This is Part One of two parts in WTOP reporter Mike Murillo’s investigation into the Marylander Condominiums.
Since the week of Thanksgiving, many residents at the Marylander Condominiums in the Langley Park area have been struggling to stay warm.
Jason Van Horne, who lives there with his 73-year-old mother, said they remain bundled as nighttime temperatures dip into the teens.
“I’m dressed in a robe, pajamas, socks, coat — just to sit in my house,” Van Horne said.
He said space heaters are their only hope, but those are causing electrical outages.
“Electricity keeps going out, so we’re constantly without any heat,” he said. “No way to cook. Refrigerator is not on, so no way to preserve our food — nothing.”
It’s a dire situation at the condo complex, which is home to many low-income residents. The Prince George’s County Office of Permitting, Inspections and Enforcement deemed several of the buildings “uninhabitable,” posting orange flyers ordering around 100 families to “vacate immediately.”
Van Horne said he and other residents, who pay close to $1,000 in condo fees, have filed multiple work orders since August, with little progress.
“We’re living in unfit living conditions. We pay mortgage and condo fees that rival D.C. prices, and we’ve got elderly, young kids, all walks of life that live here,” he said.
According to residents and the company that manages the property, Quasar, a member of a nearby homeless encampment broke into a boiler room used for heat and damaged the system so severely that a simple repair is not possible.
The encampment poses another problem for residents. Van Horne said it’s typical to find people from the encampment sleeping in hallways, as broken locks make it easy for “homeless and drug users down the block” to get in.
Condo management says vandalism, aging systems to blame
Kenneth Brown, a broker and CEO of Quasar Property Management, said his company was brought on by the condo association in April after years of alleged neglect and mismanagement by the previous firm.
He told WTOP the property was an “absolute mess,” with no money in the bank and outdated infrastructure, including an old, centralized boiler system and low-capacity electrical wiring.
The problems worsened the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, Brown said, when members of the homeless encampment — described by management as an “open-air drug market” — broke into the mechanical room, stole a circulating pump and tampered with valves.
The break-in, Brown said, caused high-pressure blowouts in nine of the complex’s 19 buildings, leaving residents without heat and causing extensive water damage.
“There is no quick solution,” Brown said, noting repairs could take months and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
A full modernization project, including new electrical systems and individual HVAC units, will cost an estimated $8 million, up from an initial $4.5 million projection.
Brown said when his management company came on board, the condo association had no money in reserves. Efforts to secure bank financing and nearly double condo fees put the association on a path toward modernizing the property, and according to Brown, the board was ready to move forward with a vote Thursday night. But the condemnation of several buildings complicated the financing, and now they’ve have to rework the project he said. Brown said they also plan to seek help from the county, the state, and Pepco for the project.
“I’ve got ulcers going on this one, because we were sort of limping along until we got to Thanksgiving. That final act of vandalism is just something that couldn’t be recovered from,” Brown said.
This isn’t the first time vandalism has impaired the condo association, Brown said, and its efforts to install fences and repair doors have been insufficient. He said the complex needs the county’s help but isn’t getting it.
“We’ve been reaching out since we took over in April with the county to try and solve this open-air drug market adjacent to the property. We had no responses — months,” Brown said.
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