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the georgetown voice 15
Empowering student tenants through support and advocacy by Nick Suttle and Mary Hanley On October 17, 2004, nearly 100 firefighters were called to the 3300 block of Prospect Street after an anonymous 911 call alerted authorities of a blaze burning through the townhouse at 3318 Prospect. The first responders arrived at 8:52 a.m. and the fire was completely extinguished by 9:20 a.m., but upon searching the house the crew discovered that not all of the residents had managed to make it out of the house. Daniel Rigby (MSB ‘05) was found lying on the floor of his room at the basement level, having already passed away due to smoke inhalation. D.C. Fire Department spokesman Allan Etter claimed that the house violated several fire codes, from having metal bars blocking any
possible exit through the basement windows to an air conditioning unit obstructing the back door. Once the fire had spread from an electrical meter up the walls and burned through the first floor, Rigby never had a chance to escape. Not only was this the second fire on the 3300 block that month, but after city officials performed inspections on other blocks, thirty-nine students were forced to vacate their rooms due to closures. Even after this loss to the Georgetown community, many townhouses still go through extended periods of time without inspections and renovations, regardless of how decrepit they become. Students are constantly forced to deal with safety code violations and subpar living conditions because unhelpful, recalcitrant landlords are too focused on avoiding
GSTA will fight the landlords, so that you don’t have to.
LEILA LEBRETON
The walls are closing in
Imagine a massive intergalactic trash compactor, Star Wars Episode IV-style. You and me, and the rest of the world’s population, are caught inside. The wealthiest of the bunch have managed to escape to the middle, furthest from the slowly but surely incoming walls. Everyone is going to perish, but at least we’ll be able to prolong our stay in the compactor. The walls that promise to put an end to life as we know it are climate destruction on one side, and injustices of various sorts on the other. Like in Star Wars, we can’t stop the walls from inside the compactor by pushing against or jamming something between them—by “cleaning up coal,” geoengineering our atmosphere, or even securing the ever-elusive emissions commitment from national governments. No, in order to stop the whole apparatus, we have to turn off the mechanisms that are moving the walls to begin
with. The change needs to happen at a fundamental systems level: economic, political, and otherwise. The hopeful part is that, unlike in A New Hope, we don’t need R2-D2 to step in on our behalf. We ourselves can dig deep to get to the roots of climate destruction and socioeconomic injustice, and replace them with more just systems of human organization. This metaphor was given to me last weekend by Gopal Dayaneni, a life-long climate justice activist, at a convergence of more than 200 student activists campaigning for fossil fuel divestment across North America. Dayaneni used the trash compactor to illuminate a major weakness of most mainstream environmental campaigns: a failure to recognize the wave of structural injustice crashing down on the other side. But, coming to terms with this failure, movements such as ours are presented with an opportunity to broaden their vision to include the entire compactor.
expensive building updates. Every Hoya has the right to clean, safe, and affordable housing, and as the co-directors of the Georgetown Student Tenant Association, we work to protect this right by helping students challenge abusive landlords. The Georgetown Student Tenant Association is a non-profit student organization that provides confidential counsel to peers seeking off-campus housing and to those encountering the problems all too common for tenants. We strive to represent the voice of tenants and we act as a liaison between student tenants and D.C. agencies with the authority to take action. It is highly apparent from our work that many Georgetown students experience problems with their landlords. Students commonly report that landlords withhold security deposits, charge illegal amounts for safety deposits, and refuse to make necessary repairs despite legal obligations. Many student tenants deal with rat infestations, mold, broken heating/ air-conditioning, broken doors, and leaky roofs. These living conditions are a part of everyday life for too many Georgetown students. It is concerning that so many properties in Georgetown do not have the proper licensing. When properties do not have Basic Business Licenses, they have not been inspected in several years. These houses
may be unsafe for students. In order to rectify this issue, the GSTA alongside the Office of Neighborhood Life and D.C. governmental agencies, worked with the unlicensed properties to schedule inspections and fulfill compliance requirements. Still, many homes have not successfully completed these inspections. It is of the utmost importance that all student homes are inspected regularly to ensure that they are safe. Students need help in taking a more active role in asserting their rights as tenants. Anyone who has tried to live off-campus knows that the hunt for off-campus housing is a competitive endeavor at Georgetown, and landlords take advantage of their leverage. Students that push back against unfair leases or ask questions may lose out in the market. They need to take the time to read their leases and ensure that they work with a reputable landlord. The competitive nature of the market results in leases that scam the tenants who do not know their rights or are panicking to resolve their housing hunt without reviewing the conditions of the lease. The GSTA offers a lease review service and our advocates utilize knowledge of D.C. housing law to identify confusing clauses and even clauses that blatantly violate the law at the expense of the tenant. If tenants know their rights, and even their re-
The fact of the matter is, divestment from fossil fuels is but one crucial element in the transition away from an extraction and oppression-based economy to one that is sustainable and just. This “just transition” pays attention to the working class folks on the so-called ‘frontlines’ of environmental struggles,
coal company responsible for the mines and countless environmental harms in Black Mesa. As I write this, they are staging a sit in outside of their Chancellor’s and Admissions offices to await an answer from Wash U’s leaders. This is inspiring, and I have no doubt that student persistence will produce results as it seldom fails to do. However, student campaigns to discredit fossil fuel companies must be simultaneously accompanied by additional strategies to facilitate this “just transition” to better systems. This includes providing immediate relief to communities in need, such as when water resources were compromised in West Virginia earlier this year as the result of a chemical spill from one of Freedom Industry’s coal facilities. A “just transition” also entails finding economically, as well as environmentally viable, alternatives for the communities that, on one hand, suffer tremendously from the health and associated harms brought
Carrying On by Patricia Cipollitti A rotating column by senior Voice staffers
such as those working the coal mines on Navajo and Hopi lands in Black Mesa, Arizona. One part of the approach is comprised of student efforts to cut ties with the companies directly responsible for these operations. Two days ago, students at Washington University in St. Louis escalated their five-year long campaign to encourage their institution to cut its ties with Peabody Energy—the very
strictions, the relationship between tenants and their landlords will hopefully become more functional and civil and less exploitative and belligerent. This is the motivation behind all our services, like one-onone meetings with tenants already in poor living conditions, or the newly launched Roomr website that allows students to review their landlords to give future tenants more information before signing their leases. Overall, the GSTA seeks to educate, advocate, and represent the interest of students living off-campus. We are students as well, encountering the same issues and battling the same abuses. It is imperative that students understand that they have a legal right to clean and safe housing. We cannot settle for unresponsive landlords and, through the Georgetown Student Tenant Association, we hope students can assert their rights as tenants. In the future, we hope to become a model for more than just Georgetown. We aim to export our project to schools throughout D.C., creating a D.C. Tenant Association Network that can tackle landlord-tenant issues on a larger scale through combined advocacy efforts.
Nick Suttle and Mary Hanley are the co-directors of the Georgetown Student Tenant Association. Students can access Tenant Association resources at gs-ta.org about by extractive industries, but on the other, will undoubtedly bear the brunt of unemployment if these companies find a need to cut costs. In other words, we need to be reinvesting in localized solutions that directly benefit these populations. This takes more than just reinvesting in large renewable energy enterprises. For instance, one activist I met this weekend is working on a project to transition reclaimed coal lands into solar farms. These will create longterm investment in her community by hiring locals and using existing coal-driven energy infrastructure and markets. In other words, stopping the global compactor from destroying us all necessitates aligning strategies that work clearly towards a united vision: justice. There is no one silver bullet to solving the climate crisis and none to resolve social and economic injustices. Until we realize that all of these issues are intertwined, we’re going to have a very hard time of getting out of the compactor in time.