MoxBlog

He was startled by the roar of a lawn mower right outside his window.

Which was strange, because Richard Jaskiewicz doesn’t have a lawn.

“By the time I got to the window and looked outside, they were done. Just chopped it all off. There were eight guys and two trucks out there,” said Jaskiewicz, 63, showing me the piebald, postage-stamp front yard that had once been covered in ivy (and some weeds, he readily admits) outside his townhouse in Northwest Washington.

“Then the city sent me a bill for $2,000,” he said.

That wasn’t the worst of it.

The retired mechanic is about to lose his home because someone determined it wasn’t as well-maintained as the other townhouses being snapped up and remodeled in his neighborhood. It’s in a pretty hot neighborhood, between the city’s Target shopping center at Columbia Heights and around the corner from one of our food critic’s favorite restaurants.

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The city’s Department of Buildings — most likely prompted to action by complaint calls from residents — declared the aging five-bedroom beauty vacant and blighted. Jaskiewicz began getting notices that his biggest asset, which was built in 1908 of brick and Indiana limestone and which he bought in 1997, was headed to a tax auction.

“It was a little worn when I bought it,” he said. “But I’ve been working on it for years. Was planning to keep fixing it up.”

There are almost 350 properties that the District has declared vacant and blighted, among nearly 3,500 residential properties that are deemed vacant, according to the Department of Buildings database.

Housing in D.C. is consistently ranked as some of the nation’s most expensive, fueled by an ongoing housing shortage and a waiting list for affordable housing that was 40,000 people long last year.

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So a city agency aggressively making unused housing usable is generally a good thing.

In some cases, neighbors are clamoring for the city to get rid of the decaying properties that attract rodents and interlopers doing sketchy things.

“They need to do something about this, it’s a danger to the neighborhood,” said a neighbor of 1616 E St. NE; a small apartment building on the vacant and blighted list that is boarded up, fenced off and falling apart.

But this is not the case with Jaskiewicz.

“This is my home. I live here; I’ve lived here for decades,” he said.

True, his neighbors told me they see him come and go most days as he heads out for groceries or to yoga class.

But his house doesn’t look like the Pinterest-ready renovations happening in the gentrifying parts of the city — no sans-serif house numbers, Pottery Barn lounge furniture or burbling fountain out front.

It’s not an eyesore either, though. I visited some of the other houses that got on the “vacant” and “blighted” list, like that building on E Street. The ones I saw are crumbling and hollow-eyed — the ones you avoided or tried to explore as a kid, depending on the kind of child you were.

The government tried to regulate this problem through taxes.

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Normally, D.C. properties are taxed at 85 cents for every $100 of assessed value. If a home is vacant, it jumps to $5 for every $100, and if it’s blighted, it goes to $10 for every $100 of assessed value, a smart tactic by the city to prevent absentee owners or developers from tying up D.C.’s valuable housing stock.

Jaskiewicz bought his townhouse in 1997 for $127,273 and owns it free and clear. He’s paid his property taxes on time every year. But he faced a monster tax bill that increased tenfold, to nearly $52,000, from his usual rate because the property is assessed at more than $1.1 million.

“He will have to decide between forfeiting refilling his medications, getting another job, selling assets or other draconian measures just to pay bills that shouldn’t be there,” said Randy Alan Weiss, a friend of Jaskiewicz who is also an attorney and has been helping him with the issue.

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Weiss and Jaskiewicz tackled the vacancy issue, gathering enough documentation from water bills and neighborhood testimony to convince the city inspectors that Jaskiewicz lives in the house.

That got the city to change the property status to “occupied,” according to documents. The bill, however, is still more than $26,000, according to the latest letter Jaskiewicz received. He doesn’t have that kind of cash, he said.

He’s also receiving notices that the house is headed to a tax auction.

The Department of Buildings wouldn’t comment on Jaskiewicz’s case specifically.

“Through a task force with ANC and other community leaders, we are working to ensure that DC’s regulations remain transparent, accessible, and responsive to changing circumstances,” the department said in a statement when I asked for details. “Code violations can be dangerous, and we urge anyone in violation of DC code to respond in a timely manner to communication from DC government, and to work with our team to ensure that issues are quickly addressed.”

The case “metastasized” all the way to tax auction because Jaskiewicz hadn’t responded to earlier notices and attempts to reach him, a department official told me.

Jaskiewicz is not a social guy. He’s taciturn, a bit of a curmudgeon. After spending a career repairing and restoring classic cars, he withdrew into his lifetime project — his house. And when he got the blighted sticker on his home and the city began sending him notices, he started fixing up his windows, pulling the remaining weeds.

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“It was confusing, all the stuff they sent me,” he said.

He’s had a rough go of things as the notices piled up. His fiancée died of cancer, his parents died.

“I wasn’t totally together after that, you know?” he said.

The building officials I talked to all said the situation is resolvable if Jaskiewicz just gets in touch with them.

But Jaskiewicz insists that he has called them and has made little progress.

“I just didn’t realize what the implications of all this were,” he said. “I thought I was just dealing with cleaning up the yard a bit.”

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