Recent management changes at an affordable housing complex bought with Amazon’s money followed months of advocacy and frustration from both tenants and county officials.
Last month, complaints led Washington Housing Conservancy, the property owner, to install a new management company to support ongoing changes at the Crystal House 1 and 2 buildings at 1900 and 2000 S. Eads Street. The shift didn’t come easily, however.
Residents told ARLnow that they previously spent months speaking up at public meetings, submitting code enforcement complaints and attracting the attention of both the Tenant-Landlord Commission and members of the Arlington County Board.
“My neighbor and I say that living at Crystal House is a full-time job, or it has been for us … because of all the levels of advocacy at the county that we’ve had to do,” said Rebecca Ritzel, who moved out of her apartment last week after four years at Crystal House.
At public meetings and in conversations with ARLnow, tenants have raised allegations about delayed responses to maintenance requests, squatting, pest infestations, poor communication and difficulty renewing leases.
One tenant described their past year in a one-bedroom apartment as “akin to a nightmare.” The tipster recalled one instance where they reached out to maintenance with a complaint about cloudy water.
“They came and said that the white water was normal,” the tipster wrote in an email to ARLnow.
After two more failed requests, the person said they finally got results after contacting corporate management. In the end, the solution was “a literal 2-minute fix” involving a faulty aerator.
The person also described a major water leak that flooded into their hallway in March, as well as a lease renewal process that required weeks of emails and “a large amount of arguing.”
Other residents have raised similar complaints at meetings of the Tenant-Landlord Commission in July 2024 and in March, April and May of this year.
A tenant complaint about maintenance, vermin and security elicited a lengthy response from County Board member Maureen Coffey in October. Coffey noted that Crystal House doesn’t depend on county funds in the way that some other affordable housing developments in Arlington do.
Instead, back in January 2021, Amazon provided a $381.9 million contribution that Washington Housing Conservancy used to create and preserve around 1,300 units of affordable housing at 1900 S. Eads Street.
“The County doesn’t currently have any agreement with the Washington Housing Conservancy (WHC) or Cushman & Wakefield that would allow us to monitor the property directly, however, we’re concerned about the issues you’ve raised and staff has been reaching out to WHC staff for updates,” Coffey wrote in an email provided to ARLnow.
In response to complaints, the property owner began hosting monthly meetings with residents in September and announced biweekly “office hours” for resolving questions about lease renewal and billing.
Facing continued pressure, the Housing Conservancy announced last month that it had dropped Cushman & Wakefield. The new management company is Avenue5.
At a commission meeting earlier this month, Avenue5 representatives said they had installed a new property manager, staffed up leasing and maintenance operations, worked through a backlog of maintenance requests and connected with residents on lease renewals.
Still, several tenants who attended the meeting said they have seen little improvement.
This isn’t the first time an affordable housing complex in Arlington has faced sustained complaints about shoddy management. At Serrano Apartments on Columbia Pike, some residents spent years advocating for better living conditions — raising concerns about mold, mice and rat infestations, balconies with broken glass and rust, dirty HVAC units and poor maintenance.
Those issues ultimately led the County Board to get involved in 2021 and begin keeping tabs on property owner AHC Inc. A report on ways to prevent a similar situation came out in 2022.
Back at Crystal House, Ritzel says she sees Washington Housing Conservancy making “baby steps” in the right direction. Still, she said that ongoing problems are a bad look for the neighborhood, especially as True Ground Housing Partners and Bethesda-based developer EYA are planning to build more apartments elsewhere on the Crystal House site.
Overall, Ritzel said she is glad to be moving elsewhere.
“It just became this place that I really needed to get out of,” she said.
