DC tenant protections to try to push her and her neighbors out of their rent-controlled apartments so he can sell a vacant building at an extreme profit. Here's how it works:

DC rent control has loopholes that allow landlords to raise rents by much more than the CPI+2% limit. These include petitions claiming financial hardship or the need for a capital improvement/substantial rehabilitation. Eloíza’s landlord has been threatening to file the latter.

There’s no denying the need for repairs, but the need arose due to the owner’s failure to do routine maintenance over decades, and the main reason the building isn’t bringing in enough revenue isn’t rent control, but because the owner hasn't filled 14 of the 21 vacant apartments!

This is why our platform demands better oversight and enforcement of all of these petitions, and specifically seeks to ensure that increases under a Substantial Rehabilitation Petition must be temporary rather than permanent.

Eloíza and her neighbors will keep fighting hard to stop displacement and preserve affordable housing in DC but they need your help!

Join tenants in saying NO MORE to the weak rent control laws of the 1980s by signing the #ReclaimRentControl petition: https://actionnetwork.org/forms/reclaim-rent-control