The D.C. government will swarm slum properties with inspectors and take their owners to court in a broad, aggressive battle to rid the city of its most neglected dwellings, District officials announced Tuesday.

The Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs will soon start an inspection program that targets all multifamily buildings in a routine cycle, director Linda Argo said during a news conference outside a slum in Southeast. The District’s attorneys, meanwhile, will take property owners to court, and perhaps to jail, over their failure to fix the worst of the worst.

The changes follow years of lethargy on the city’s part fighting slumlords.

“We need to go after these properties in court, and we need to use the strength of the receivership law to make sure work is done on these buildings,” Mayor Adrian Fenty said outside 2907 Gainesville St.

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The rotting windows of the 13-unit Gainesville Street building are the first sign that something is obviously very wrong. The conditions get much worse inside.

Apartments are infested with rats, pipes are leaking, floor tiles are missing, and ceilings are crumbling. There’s a gaping hole in the ceiling of James Weaver’s second-floor unit, hundreds of roaches scuttling in his kitten’s water dish and a breach in the floor beneath his kitchen sink, through which one can see the basement.

“This was cheap and I thought I could get them to do things,” Weaver, an eight-month resident, said of the building’s owners.

Tenants complained to no avail, at least until April, when the city sued the owners of 13 properties across the city, threatening receivership if code violations aren’t abated. The first hearings are slated for Aug. 1.

Sharlon Williams, a co-owner of the Gainesville Street property, claimed to be “in the process of getting a loan to fix the place up.” All 13 units are rented, he said, but several tenants “buy their drugs but they don’t pay me a dime.”

City officials threatened incarceration for the city’s worst landlords.

“If the court orders are violated, our ultimate punishment will be to put these people in jail,” said acting Attorney General Peter Nickles.

There are a handful of slumlords, Argo said, “who scoff at the law and take advantage of the enforcement system we set up.”

Under the existing inspection system, the agency’s 74 inspectors check only those buildings that receive complaints. The new program, still in development, demands routine inspections of problem properties and occasional looks at every multifamily building in the city.

mneibauer@dcexaminer.com