Rent escrow remains one of the most powerful tools renters in Maryland have when it comes to housing maintenance and repair. Yet, particularly for residents facing building wide problems, the law doesn’t have much power to create stable and lasting change.
Kisha began to have problems almost immediately when she moved to the Queen Esther apartments in 2018. Her heat would go out for weeks at a time and mice ran down the common hallway.
“You have disabled people and elderly people in this building and they don't care,” she said during an interview in July. “You have trash that you have to literally go to the sixth or seventh floor to dump your trash in the dumpster because they don't clean the dumpsters out. It's disgusting.”
To protect tenants from retaliation, this piece uses only first names. Alex put it this way.
“City jail was cleaner than this building. And that’s saying a lot.”
Most of the approximately 170 tenants are on subsidized housing vouchers and most residents are Black.
The building, previously called the Lanvale Towers, was condemned in 2017 after a fire and then rehabbed. Since then, residents like Skylar say flooding and mold are constant problems
“I thought it was raining outside because I got water coming down in the apartment. I didn't hear it [at] first. And then I heard it [raindrops] overtop the TV,” he recalled. Flooding was especially bad over the summer when residents complained of flooding that got into the building during heavy rain storms. There was also a leak on the first floor that management spent weeks trying to fix– that resulted in half the tenants on one side of the building needing to move into other units.
Not only do those circumstances make life miserable but it costs too.
“I’m not buying more towels to dry up the floor, so that I can pay two dollars to wash and dry my stuff. I'm not doing that now,” said Skylar.
Some of the people WYPR interviewed said they had to choose between paying rent or spending their own money to fix their unit or stay in a hotel.
Kisha has applied for rent escrow three times over the last five years; according to Maryland court records, her case has only been accepted once.
Rent escrow is only for situations that meet a very high bar for “life, health, and safety” of occupants, as according to the statute.
“It’s not for minor code violations… There can be a lot of stuff wrong with your place that is not probably gonna get addressed in rent escrow,” said Jill Shea, an attorney with the Pro Bono Resource Center of Maryland, which serves low-income clients and where Shea estimates about 25% of her work is rent escrow cases.
Rent escrow typically only applies to a problem in your own unit. Defects in the communal living spaces could qualify but still have to meet the high bar for life, health and safety. Kisha said that when she tried to file over the building’s expired elevator license, the judge rejected her case.
A 2017 Baltimore Sun investigation found that in only six-percent of cases did judges reduce or waive rent. There were 1,427 cases where city inspectors reported life, health, and safety concerns but only about half of those ended in tenants’ payments being diverted into a rent escrow account.
The building now called the Queen Esther apartments changes hands frequently and since 2021 has been owned by New Jersey-based Radiant Properties, which specializes in making a profit off affordable subsidized housing. The property has had a laundry list of citations from the city’s housing department over the years under both Radiant and other owners. In 2023, Radiant was taken to large claims court by two contractors for non-payment. WYPR reached out to Radiant who declined to go on record for this story.
“In these large buildings, so often, the remedy for one unit doesn't help the other unit so it's like a game of whack-a-mole if all tenants are filing separately,” said Katie Davis, Director of the Courtroom Advocacy Project at the Pro Bono Resource Center of Maryland.
Residents at buildings like the Queen Esther could be helped out by the “Tenant Safety Act”, a bill through the House of Delegates in the General Assembly. It would allow tenants to file rent escrow jointly.
“It allows for more effective remedy really, because then the landlord can see them all at once and say, ‘Okay, I'm gonna fix this this entire part of the building rather than go into court multiple times and have the exterminator coming to unit 1A and then they go to 2A and then they're back in 1A and then it doesn't get you get anyone anywhere,’” said Davis.
Those living conditions have real impacts. A former high-school athlete, Kisha at 41 years old, now struggles to breathe going down the hall. She has asthma and sleeps with a breathing machine. She says her doctor has suggested she find different housing.
“It costs to put in applications and I'm on a fixed income so I can only put so many applications in a month because I still have to eat. I still have to get the doctor's appointments,” she said. “It's a struggle but I have to do something because these living conditions are killing me. I'm paying them to kill me and this isn't fair.”
Kisha and the other tenants aren’t waiting around. They’ve held public protests, organized mass 3-1-1 calling campaigns to the city, and reached out to the federal housing agency that oversees the program for many of their housing vouchers. In the late fall, Radiant did sit down for a meeting with them to discuss the issues.
“They’ve basically fired the whole [building] staff. Things are getting better,” said Skylar. Most of the flooding issues appear to be remedied, for now, and much of the common area is cleaner.
“It’s better, I’ll give them credit for that,” said Kisha on Tuesday. But she’s still worried that the small improvements will be temporary and that things could slide back to the way they were. So, she said she’ll stay vigilant “for the elderly and the families that live here.”
And if she needs to, she’ll file for rent escrow once again.
Hallie Miller from the Baltimore Banner contributed reporting to this story. To learn more about how rent escrow is working in Baltimore City and read about more housing laws before the General Assembly in Annapolis, go to our partners at The Baltimore Banner.
