In recent years, the residents of Potomac Gardens public housing complex near Capitol Hill have contended with flooded bathrooms, ceiling leaks, broken air-conditioning, and rodent infestations. But, like many of the District’s public housing residents, those who live there say reporting such problems to the D.C. Housing Authority often results in little but inaction.
“They tell you one thing, and they do something else,” says one longtime resident who is a member of the building’s resident council and asked not to be identified out of fear of retaliation. This summer, it took this resident three separate complaints to get her air-conditioning properly fixed. Now, she says, after 14 years in the complex, she’s moving out to live with her adult children. “I’ve just had enough.”
Five other public housing residents who spoke with City Paper described similar issues with maintenance requests. None of them agreed to be named for this story.
District officials have known for years that housing code violations are commonplace within D.C.’s 52 public housing complexes, and that resident efforts to report such issues are plagued by delays. After a scathing 2022 assessment by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development—which, among other concerns, found that maintenance and upkeep procedures were failing to keep units in “decent, safe, and sanitary condition”—DCHA underwent a leadership shake-up and updated its policies.
Now, under recently appointed director Keith Pettigrew, the agency aims to resolve emergency orders within 24 hours; routine repairs are to be addressed within 14 days, though those timelines are goals, not firm deadlines, DCHA spokesperson Alison Burdo says.
Nearly two years after HUD’s audit, data shows that public housing residents continue to face significant delays in getting basic safety and quality of life issues addressed by DCHA.
During fiscal year 2023—Oct. 1, 2022 through Sept. 30, 2023—emergency repairs at DCHA properties, which include threats “to life, safety, and property,” took an average of 12 days to be resolved, and nonemergency repair requests took an average of 67 days, according to data provided to the D.C. Council earlier this year and recently obtained by the Investigative Reporting Workshop.
While those averages included several outlier cases, IRW’s analysis shows that the department routinely fails to respond to housing issues within the window of time set by DCHA as a goal and by federal law as a requirement.
Out of 20,468 routine work orders completed during that year, 35 percent took more than two weeks to be addressed. Of 14,604 emergency work orders filed during that time, 45 percent took longer to be remedied than the one-day window stated in DCHA’s policy.
“When tenants sometimes report a problem, for example, with a bad rodent infestation, the issue often becomes something that is larger than that single unit and requires more widespread repairs in the property, and we often see that those repairs don’t happen promptly,” says Brian Rohal, senior staff attorney for Legal Aid DC. “Those repairs don’t happen in an adequate fashion to actually resolve the underlying issues. And often tenants just don’t even get clear responses of when repairs can be expected.”
Burdo notes that since the agency came under Pettigrew’s leadership in November, the department has worked on a “substantial realignment of goals and priorities.” She adds that DCHA is working to improve its work order completion rates while also making sure the underlying problems are adequately resolved. “DCHA public housing program’s main goal is ensuring the work is completed properly,” she says via email.
According to statistics provided by DCHA, in June 2024, 65 percent of routine work orders were completed within the federally required 21-day time frame; and 48 percent of all work orders—including emergency and urgent requests—were closed within 24 hours.
In the fiscal year 2023 data, 68 percent of routine work orders were completed within 21 days.
Makenna Osborn, a policy attorney with the Children’s Law Center, says that in many cases after public housing residents file complaints about their housing conditions, even when they do everything by the book, the reporting process still fails. Osborn says her organization has worked with residents who are given work order numbers but are told later that no case with that number exists when they call back to check on the status of the request. “It just disappears,” she says. “There’s no way for [the residents] to track it,” though she adds that upgrades to tenant-facing software could mitigate this issue.
At-Large Councilmember Robert White, who chairs the Council’s housing committee with oversight of DCHA, notes that the District has worked for years to remedy issues with maintenance backlogs. He recalls touring one public housing unit that not only had a broken light, but also a years-old hole in the wall.
“They had systems that just didn’t make sense,” White says. “Even if you, the repair person, could see the hole in the wall, if they didn’t report it, your process, your system, was to ignore it, and that is just ridiculous.”
A 2020 review by an outside consulting group documented holes in the reporting process, including that work orders were often misclassified and that internal data about response times was often inconsistent or inaccurate. Two years later, the D.C. Office of the Inspector General documented what it called a lack of accountability within the system. “As a result of a lack of planning and monitoring over the housing unit inspection process for those units that were not properly inspected, DCHA does not have assurance that tenants have not been exposed to unsafe or unhealthy living conditions,” the report concluded, adding that DCHA would often hire contractors to fix issues and then never confirm that fixes had been made.
“HUD continues to monitor DCHA’s performance and works with DCHA to resolve the remaining findings from HUD’s 2022 report,” a HUD spokesperson writes in an email to City Paper. “HUD has seen significant progress, including DCHA assessing all properties and units for deficiencies, creating a preventative maintenance plan, bringing on additional staff/contractor resources to resolve work orders and address vacant units, and assessing options for modernization and redevelopment of public housing properties with substantial needs.”
Following the 2022 HUD audit, DCHA was given until May 30, 2023, to resolve the more than 100 issues laid out in the report—a deadline that the agency did not meet. More than a year later, DCHA still has not addressed all the issues HUD identified.
Even after significant reforms and leadership turnover, White says the DCHA is still significantly underfunded.
“I think the Housing Authority needs two things right now,” White says. “They need a large amount of money to get properties into a state of good repair, and then they need a less, but still significant amount of money to maintain it on an ongoing basis, so that we don’t get back here.”
White says he has confidence in Pettigrew’s leadership, which marks a shift in his tone regarding former director Brenda Donald’s administration when he called DCHA an “agency in chaos.” With Pettigrew, White says, “I have really appreciated his sense of urgency and his understanding of how public housing works.”
While a significant portion of the DCHA budget comes from the federal government, White believes the District needs to increase the local funds that bolster the housing authority’s budget. “Putting the amount of money in the budget that the housing Authority needs sends the signal to the authority that the city is serious about maintaining its public housing stock,” he adds.
The District’s 2025 budget includes $101 million in funding “to rehabilitate and modernize public housing units managed by the DC Housing Authority,” which would provide an infusion of cash for repairs. But some fear it still may not be enough to keep these properties in good condition. “We are not putting the amount of money that I think they need, but we are increasingly putting more money into public housing,” White says.
Mayor Muriel Bowser declined to sign the budget that was passed by the Council earlier this year—a signal she disagrees with some of its priorities. The plan will take effect pending a 30-day review period by Congress. Bowser’s office did not comment on whether she supports additional spending for rehabilitating public housing; her office did not respond to questions about the ongoing delays in the fulfilling of maintenance requests.