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Justin Wm. Moyer

In 2021, Staci Jameson had been living in a tent when she received what thousands of homeless people in D.C. desperately need: a housing voucher. She landed a one-bedroom apartment in an upscale building downtown, with rent fully paid each month by the government.

But Jameson, a 38-year-old mother of three with a history of heroin addiction,  was soon accused of threatening staff, undressing in the lobby and rubbing her backside against a police officer responding to a complaint about her, according to police records and evidence presented in court. So in 2022, her landlord, Borger Management, launched the legal process to get Jameson out of the building.

Almost two years later, the case is still winding its way through landlord-tenant court, and Jameson is still living in the building. The case illustrates the myriad challenges that come after unhoused people are given a place to live, as well as the mental health and other support that is often needed to help them succeed.

Jameson said she did not know if there was a case manager or anyone responsible for helping her remain in her apartment. She can’t afford a lawyer, pro bono attorneys declined to take on her case and she has had trouble navigating the eviction proceedings.

“I don’t even know what any of this means,” Jameson said, nervously tugging at the “good luck charms” jangling from a white string around her neck during a hearing last year.

The Department of Human Services declined to provide information on Jameson’s case in particular, citing privacy rules. But Rachel Pierre, the administrator for the department’s family services administration, said that in general the agency provides voucher clients with a case manager who should visit twice per month.

The case manager’s job is to make sure a resident understands what their lease entails and that if they break these rules they may be evicted, she said. Evictions among voucher holders are rare, according to Pierre, with four having occurred in 2023.

Pierre said the department will connect people on vouchers with behavioral health support, and she asked neighbors who might be upset with their behavior to be patient. “Just remember that just because someone is exiting homelessness, they still deserve to be welcomed as a neighbor just as any neighbor would be,” she said.

Borger Management declined to comment for this article. Jameson argued that she was a victim of discrimination and Borger staff didn’t like her because she has a housing voucher and is a White woman with a Black boyfriend — assertions that the building’s tenants association vigorously disputed.

“It is unfair to the residents and workers in our building to have to deal with unacceptable, disruptive, and menacing behavior,” the association said in a statement. “When individuals who are doing wrong continue to get away with things other residents would be evicted for ... there’s something wrong with that picture.”

Jameson is far from being the first person to defend herself from eviction in landlord-tenant court. While landlords show up to eviction proceedings with a lawyer more than 80 percent of the time, only about 4 percent of tenants have similar support, according to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/11/02/dc-legal-aid-right-to-counsel-relaunch/" target=_blank>data</a> collected from jurisdictions across the country by the National Coalition for a Civil Right to Counsel.

The emphasis in eviction proceedings is not equity or tenant participation but speed, said Emily A. Benfer, an associate clinical professor of law at George Washington University and a research collaborator at Princeton University’s <a href="https://evictionlab.org/who-is-evicted-in-america/" target=_blank>Eviction Lab</a>.

“What you see in a lot of urban courts is 100 cases a day. The priority is getting through as many cases as you can,” Benfer said, noting that eviction can upend employment and schooling, destabilize families and even <a href="https://evictionlab.org/rising-rents-and-evictions-linked-to-premature-death/" target="_blank">cause premature death</a>. “I talk to people evicted as children — it still haunts them today. It’s 90 seconds charting the course of a person’s life.”

Bill O'Leary

Jameson said she grew up across the East Coast, including in Calvert County, Md. After struggling with heroin addiction and spending time in and out of rehab, she lost contact with her children after custody disputes. She said she ended up in a D.C. encampment.

It was her first time living on the street — but her tent, she said, was in some ways better than the apartment she found when she got a voucher in 2021. People living in encampments didn’t challenge her behavior the way they do in her apartment building.

Now, Jameson has to fight to keep the housing she’d won. On the first day of her eviction trial last April, Jameson was late. She’d headed to Judiciary Square — an area in D.C. packed with courts — but gone to the wrong courthouse.

As she wandered the hallway outside the courtroom, inside it Magistrate Judge Sherry Trafford entered a default judgment against her. Because the landlord’s lawyer had shown up and Jameson hadn’t, the case was deemed over.

A Post reporter found Jameson sitting in the hallway and alerted her to the judgment.

“I’m here,” she said in alarm. “How do you go in?”

Once Jameson found the courtroom and explained the situation, Trafford rescinded the judgment.

Borger’s battle with Jameson was entering its third year, Timothy Cole, the landlord’s lawyer, said in court. She’d moved into <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/05/20/dc-mayor-bowser-homelessness/" target=_blank>her apartment in 2021</a> and, Cole said, has disrupted the community since.

According to a police report, in 2021, Jameson was charged with sexual assault after allegedly snorting a white powdery substance off of her phone in the building’s elevator, smacking a resident on the buttocks, disrobing in the lobby and rubbing her own buttocks on a police officer responding to the scene. “Licky licky licky like a lollipop,” she told the officer, according to the report. The charges were dropped last year. Jameson said she has no memory of the incident and specifically denied undressing in the lobby.

Jameson received a notice on April 7, 2022, alleging she was violating her lease by “making verbal threats toward other residents on the premises and engaging in loud disruptive behavior.” In court, Cole said, she had not — in legal jargon — “cured” her alleged violation, so she had to leave.

Jameson rejected Borger’s contentions. “I’ve done nothing wrong,” she said during the hearing. “I was plucked off the street. ... I’ve not been able to enjoy my own home.”

Jameson didn’t understand how she could change elements of her personality. She’d lived in a tent for four years, she told the court, and now just wanted to enjoy her apartment.

“They have a problem with the way I look and who I’m with,” she said. “I thought I’d earned my place being outside all that time.”

Cassandra Lee, a concierge in Jameson’s building, took the stand and described an incident last summer when police responded after complaints that Jameson, who was trying to run for mayor, harassed people outside the lobby by seeking signatures for a candidacy petition.

Jameson, of her own accord, brought up other disruptive incidents while she cross-examined Lee. In one, the concierge said, Jameson had threatened her.

“You came in with your little stick in your hand — your little pole — swinging it, referring to yourself as being Jesus Christ,” Lee said in court. “You’re talking about killing me.”

Jameson responded: “I do have a stick. ... I don’t have it here today.”

On the second and final day of Jameson’s trial — held nearly a month after the first — Jameson called her boyfriend, Savon Peterson, to the stand. He described at least eight police incidents involving Jameson at the building.

After he stepped down, Jameson addressed the court, arguing that the volume and sound of her voice and character were the problem: “This is my voice. Of course I’m going to use it. It might not be the most ladylike at times. ... This has been a problem my whole life. I’m not liked. But I’m not a bad person, and I don’t deserve to be ripped from my home.”

After Jameson’s final plea, it took Trafford 50 minutes to return a verdict — to evict her.

“This is crap!” she said, storming out of the courtroom and shouting her way down the hallway.

Months passed, and Jameson remained in her apartment. She filed an appeal. Then her case took a remarkable turn.

After she appealed, a judge noticed a technical problem with Borger’s paperwork: A notice of eviction must explain that victims of domestic violence may be able to stay in their apartments if their lease violations are related to domestic violence. Jameson’s didn’t have such language.

So in June, Borger’s case against Jameson was dismissed, even though she does not claim to be a victim of domestic violence.

Paul Di Blasi, managing attorney of the <a href="https://www.dcbar.org/pro-bono" target=_blank>D.C. Bar Pro Bono Center</a>, held an hour-long consultation with Jameson ahead of her trial last year but said he could not represent her. He said he could not discuss her case but noted that although landlords think of the District as tenant-friendly, the court still defends property interests: “While relatively better than other jurisdictions ... it still can be very brutal.”

Last year, a coalition of nonprofits and law firms <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/11/02/dc-legal-aid-right-to-counsel-relaunch/" target=_blank>relaunched an initiative</a> aimed at guaranteeing more D.C. tenants who receive housing subsidy access to a lawyer to represent them for free throughout eviction proceedings. However, it isn’t clear if the initiative will help Jameson, who is facing another bout in court against Borger. On Dec. 5, the company filed another eviction case against her.

A nonprofit offering free legal representation, Rising for Justice, sent a lawyer to appear alongside Jameson at a hearing for the new case in March, but it is not representing her in the long term, said James Toliver, a supervising attorney of the organization’s housing advocacy and litigation clinic.

Toliver said he could not discuss Jameson’s case but noted that if voucher holders have been having trouble adapting, the agencies that gave them the vouchers must intervene. He said that it can “sometimes be hard for an advocate to establish an attorney-client relationship with someone who has a lot of challenges.”

The result, according to Toliver, is that advocates stand aside as tenants fumble through their cases and are evicted: “There’s nothing you can really do except cringe.”

Wesleyan University, BA in social science/music, 1998

Goucher College, MFA in creative nonfiction, 2014

Georgetown  University Law School, JD expected 2024

Justin Wm. Moyer is a reporter for The Washington Post. His work with a Post team covering the Capitol insurrection was honored with a Pulitzer Prize in 2022, and his coverage of Saudi lobbying with a Post team was honored as a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2019.

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Formerly homeless woman in D.C. fights eviction on her own

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