Suburban Crowding Arouses Tensions
Immigrants Jam Affordable Houses
By Jo Becker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 3, 2002; Page A01
The living room is tiny: a stroller blocking the fireplace, family members wedged tightly on a small sofa. Outside, cars spill over asphalt onto the grass. But to Sandra Sorian, the overflowing house is a tranquil palace compared with the confining poverty she knew in El Salvador.
It's just a three-bedroom bungalow, and she shares it with her husband, their two children, her husband's two sisters and his mother. But it took all five adults four years to save enough money to buy the small home on Domer Avenue in Silver Spring. To make the mortgage, they pull long hours busing tables, driving a tow truck, chopping food and cleaning restaurants after closing time.
"Everyone pitches in because it costs so much money," the 22-year-old says in Spanish of her $146,000 house. "We'd all like a bigger house, but there's reality."
Domer Avenue, an inside-the-Beltway cluster of small brick homes, has always been an entry point into wealthy Montgomery County for people with limited means. Once, it drew a diverse group of young couples who scraped together down payments on their starter homes. But more and more, the affordable homes of Domer Avenue have become filled with large extended families of Latino immigrants or been turned into virtual boarding houses.
A similar transformation is taking place in pockets across the Washington area, the product of rising housing prices, rapid population growth and an influx of immigrants.
The phenomenon is pitting longtime residents who fear for their property values against new immigrants who are increasingly moving directly to the suburbs in search of good schools, safe neighborhoods and better jobs. Caught in the middle are ambivalent housing regulators who face a quandary. If they enforce laws designed to ensure safe housing, they could open themselves up to discrimination charges and end up enlarging the homeless population.
The underlying problem is a critical shortage of affordable housing. Across the region, more than 104,000 families are paying more than half their incomes for housing, according to the federal government's American Housing Survey.
In Montgomery County, which is considered a national leader in affordable housing, the average apartment rent jumped 11 percent last year to $1,180 a month, and the waiting list for rent subsidies has more than doubled since 1999.
Families, many of them immigrants, are consequently forced to double and triple up.
The question facing county officials is: What should be done about these crowded houses?
Montgomery County, like other jurisdictions, has all sorts of rules governing the number of people who can live in single-family homes. James Melton, Sorian's next-door neighbor, used to believe in them, back when he bothered to pick up the phone to gripe about his neighbors. Inspectors came and went, but little changed, except that Melton began to feel that officials were brushing off his complaints by labeling him a racist.
Melton, a baby-boomer archaeologist who has spent most of his 51 years in his yellow-trimmed brick house on Domer Avenue and had hoped to retire there, said the characterization was unfair.
Domer Avenue has long been diverse, he said. It just hasn't always been this densely populated.
"The response we got from county government is that cultural change is difficult," he said, pacing his kitchen with a cup of coffee in his hand. "They created an atmosphere of noncompliance and nonenforcement."
During the 1990s, as Washington area home prices soared and immigrants arrived in huge numbers, the proportion of the population living in very large households -- those with at least seven people -- began to increase, reversing a long-term trend. Recent census figures show this is particularly true among Hispanics, who are much more likely than other groups to live in in large households.
With the demographic shift came an increase in complaints about crowding. The number has tripled in Montgomery County since 1997, prompting 159 investigations last year. In Fairfax County, investigators looked into 285 cases last year.
Behind those numbers are long-established homeowners like Melton and newcomers like Sorian. Fed up, Melton and his wife are packing their house and preparing to move to the Shenandoah Valley, where the nearest neighbor will be a quarter-mile away. Sorian can't wait to see him go.
"He complains about all our cars and says there's garbage, but take a look at his house," she said, jerking her head in the direction of Melton's overgrown and cluttered lawn. "So we have five or six cars. They're not for luxury -- we need them to work."
Overworked, hampered by hard-to-enforce codes and acutely aware of the pitfalls, Montgomery regulators attempt to strike a balance between social justice and the letter of the law.
They are influenced, too, by history: In 1988, an effort to rid Takoma Park of illegal apartments was met with hunger strikes and sit-ins. In Virginia, a Fairfax lawmaker last year withdrew a bill to limit sleeping quarters to bedrooms after the legislation was labeled anti-immigrant.
When they find severe health and safety violations, officials say they take a stern approach. Montgomery County moved quickly after a January fire in Gaithersburg killed a a Salvadoran family of four living in the basement of a town home. County Executive Douglas M. Duncan (D) announced criminal citations against the landlord, who allowed the illegal basement sublet to help the struggling immigrant tenants upstairs pay the $1,200 monthly rent.
"This family should not be dead," Duncan said. "I know people double up, but you've got to obey the law."
Laws are fairly straightforward, though they vary slightly by jurisdiction. In Montgomery, zoning rules prohibit more than five unrelated adults in the same house. The county also has per-person square-footage requirements and fire safety regulations relating to sleeping quarters. Homeowners can rent rooms to as many as two boarders, but only if they all share a kitchen. Separate apartments built into single-family houses are allowed only by special permit.
But when it comes to enforcement, the county's record has been less clear-cut.
Last year, fewer than a third of the county's confirmed crowding cases resulted in tenant evictions or condemnations. Most owners got off with warnings to take corrective actions and no fines, records show.
"If we find people living in an illegal basement apartment, we may say, 'Why don't you sleep upstairs?' " said code enforcement chief Linda Bird.
For the most part, regulators try to work with homeowners so as not to displace residents. Some homeowners are given governmental assistance to make illegal apartments safe. In one case involving a U.S.-born family of six jammed into one bedroom of a house, the enforcement team became virtual social workers, trying to find the family a larger apartment and subsidies to pay for it.
"I don't want to go into a situation and take out the tape measure and say, 'Uh, uh, uh, you don't meet the code's square-footage requirements' if that's going to make a family homeless," said Rob Dejter, a senior inspector.
That's assuming Dejter can catch crowding at all. With limited resources and a staff of just 13 inspectors, the county investigates single-family homes only when there is a complaint and does not routinely follow up after a case is closed. Often, Dejter and his counterparts across the region are stymied by the same problem: U.S. Supreme Court rulings that make it hard to limit the number of family members under the same roof.
"If people tell us they're all related, we really don't have an avenue to pursue it any further," said Bill Shoup, Fairfax County's deputy zoning administrator.
Not everyone wants strict enforcement.
"Most of my neighbors are not more than a few paychecks away from financial disaster," said Steven D. Dutky, who lives on Domer Avenue.
For Maria Maldonado, a housing specialist for the Hispanic advocacy group Casa de Maryland, the problem isn't enforcement; it is a lack of housing, particularly for larger families.
"We hear a lot of stereotypical accusations from people who are seeing a lot more density in their neighborhoods, and I'm sure that that density is increasingly Latino," she said. "But where are these people going to go? There's an assumption that the immigrant wants to live this way."
Montgomery's philosophy of enforcement, however, has produced a record that infuriates some civic activists because it does little to punish landlords who break the law.
Jorge Ribas, a businessman who immigrated to this country from Ecuador in 1963, has become something of a code enforcement vigilante, driving the county's streets looking for infractions. Ribas, the former president of the Montgomery County Civic Federation, is sympathetic to the immigrants' plight but nevertheless subscribes to what social scientists call the "broken window" thesis. Neglect minor signs of neighborhood disorder like a broken window, the theory goes, and more problems will follow.
Nor is the problem limited to immigrants, Ribas said. He and real estate agents said properties are often purchased by U.S.-born investors who divide them up and rent to multiple tenants. Frustrated neighbors leave, and the investors snatch those properties up at bargain prices thanks to the nuisance they created next door.
"The county has to draw the line on overcrowding," Ribas said. "Because if they let this problem go, the reality is it's like a cancer that will spread."
For more than a half-century, Domer Avenue and the surrounding Silver Spring area has represented one of the few affordable neighborhoods in one of the nation's wealthiest counties.
When Earl and Sandra Garrison looked to buy their first home in 1975, the recent law school graduates had hopes of buying a big Victorian. But they quickly realized that their paychecks from an environmental think tank put dream homes out of reach.
They purchased a fixer-upper at 406 Domer Ave. for $40,000.
"Let's be honest: We were looking for a house we could afford," Sandra Garrison said. "Even in those days, there weren't a lot of houses in nice neighborhoods that weren't falling down for that price."
The couple found a leafy street and a stable mix of young professionals, working-class immigrants and blue-collar retirees.
Sandra and her Cuban neighbor Graciela Nearing had their babies at the same time. Down the street, Richard and Cathy Thomas sponsored a family of Vietnamese refugees, and the whole block chipped in with clothes and English lessons.
When the Garrisons sold their home in 1981, Domer Avenue was a congenial little oasis of flower beds and backyard parties with very few renters. Since then, it has become more common for owners in the neighborhood to let out rooms in their homes and, census figures show, average household size has grown.
The lawyer who bought the Garrisons' home for $70,000 transferred it to a relative and moved to Montana. Leaves piled up, and the house fell into disrepair, prompting neighbors to complain.
"It got real loud at nighttime -- a lot of cars coming in and out," recalled Anna Korompay, a Hungarian immigrant who lived in the house next door to the Garrisons from 1972 to 1996. "Our mailman told us it wasn't just one family living in some of the houses."
Crime began to encroach on the neighborhood. One summer evening in 1994, Korompay heard shots from a nearby pool hall.
As residents like Korompay and the Garrisons left, they were replaced in large part by Hispanic immigrants who found Domer Avenue welcoming for the very same reason Korompay and the Garrisons once did: affordability.
In 1996, Margarita Rivera and Ismael Ramirez purchased the Garrisons' old house for $137,500 with help from family.
Today, Rivera speaks in almost dreamy terms of her journey from a primitive hovel in Guatemala, where shantytowns of wood and tin and plastic go unregulated by a government overwhelmed by poverty, to an amenity-filled life in the suburbs. Like countless other residents, she chose Montgomery because she wanted to give her children a top-notch education.
"I fell in love with this house immediately," she said in Spanish. "It's right near the stores, near the buses and, the most important thing, it is close to the schools."
As a very pregnant Rivera cooked chicken soup, other members of the household began to assemble in the dining room, where they eat in shifts on metal folding chairs -- children first, adults later.
Sleeping quarters are tight: The couple shares one bedroom with the two daughters, Patricia, 8, and Diana, 1. Their son, Fredy, 10, shares another bedroom with his 15-year-old half brother, who recently arrived from Guatemala. Ramirez's brother-in-law and two cousins share the basement. There is also an upstairs rental apartment.
Ramirez, a part-time landscaper, said he makes about $20,000 a year and tries to send a few thousand back to relatives in Guatemala. He took in relatives out of obligation to his family, he said, but their rent also helps him meet his $14,400 annual mortgage.
It's difficult and cramped, but for Ramirez, it's worth it. No longer is he the "little man in America," he said proudly. He is a homeowner.
"Absolutely, this is a dream," he said. "But I also want more. More money, a new car, my son and my daughter in college."
Crowding cases can be difficult to prove, and homeowners who are caught often face few if any consequences. Evelyn Brinker could never understand why the county didn't do anything about the woman who bought her neighbor's house in 1989.
"This woman had 50 million people living in that house," said Brinker, who has since moved. "It wasn't a residential property anymore, it was a hotel-motel. Bugs started coming and walking over to my house. I didn't like it one bit."
The house was the subject of numerous complaints. In 1993, an inspector found that the basement at 412 Domer had been turned into an illegal apartment, records show. The case was turned over for further investigation but then was closed with no explanation.
Bird, the county's code enforcer, blamed the failure on a previous administration: "They should have at least eliminated the unit or forced them to legalize it" by filing for a waiver, she said.
But in 1997, when Bird was in office, inspectors again found an occupied illegal basement apartment, records show. The owners could have been fined up to $500. Instead, the county closed the case after a subsequent inspection found that the house was unoccupied.
Last April, a fire gutted the house. Melton and other neighbors described watching as a stream of people ran out into the street in their underwear.
According to interviews by fire officials at the scene, five adults and two children were at the house that morning. One of those adults was asleep in a bedroom in the basement, which he shared with two other people. The two owners, who did not return several messages requesting comment, lived in the house but were not there that morning. Those who were there escaped unharmed.
Records show that the county issued no crowding or fire citations. Bird referred questions to the county's Fire and Rescue Service. Its spokesman, Pete Piringer, said officials "didn't recognize any obvious fire code violations, and that's the only thing we're really concerned with."
Directly across the street at 413 Domer Ave., Manuel Rodriguez lives in similar circumstances. The Bolivian owner, according to Rodriguez, shares the house with a number of boarders, immigrants from Central America like himself who pay $300 a month apiece.
As Rodriguez talked from the living room, a woman padded through from the back of the house with a ceramic jug, and a shirtless man stumbled sleepily down the stairs. On one side of Rodriguez was a makeshift wooden door attached to the arched entryway of what once may have been a dining room.
On the front sidewalk, someone had scrawled the word "Reservado" in a vain attempt to save space on the crowded street.
Rodriguez, who came to the United States two years ago from Guatemala, said he went through eight apartments before landing here. In the last one, six people shared two bedrooms.
"It was crowded, and people were drinking and engaging in untoward things," the construction worker said. "This is better."
Less than two years ago, records show, the county cited the owner for operating an unlicensed rooming house after a tenant complained that 14 people were living there. The county closed the case after a subsequent inspection found the owner had reduced the number of boarders to two. No fines were issued.
Such "benign indifference" has so frustrated Melton that the only thing he can think about is packing his bags. He already has a marketing strategy for his home.
"I have no doubt that the people who buy this house will carve it up into apartments," he said. "They're going to do the very thing I'm trying to get away from, with the blessings of an irresponsible and out-of-control county government."
Or maybe not. Gabe Fontana, a Long & Foster real estate agent, said prices have risen so high so fast over the last 18 months that the days when families or couples could pool resources to buy a house may be over.
"The people you're talking about have been priced out of the market," he said.
Database editor Dan Keating and researcher Bobbye Pratt contributed to this report.