Why is the next Chairman of the Chamber of Commerce being accused of being a slumlord?
By Jeffrey Anderson
The house at 5700 MacArthur Boulevard in Northwest D.C. is festooned with colorful handmade signs complaining of landlord negligence, unpaid utility bills, and jacked up rent.
“ENTER IF YOU DARE” reads a white sheet splattered with red paint – a Halloween-themed admonition on this October day, if not a legitimate warning about what lies within.
Street views offer clues: Weather-beaten façade; side-street garage with peeling mold-streaked paint and rotting wood; sagging rear deck hovering above overgrown backyard; chain link fence and a sagging portable shed; tree limbs about ready to fall on the roof.
This two-story, 1920s-era bungalow with a sloping roof on a double lot in leafy Palisades has a story to tell. It’s not the run-of-the-mill landlord-tenant dispute, though.
Harsh allegations in a civil lawsuit are directed at one of Mayor Muriel Bowser’s most trusted advisors, Chairman-Elect of the D.C. Chamber of Commerce, Earle “Chico” Horton III, Esquire.
A Bowser campaign treasurer and former chair of her FreshPac political action committee, Horton, according to the lawsuit, is allowing unsafe and unsanitary conditions such as mold and rodents to persist at the home of a family that has lived here for generations.
D.C. housing regulations state, “No person shall rent or offer to rent any habitation… unless [it is] in a clean, safe, and sanitary condition, in repair, and free from rodents or vermin.”
It’s unseemly business for a man who the business community appears to hold in high regard. Yet it’s not without upside: An $820,000 speculative investment in a house Horton acquired from a family’s estranged in-law has appreciated to $1.2 million, in a neighborhood where houses sell in the mid-to-high seven figures.
His tenants are determined in their demands for humane treatment. They lack the means to just pack up and move, and if they cannot remain in their family home – under habitable conditions – they must be able to relocate to someplace decent and affordable.
Some local power brokers might avoid such a dispute, but Horton seems determined in his own right to wear down his tenants and run them out of this ramshackle abode.
He insists he is not the property owner, that his development company manages it for 5700 MacArthur LLC, a limited liability company he created to purchase the property. Legal gymnastics aside, he says his tenants, whose in-law failed to maintain the property, have not proven they too are not responsible for its condition.
When his tenants complain about roof leaks or loose boards/nails on the rear deck, however, or a shut-off notice from a public utility, Horton has complained they owe him rent based on a figure the court has rejected.
In real estate, a “warranty of habitability” means that a “landlord must maintain…a property in compliance with the housing code… keeping the structure and facilities of the property in good repair, and ensuring adequate heat, lighting, and ventilation.”
It’s hard to picture 5700 MacArthur Boulevard meeting that standard. And it’s hard to figure why an esteemed member of the business community has anything to do with such a tasteless situation.
***
Gabrielle Wilds answers the door last October and invites District Dig in for a tour of the house, a cramped labyrinth of rooms full of unused furniture and household objects that have been accumulating for years.
One of the bedrooms, belonging to her younger brother, is missing a door.
Gabrielle, known to her family as “Gabby,” apologizes for the kitchen, which has signs of mold and a bulge in the ceiling that drips when it rains; pots and pans stacked on the floor because the cabinets have no shelves; and a hole under the sink that the family’s four cats monitor for mice coming up from the basement.
As lead plaintiff in her family’s lawsuit for breach of warranty of habitability, Gabrielle, who turns 26 this spring, is the designated researcher, record-keeper and enforcer of visitors’ rules. Her mother works in real estate, and she works as a concierge at the front desk of a condominium building in the West End.
Familiarity with real estate is not her only asset: She researches housing regulations, compiles timelines, and provides litigation support. She takes notes of interactions with Horton and his proxy, Samuel Dougan, an employee of Blue Sky Housing, the management firm (owned by Horton) that oversees the property on behalf of 5700 MacArthur LLC (also owned by Horton).
“I’ve gotten good at documenting and recording confrontations I’ve had,” she says. “I’ve learned to record conversations, there might be something I’ll want later.”
Gabrielle first met Horton on May 28, 2021, a day after he texted her mother to say that he – Earle Horton – was the “purchaser of 5700 MacArthur Blvd.” (A screenshot of the text is included in the court file.)
Accompanying Horton that day, says Gabrielle, was her deceased uncle’s wife, Stephanie Pettis, who up until then had been living in the basement.
Long before Horton came along, she says, Pettis and her husband Patrick would control the hot water supply and the electrical breakers, and prevent her and her family from using the washer/dryer, forcing them to use extension cords throughout the house.
Occasionally, Pettis would sue the family for back rent and accuse them of squatting. Gabrielle says Pettis told them not to pay rent, then refused to cash the checks once they agreed on an amount: $300 per month.
Life did not get better when Horton came along. One Thanksgiving holiday weekend, the family went without hot water for five days, the lawsuit says, and Horton accused them of “tampering” with the water heater.
Dougan is no less insulting, Gabrielle says. To protect her and her family from false accusations, she has videotaped him when he showed up unannounced and tried to come onto the property.
“He’s usually rude, and tries to intimidate me,” she says of Dougan. One time, she says, when everyone in the house had Covid-19, he showed up and wanted to come inside. Denied entry, Dougan accused her and her family of being “bullshitters and liars,” she says.
Dougan and Horton are the only ones to have surveyed the main floor of the house, Gabrielle says, and even then, it was to go over defects that a D.C. housing inspector had already documented.
On the rare occasion contractors have come to assess the need for repairs in the basement, she says, they look around without taking any notes or videos, and disappear for six months.
Some things she has taken upon herself to fix, Gabrielle says.
“There were things we did for our own safety, like install smoke and carbon monoxide detectors. We informed the owner the upstairs and downstairs toilets were not flushing so we took it upon ourselves to fix them. Who wants to have to fill the tank with water before and after using the toilet?”
Gabrielle has called mold specialists who will come out and inspect the property for free, but her family cannot afford to hire them for abatement.
“I cleaned mold in the basement with bleach,” she says, pointing to creeping stains rising up through the floor near the base of her bed. “That probably wasn’t a good idea, but I got tired of smelling it.” (The fumes got so bad her lungs accumulated fluid and she had to start using an inhaler.)
D.C. law requires landlords to inspect their properties within seven days of receiving notice about signs of mold, and to remediate the condition within 30 days.
Yet it does not seem to faze Horton or his people that mold “is a recurring issue in the basement,” according to the family’s lawsuit. Gabrielle finds him “unwilling to be a good landlord.”
“Mostly he ignores me,” she says.
She’s not the only one: Just recently, the Department of Buildings placed a lien on the property for 5700 MacArthur LLC’s failure to pay a $7,000 fine over 16 separate housing code violations.
D.C. records also show 5700 MacArthur LLC’s business license – a requirement for owners of rental properties – expired in October.
Horton has his own grievances. He has complained in emails to Gabrielle and her family’s attorney that he feels harassed by their persistent demands for repairs he does not seem to feel are necessary.
Neither he nor his lawyers responded to inquiries for this story.
***
Horton has been involved before with litigation related to allegations of harboring slum conditions – an odd recurrence for a man of his stature.
In 2018, as attorney for a developer, Horton helped facilitate a convoluted transaction in which he loaned his client $200,000 in an alleged scheme to evade tenant purchasing rights by acquiring their landlord’s debt as a means of foreclosing on dilapidated buildings at the Congress Heights Metro Station.
Conditions had become so bad the elderly Black tenants had to vacate their apartments, amid legal actions that lasted a decade. Horton’s client acquired the debt on the property and concurrently purchased the buildings via a “deed in lieu of foreclosure.”
Though he was not a defendant in the resulting lawsuit, and was not accused of wrongdoing, the litigation, along with a receivership action by the Office of the Attorney General, resulted in widespread press coverage.
In the end, the developer was forced to relent on plans to redevelop the blighted apartment buildings Horton had helped him acquire. The displaced tenants partnered with an affordable housing developer to purchase the property so they could hopefully return to new homes someday.
Though Gabrielle and her family do not have a denial of purchasing rights count in their lawsuit, the question of why Horton would get tangled up in something similar is a puzzling one. (Coincidentally, the judge in Congress Heights case, Judge Shana Frost Matini, also presides over the 5700 MacArthur Boulevard case,)
“Up to today, Mr. Horton put out a façade that he cared about low income people and created a Blue Sky Housing LLC company,” reads the complaint in D.C. Superior Court filed by the family’s attorney, Bwo Marian Chou. “On the contrary, Horton wants the 5700 MacArthur Blvd, N.W., tenants moving out so he can build two mansions to sell and profit from the sales himself.”
It’s an unseemly theory, and at odds with the image of a professional who has fiduciary duties to the District and has done well on the public dime.
Horton’s law firms alone have landed millions of dollars in D.C. government contracts over the years, according to the Office of Contracting and Procurement database.
His law firm was awarded multi-year contracts to provide legal services to the City Administrator, to serve as Industrial Revenue Bond Counsel to the Deputy Mayor of Planning and Economic Development, and to serve as Bond Counsel for the D.C. Housing Finance Agency.
In all, Horton and his related firms will have raked in at least $8 million in D.C. contracts since 2013.
He is an active political contributor as well, contributing tens of thousands of dollars to Bowser and Bowser-friendly candidates over the years through his law firms, his family, and his development company, according to campaign finance records.
In 2020, Bowser appointed Horton to her “Reopen DC” pandemic advisory team.
***
The history of the house at 5700 MacArthur Boulevard is not what one would expect in this leafy, well-maintained neighborhood of multimillion dollar homes. But as Gabrielle and the family’s lawyer point out, pre-existing conditions at a rental property are no excuse for allowing them to fester.
Gabrielle is a fourth generation resident of this home. She keeps handy a copy of her family’s 1957 deed to the property. In 2006, her great grandmother, Audrey Pettis, then the owner, was diagnosed with dementia, and added her son Patrick Pettis to the deed to the house.
In 2007, Audrey’s grand-daughter Desiree and her one-year-old, Paul, and her husband moved to D.C. to care for her. That summer, Desiree’s two other children, Audrey and Gabrielle, moved in as well. (Gabrielle’s boyfriend Ainsley is a subtenant since March 2017.)
Audrey Pettis passed away in April 2009. The following year, her daughter in-law, Stephanie Pettis, was added to the deed; Stephanie and her husband Patrick asked Desiree and her children to start paying rent.
Patrick Pettis died in November 2017, leaving Stephanie as sole owner of the property. According to Gabrielle, Stephanie failed to rectify housing code violations, causing Gabrielle to regard her as a “slumlord,” a label the lawsuit says applies to Horton as well.
Years passed, until one day, May 27, 2021, Chico Horton texted Gabrielle’s mother Desiree that he had purchased the property. D.C. corporations records show Horton registered 5700 MacArthur LLC on June 6, 2021, and his company purchased the property on June 28, 2021.
It’s unclear how Horton and Pettis met. Shortly after she sold the property, Pettis moved out. Visited at her home in Montgomery County recently, she declined to comment.
Gabrielle’s family wasted no time informing Horton that city inspectors had been out to inspect the property and documented signs of mold in the basement – among other other housing code violations.
Horton’s contractor came out and knocked out walls in the basement, including a standing wall. According to the lawsuit, the contractor also damaged support beams, exposed pipes and insulation, and left a dripping hot water heater, a leaking boiler, a broken sump pump, and a hole in the ceiling below the kitchen floor.
No work notices or permits were posted at the time of the demolition, Gabrielle says. The Dig was unable to locate permits on file for the property for 2021.
The mold spread.
Then, when Gabrielle complained to Horton about loose nails on the faulty rear deck of the house, tall weeds and snakes in the backyard, and broken tree branches hitting the gutters of the house, he told her to stay off the deck and “Not go outside to the back yard,” according to the lawsuit.
Horton did not upgrade a faulty electric system, either, the lawsuit states. “The circuit breaker was unstable and created a flicker in the house.”
“I don’t think it’s fair for anyone to be living like this,” Gabrielle says. “And I don’t think [Horton] would subject himself to living like this either.”
In November 2021, the family received a “Discontinue Notice” from Washington Gas, causing a shutoff of gas service and forcing them to pay the past due amount and reconnection fee. Gabrielle says the gas bill is still in her family’s name, and that they never recovered the past due amount and reconnection fee, about $600.
The following month, Horton attempted to increase the rent from $300 to $6,200, through an application to the Department of Housing and Community Development’s Housing’s Rental Accommodations Division, which denied the request. The court later ordered the rent to remain set at $300.
These were the first signs of what life would be like for Gabrielle and her family as tenants of 5700 MacArthur LLC.
***
Gabrielle continued notifying Horton of housing code violations in 2022. When she got no response, she reported them to the Department of Buildings (“DOB”).
On March 11, 2022, Inspector Matthew Price inspected the property and documented 16 violations of the D.C. Property Maintenance Code.
Infractions included: Uninhabitable basement; exposed pipes; holes in walls; missing bathroom fixtures; missing drywall; broken and loose wood and unsecured steps on back deck; front and rear roof gutters and downspouts obstructed and unsecured; leaking, water-damaged kitchen ceiling; cracks in living room wall and ceiling; defective enclosed porch ceiling; broken, cracked and loose bathroom and kitchen tiles; missing smoke/carbon monoxide detectors and unsecured bedroom door frames.
DOB served a notice of infractions to Horton by email at his law firm, Tiber Hudson, on April 1, 2022, and sought to impose a fine of $14,063. Horton responded with a plea of “Deny” and requested a hearing. Price re-inspected the property on April 18 to find the violations unabated.
Horton doubled down. On May 2022, he sued the family in landlord-tenant court for unpaid rent. He had a contractor come to replace the leaky roof in August – but just the front half, the tenants claimed.
“5700 MacArthur LLC finally replaced the front portion of the roof for the curb appeal after receiving [a] citation,” court filings say. “But, they refused to replace the back side of the roof.”
Gabrielle’s contemporaneous notes also state that Horton and a plumber visited the property on August 17, 2022, stared at the hot water heater in silence for 15 minutes, then left.
On August 23, 2022, Chou, the family’s lawyer, sent an email to Horton’s lawyer, Brian Riger, complaining of a dead tree in front of the house, a leaking roof, mold in the basement, and a “dangerously decayed” back deck.
A month later, Gabrielle sent Horton an email about the electric bill being late, and he responded that the tenants were $45,000 in debt over unpaid rent. She considered this harassment.
Eventually, Horton paid a Pepco bill of $4,038.32, and told Gabrielle she could schedule an appointment to put the bill in the tenants’ names. (Though he continued to insist 5700 MacArthur LLC owns the property, the judge brushed aside the distinction. A court order in the case states that when the house was acquired, “Mr. Horton through MacArthur LLC assumed legal responsibility and became the new landlord.”)
The harassment continued, according to Gabrielle. “MacArthur LLC does not accept any payment amount that is less than the full amount of $6,500 a month for rent at the property and will not accept anything less than the full amount of rent,” Horton wrote from his law firm email account.
Soon, Horton was demanding $55,000 in back rent. He filed a second case in landlord & tenant court in October 2022, and as tenant complaints mounted, he denied ignoring repair requests and insisted that his company relied on his contractors for advice about when repairs were needed.
He also insisted the back half of the roof did not need to be replaced.
His tenants are not backing down. “There are so many housing code violations in the house,” their attorney Chou wrote to Riger, citing a water-filled bubble in the kitchen ceiling, and accusing Horton of using unpaid bills as a means to force her clients out.
“Mr. Horton is proud to be an attorney who can afford to provide low and middle income people housing in this town. Why is Mr. Horton/5700 MacArthur LLC so cruel towards [my clients]? He and his family should move into the place to live for one week, then he will understand his tenants’ suffering. They can exchange their housing and living arrangements.”
On December 12, 2022, the family filed a lawsuit on behalf of Gabrielle and her family. A few months later, after DOB Inspector Christine Hall came out and cited 60 housing code violations, Gabrielle filed a separate action in Housing Conditions Court that was dismissed because of the pending lawsuit in Superior Court.
The lawsuit dragged on, and on July 12, 2023, the Office of Administrative Hearings heard evidence regarding the housing code violations documented by Matthew Price, the first DOB inspector.
In a Final Order dated September 22, 2023, an Administrative Law Judge acknowledged that Stephanie Pettis had not maintained the property, but decided that, whatever kind of shape Horton found the house in, his company was responsible for maintaining a safe property:
“Because [5700 MacArthur LLC] is now the owner, it is responsible for the violations even though they pre-existed [its] ownership,” the judge wrote, noting that contractors had caused structural damage while removing drywall from the basement.
The judge also found mitigating factors, however, such as DOB’s approval of the LLC’s business license, and disputes over access to the property for inspections and repairs.
5700 MacArthur LLC changed its plea from “Deny” to “Admit with explanation,” though it did not provide much of an explanation, and denied responsibility for cracked walls, ceilings and tiles; water damage in the kitchen; and a damaged rear deck.
Nevertheless, taking into account violations that were abated, some that were not correctly cited, and “the historical nature of these violations,” the judge cut the original fine down to $7,559.
That fine remains unpaid, according to a Certificate of Delinquencies and a lien placed on the property, recorded with the Office of Tax and Revenue’s Recorder of Deeds on January 25.
Various proceedings are scheduled into 2024.
It’s tough to predict how Horton intends to resolve the matter. Though according to Gabrielle, he has offered a marginal sum for her family to drop the case and move out.
Which is consistent with a permit application he filed on June 23, 2023, stating that the entire residence “is being gutted inside” and “having its rear wall removed,” and that the attic and roof will be removed as well.
The Dig will continue to follow this story.
