FIDEL WAS FOUR years old when I met him in 2014. His family lived in an apartment building around the corner from us in Washington, D.C. He liked to fly around the apartment entryway with arms extended, making airplane sounds. He liked to say “no.” He played with toy cars during tenant organizing meetings.
Fourteen families shared the 26-unit building, which had decades of deferred maintenance. The absentee landlord (a Palm Beach-based Episcopalian, real estate magnate, and attorney, who preserves wealth for his children, practices elite philanthropy, and once served as protocol officer for Spiro “Bag Man” Agnew’s reelection campaign) had abandoned the building — except for rent extraction.
In Fidel’s one-bedroom apartment, he maneuvered around handfuls of roach motels and rodent snap traps. His mom sealed his clothing in airtight plastic bags to keep out the night-crawling, blood-sucking bed bugs. Upstairs, a neighbor slept with her “rat stick.” Water from the tap often ran brown or didn’t run at all. Stoves were rusted. Toilets leaked. Frigid winter air poured in through broken windows or damaged frames. Ceilings collapsed. Lead paint and mold flecked the baseboards where Fidel played and slept.
The tenants submitted repair requests. The building manager ignored them or responded inadequately. The sooner he could drive them out, the sooner the owner could flip the property to luxury condos and realize astronomical profit. One day, the owner notified tenants of a 31.5 percent rent increase. Failure to pay risked eviction. The owner’s preferential option for profit over people sent Fidel a clear message: You are disposable.
ESSAYIST WENDELL BERRY writes, “Disposability is an ‘efficiency,’ which justifies throwing away whatever we can no longer use or no longer want.” In a value system based on economic determinism, this landlord’s efficiencies are a “principled stance,” if you will. Any inexhaustible resource can be treated as dispensable. The bodily labor of Fidel’s parents, who work two or three jobs, is a renewable source of income for the owner. Under the law of greed, power and wealth become grotesque beauties.
And yet. Sometimes, in an apparently closed system of exploitation, extraction, depletion, and disposability, people say “no.” Or, as Fidel’s mom put it, “It isn’t right to live this way.”
For more than a decade, these tenants waged a peaceable war for justice. Fidel watched his mom serve as co-president of their tenant association to demand safe, decent, and affordable housing in a quickly gentrifying neighborhood. He listened at meetings to learn about housing law. He watched neighbors speak at public hearings, provide court testimony, and document rent deliveries.
When the local government failed to enforce the housing code, pro bono attorneys demonstrated how tenants and neighbors could form a citizen’s housing inspection team, which gathered evidence on violations to present in court. The struggle united us as neighbors. Said one tenant leader, “We danced together to hide the sadness.” At every stage, these tenants demanded respect and equal treatment under the law with joy, courage, and wisdom.
In 2017, the District’s first independently elected attorney general filed suit against the owner and managers of Fidel’s apartment building for “engaging in a pattern of neglect dating back many years and forcing tenants to live with long-term infestations of vermin, mold contamination, and lack of heat, among other issues.” In summer 2023, a settlement was reached. The tenants received compensation from the owner and access to safe, affordable housing in the same neighborhood, though not the same building.
Along the way, some tenants died in the struggle, some were born into it — and some grew up in its midst. Fidel is now a freshman in high school. His family is living in much better conditions, but he misses being surrounded by community in his old building.
“No doubt there always will be some people willing to do anything at all that is economically or technologically possible,” writes Berry, “who look upon the world and its creatures without affection and therefore as exploitable without limit.”
But, God willing, there will also be some who try to overcome the impossible, who approach their neighbors with affection, who draw on, as Berry puts it, “our ancient effort to define ourselves as human and humane.” Choose the beautiful struggle.
Rose Marie Berger, a Catholic peace activist and poet, is senior editor of Sojourners magazine. She is author ofBending the Arch: Poems.
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