THE VILLAGE

How D.C.’s AG Racine Tackles Issues of Housing and Homelessness

BY CHRISTOPHER JONES

What should be done about the crisis of housing and homelessness in the District? While many hold theories, the District’s Attorney General, Karl A. Racine wields powerful tools to address matters directly.

With a team of nearly 700 lawyers and staff in 12 offices and divisions, Racine’s Office of the Attorney General (OAG) is charged statutorily with serving the “public interest” of the nation’s capital and Racine himself is committed to “applying the law creatively” on behalf of D.C. residents at risk of losing housing. The Georgetowner spoke with AG Racine recently to discuss his outlook, efforts and initiatives.

In 2015, District voters elected Racine to become the city’s first elected Attorney General -- unlike most AGs around the country who are appointed. He’s now serving in his second 4-year term, having been reelected in 2018.

Since his election, Racine has gained national prominence not only through the OAG’s multiple lawsuits against Trump organizations and his recent decision to require Covid vaccines for his workforce, but by his work as president of the bi-partisan National Association of Attorneys General. Previously, he served as an Associate White House Counsel in the Clinton administration. He was also the first African-American managing partner of a top-100 American law firm, Venable LLP, and served for many years as an attorney for the D.C. Public Defender Service.

Racine’s profile on the OAG’s website, outlines his public service roots. “Born in Haiti, Attorney General Racine came to the District at the age of three,” the bio reads. He “attended D.C. public schools, including Murch Elementary, Deal Junior High, and Wilson High, and graduated from St. John’s College High School. He earned a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania, where he was captain of the basketball team, and a J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law, where he volunteered in a legal clinic supporting the rights of migrant farm workers. His commitment to equal justice was inspired by his parents, who fled authoritarian rule in Haiti to start a better life in the United States, and by the lawyers of the Civil Rights Movement, who used the law to make positive social change.”

Upon reelection in 2018, Racine posted on his profile his particular commitment to ensuring housing stability and economic security for D.C. residents. He said he was “honored to serve again” and would “use the next four years to expand work on priorities, including preserving affordable housing, employing evidence-based juvenile justice reforms, cracking down on slumlords, holding unscrupulous employers accountable for wage-theft, and protecting consumers from scams and abusive business practices.”

While the mandate of the OAG is to defend the District in lawsuits and provide legal advice to the Mayor, city agencies, and the D.C. council, the OAG’s “public interest” objective gives Racine leeway to address a range of complex issues that contribute to the problem of homelessness in the District -- from abusive landlords, to crime, to juvenile justice to fraudulent or illegal practices that put residents at risk of losing their homes. “We’re able to use the law in the public interest and that’s where we really focus our efforts when it comes to issues related to housing,” Racine told The Georgetowner.

One of the principle pipelines into homelessness, Racine argues, involves abusive landlords finding ways to force tenants out so they can upscale their properties and demand higher rents. “Unfortunately, there still remain slumlords in the District of Columbia,” Racine said, “and many of [them] have a business model where they literally purchase a building that has paying tenants or tenants who have paid via a [housing] subsidy and the longterm goal of these slumlords is to get those tenants out so that the properties can either be renovated or redeveloped and attract a whole new type of tenant that can pay higher rates.”

So, AG Racine dispatches OAG lawyers to the scene. “Our lawyers go in and we hold those landlords, owners or management companies accountable for not providing a safe, inhabitable place to tenants who in some form or fashion are paying for that service,” he said. “Essential to that business model is not providing services for the existing tenants. So tenants are forced to live with leaky roofs, leaky basements, mold, all kinds of vermin, and other unsafe and uninhabitable conditions.”

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We Spoke with D.C.’s Homeless Residents

Pg. 10: Encampment at the eastside entrance to Georgetown. Photo By Robert Devaney. Pg. 11: Encampment on Virginia Ave. by Kennedy Center Photo By Sonya Bernhardt; Lynn, a homeless woman at an encampment eats the food we brought and talks about her situation. She started to cry when she explained her husband had recently passed as did her best friend. Photo By Greg Blankenship.

BY KATE OCZYPOK

Most of us may not have noticed them — tent encampments popping up around the city.

Family-size tents with furniture suggestive of more permanent stays. The unhoused people in the parks and in the fringes appear to be preparing for the worst but hoping for the best. They’re concerned about the upcoming winter, but know their stay in the area may be longer than they had expected.

We visited a cluster of tents sitting above the on-ramps to the Rock Creek Parkway and Whitehurst Freeway. When we arrived, there was a middle-aged man sitting at a table, using a generator to power a fan to keep him cool and charge a phone that was sitting on a picnic table in front of him.

The man was friendly, eager to share his story about being from Sweden. His accent was thick, and he told us he had been homeless for five months, which would put him living at the enclave since around March of this year when the pandemic took hold. As he concentrated on rolling a joint, the man explained he was educated and had a background in finance and stocks. He spoke fingering a gold cross necklace, telling us he had been an army veteran, serving 10 years and ending his service due to a disability. When he got up to throw away a piece of trash, he was slightly stooped and had a visible limp.

Soon after we began speaking, another middle-aged blonde woman in aviator sunglasses wandered over. She sat at the opposite head of the picnic table, quietly listening to us speak with the Swedish Army vet nearer to us. The two shared their vaccination status (both fully protected) and seemed to understand the importance of the shot, especially given their living arrangements.

Before we got to speak further to the blonde woman, a boisterous Jamaican woman wandered over. She was clad in purple slippers, a King’s Hawaiian Rolls bright orange apron and a pink headband with a bow on top. A lot of what the woman said was incoherent, but we were able to gather that she did hair and nails at one point in her life. She ran back to her tent to show us a square piece of wood she had written all her specialties on, including manicures and pedicures, “Janet Jackson braids,” cornrows and lots more. A creative soul, she also showed us bracelets she had made and shared with us her knitting abilities.

However, due to whatever ailed the woman -- whether it was a mental illness or drug addiction -- she got angry quite easily. She became particularly upset when she recalled a story of a woman high on PCP who threw away her baby.

While the Jamaican woman spoke, two other younger men came up to see what was going on. The taller of the two, a Black man with a salt-and-pepper goatee, told me it was the first time he found himself homeless in 20 years. His roommate and he got kicked out of their housing accommodations after his roommate failed to pay rent. According to the man, his roommate had been a cocaine and meth addict as well as an alcoholic and used his rent money to pay for his habits.

The man had recently gotten laid off from his construction job due to the ongoing pandemic, so now here he was. When asked if he was vaccinated, he adamantly said “no.” The Jamaican woman seemed to overhear this question and loudly proclaimed that “God will take me when it’s my time!” She too was unvaccinated.

The second of the younger men spoke to me about how his mother was a doctor so he “had to get vaccinated.” It was unclear whether the man lived in one of the tents, as he shared with us that he had supplied around half the tents in the area. He was getting ready to go to work, in red Nikes and Apple AirPods in his ears. He stood close, sipping an open bottle of Jose Cuervo tequila before admitting he was heading into work. He shared that he worked in the restaurant business, having experience in cooking.

It was unclear where exactly he worked, but he did share that he “works for rich people” and he was sipping the tequila because “the job [is] stressful.” He admitted he never swore at work as much as he had the previous week. Despite all this, he was genuinely grateful he did have a job.

The unhoused folks we spoke to are part of an ongoing homelessness problem in the D.C. area. According to the D.C. Department of Human Services, the number of chronically homeless people in the city rose from 1,337 in 2020 to 1,618 in 2021, an increase of about 21 percent. The number of unsheltered individuals not considered chronically homeless also rose, from 653 to 681 people. Particularly concerning is the number of homeless between the ages of 18 and 24 — that number rose about 34 percent in D.C. since 2020.

TO READ MORE ABOUT THE MENTAL HEALTH ASPECT OF HOMELESSNESS, VISIT GEORGETOWNER.COM FOR AN INTERVIEW WITH DR. COLLEEN LANE OF THE WHITMAN WALKER CLINIC’S MAX ROBINSON CENTER.