Prince George’s County, Md., was planning to evict hundreds of residents from the Marylander Condominiums on Thursday after vandalism from a nearby homeless encampment plunged the property into disrepair. Now, thanks to an eleventh-hour intervention by a Maryland court, those plans have been put on hold.
At an emergency hearing Wednesday morning, Maryland district court judge Bryon Bereano declined to authorize the evictions that he had provisionally greenlit earlier this month. The county requested Wednesday’s hearing at the last minute in order to obtain a final sign-off to remove residents, less than 24 hours before it planned to post eviction notices on 100 units, according to Beverly Habada, a member of the condominium’s board. It did so without notifying residents or property managers.
County officials presented the court with a draft order approving the notices. Bereano refused to sign, Habada said.
The county will not be permitted to evict residents until a follow-up hearing can take place. It is not clear when that will be.
The delay comes after the Washington Free Beacon published a series of reports about the condominium, which has struggled for years with the encampment on its doorstep. Property managers say the county’s failure to clear the camp resulted in nonstop crime and vandalism, culminating in irreversible damage to the heating system after residents of the encampment allegedly vandalized the boiler room.
Some 100 units were left without heat amid one of the worst cold spells in the area’s history. The conditions prompted the county to deem those units "unfit for human habitation" in December and ordered their residents to leave, touching off months of litigation as residents defied the order and weathered the cold.
At the same time, the county refused to guarantee a loan for the complex to install a new heating system. The result was a Catch-22 that iced the condo out of credit lines and caused some residents to suspect that the county—the most Democratic-leaning in the nation—is attempting to destroy a largely minority, low-income community that is paying the price for its toleration of disorder.
"They are going above and beyond what they need to be doing here in terms of trying to shut this place down," Habada said of county officials’ conduct toward the condominium and its residents. County officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Even if the evictions are postponed indefinitely, residents say some units have become truly uninhabitable thanks to severe damage from the encampment. At least one building without heat also lost electricity after space heaters fried its circuits, and several units flooded when their pipes burst due to the cold weather.
Some residents have fled to hotels but cannot afford to stay there much longer. A few say that their only source of shelter may soon be the encampment that displaced them.
"They’ve been living better than us," Jason Van Horne, who shared a condo with his 73-year-old mother, told the Free Beacon earlier this month.
Adding insult to injury was the decision of top county officials to spend more than $43,000 in taxpayer funds to stay at a luxury hotel during January’s snowstorm. In an interview with local news, county executive Aisha Braveboy justified the stay by saying that "a lot of decisions … had to be made in real time" amid the storm.
A few days before the snow, county officials said they were aware of the encampment but wanted to ensure that any law enforcement response was "compassionate."
"We’re not criminalizing the unhoused," police major Thomas Boone said at a town hall.
