Fairfax Co. threatens to evict non-responsive tenants

WASHINGTON (Map, News) - Fairfax County is threatening to evict about 100 households from Wedgewood Apartments, the largest property in the county’s affordable housing program, unless the tenants release personal and financial data to prove they qualify to live there.

Housing officials are telling the families that they have four months to leave the 672-unit complex in Annandale unless they provide information on their employment, tax returns and income, said Paula Sampson, director of the Department of Housing and Community Development.

It’s a snag for the flagship in Fairfax’s affordable housing preservation initiative, in which the county buys rental units or partners with nonprofits to hold down their rent. The program, initiated in 2004, was aimed at maintaining low- and moderately priced living space as housing prices skyrocketed during the region’s building boom. Wedgewood was bought in October 2007.

The tenant information is necessary to determine whether the tenants’ incomes qualify them to live at Wedgewood and whether they are in the United States legally. Sampson said the household’s wage earner cannot be an illegal immigrant. Undocumented family members are not counted toward the rental assistance, which is set by income and family size.

Sully District Supervisor Michael Frey quarreled with housing officials over that policy at Monday’s Board of Supervisors meeting. Frey questioned whether the tenants were being thoroughly vetted for legal status and argued that because of the federal subsidies involved in the project, all of them should be checked.

Income levels, however, appear to be the larger factor in play. The county already has kicked out about 30 tenants from Wedgewood because they made too much to meet the threshold to qualify for the rent-subsidized dwellings, Sampson said. The county allows a mix of incomes at the development, in some cases as high as 100 percent of the area median income, or $99,000.

Fairfax County is distributing information about the potential evictions in both English and Spanish, and staff are going door to door, Sampson said. She described unresponsive occupants in about one in seven units as “typical.”

“Overall, we’ve had a pretty good response,” she said.

wflook@dcexaminer.com

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