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.”
Read more (and listen) at WYPR.
