Renters at Faria Management properties say they're battling mold, rats, sewage leaks, and intimidation. They believe a reckoning for unaccountable landlords is finally here.
“Fuck you, you dirty bitch,” reads a quote attributed to Taunya Martin, one of the candidates for an advisory neighborhood commissioner post in Ward 4, on a flyer distributed by a political action committee in recent weeks.
The heated exchange took place between Martin and staffers in the city office managing ANCs, as she fought to be included on the agenda for an ANC meeting in her Petworth neighborhood, and seems to have featured quite a bit of shouting.
“There is enough rudeness and negativity in our politics,” the flyer, distributed by the Bike, Walk and Bus PAC, reads. “Don’t make Taunya Martin the voice of our ANC 4C07 community.”
Martin (who doesn’t deny the quote itself) doesn’t think much of these attacks: “I guess when you’re great, and I am, this is what they do,” she says. “If I wasn’t great, they wouldn’t be talking about me.”
Though their decisions are merely advisory (as the name suggests), ANCs weigh in on hyperlocal community issues such as development and transportation projects. Such topics can get pretty heated, which in turn amps up tensions in these otherwise low-profile elections.
It’s an old saying in D.C. political circles that the lower stakes, the greater the drama.
The vast majority of D.C.’s 345 ANC races currently include only one person running or no one interested in the seat at all. But among the dozens of contested races, there are bitter fights over bike lanes, allegations of stolen signs, at least one MAGA figure, homemade attack flyers, and a whole lot of name calling.
Newer arrivals — often White families with young children — have championed the projects, arguing they’re badly needed safety measures in an area that’s seen a large number of dangerous crashes over the last few years. But this has drawn the ire of some long-time residents — often Black seniors who have called Petworth home for decades — who believe the changes have eaten up parking and made the streets harder to navigate.
Martin and her opponent, Lionel Dripps, neatly represent each side of the conflict.
A retired federal employee who still lives in her childhood home on 5th Street, Martin believes the projects were undertaken without properly consulting the community, particularly her fellow seniors. Dripps, a 40-year-old nonprofit staffer with two young kids who bought a home in the area several years ago, believes they are necessary to make the neighborhood “as safe as possible for everyone’s kids.”
Both chose to run for ANC after the current commissioner decided not to run again – in no small part because of the bike lane controversy.
Since the projects were proposed several years ago, Martin has gained notoriety in the neighborhood for her frequent attendance at community meetings to decry the proposals. (Memorably, she derailed a March ANC meeting on the Grant Circle measures with her outbursts, leading one commissioner to recount an incident where Martin allegedly cut the spokes of a dog-walker’s bicycle after he locked it on a parking sign.)
Dripps says he appreciates Martin’s commitment to the community, allowing she does have long-standing connections with many of its older residents, but he believes this behavior disqualifies her for public office.
“I don't think that somebody who engages in politics like that is going to be effective in a position where you have almost no power, and all you can do is get people to want to work with you,” Dripps says.
One place that might be an issue: the city’s Office of ANCs.
[“Our office will not be answering any phone calls from you,” Denise Wiktor, the office’s general counsel, wrote in an August email to Martin, which was made public by the PAC running ads against her. “No public employee is required to tolerate abuse.” ]
But Martin makes no apology for her bombastic style. She doesn’t dispute calling the ANC worker a “dirty bitch” in the incident described on the PAC’s flyer, but says she only “called her a name after she hung up on me” during a previous phone call, arguing the office has operated unprofessionally. If anyone has concerns about her conduct, she believes “my reputation and community service speaks for itself.”
“If I don’t win, it makes no difference to me, because I know everybody in this community,” Martin says. “Nobody knows [Dripps], I’ve never seen him around anywhere.”
Dripps suspects he and Martin run in very different circles — he’s very active in online communities and WhatsApp groups of local parents, while Martin says she makes it a point to attend every possible ANC and community meeting in the area. Whoever wins the race, Dripps says, will need to play a role in bringing neighbors together regardless of “how they’re in community with each other.”
Stolen signs in Chevy Chase?
The fate of an aging library and community center in Chevy Chase has been a flashpoint in the neighborhood for a little over five years now. Perhaps, then, it’s no surprise that the controversy has bled into the area’s ANC race.
Karrenthya Simmons has spent years arguing that the site, commonly known as the Chevy Chase Civic Core, should be redeveloped to include new affordable housing, particularly because the neighborhood has historically been among the least friendly to new housing construction anywhere in the city. She also happens to rent an apartment near the site, so she decided two years ago to run for the ANC 3/4G05 seat and have a direct say in guiding the project’s future.
Simmons won that contest by a scant two votes, and she has spent her term trying to make Mayor Muriel Bowser’s proposal to build 177 new apartments there a reality. But the opposition has been fierce; A dedicated group of neighbors has fought efforts to add any housing there ever since Bowser first pitched the redevelopment in 2021. Bowser’s revisions to the plan over the years have angered supporters and opponents alike, but it finally stands on the cusp of a major milestone: the mayor is pressing the Council to pass legislation teeing up the project before she leaves office at the end of the year.
The project’s critics have seized on the ANC race as a chance to install a commissioner much friendlier to their point of view, backing architect Wei Torti in her bid against Simmons.
In an email, Torti declined to take a position on Bowser’s proposal for the site, arguing her job will be to represent “the collective voice of our community” not advance her personal preference, but there’s no mistaking which constituency she appeals to. The project’s opponents have begun waving signs supporting Torti on several neighborhood street corners and sending out emails on the popular Chevy Chase listserv disparaging Simmons.
“Our neighborhood is facing a once-in-a-generation undertaking — the proposed redevelopment of the Civic Core site — and too many neighbors feel their voices haven't been heard,” Torti wrote in an email.
In a development that would be of little surprise to anyone watching the drama over the project the last few years, Simmons says the race has turned ugly. She recalls one incident when she went to speak to some of the people waving signs supporting Torti to try and find some common ground. One attendee at the gathering told her to “fuck off” and “not to talk to her until I go to law school,” she recounts. (For her part, Torti says she’s unaware of these confrontations, and she’s “entirely focused on a positive, issue-oriented campaign.”)
Simmons also believes some of her campaign signs have been stolen or defaced by Torti’s supporters. Many of them survived intense storms in August, but only started disappearing after Torti’s signs went up a few weeks ago, she alleges. Torti says Simmons reached out directly to her about the issue last month, and she assured Simmons “that neither I nor anyone on my team has ever stolen or damaged her signs.”
“In fact, our own campaign has experienced significant losses, with over five dozen of our signs disappearing — requiring us to replace missing signs constantly,” Torti wrote in an email. “Despite this, neither I nor my team have pointed fingers at her or her supporters.”
But as a younger Black renter in a community dominated by older white homeowners, Simmons can’t help but suspect the vitriol surrounding the race stems in some part from her identity.
“Just because I'm a renter does not mean that my voice is less valuable, even though I’m closer to understanding the affordability crisis, as a renter, than a homeowner would,” Simmons says. “It sometimes seems like renters’ voices don’t matter…but the city is here for everyone.”
MAGA vibes in Ward 5
Along Upshur Street NE in Brookland, neighbors started noticing something unusual a few weeks ago: An otherwise unassuming house was surrounded by dozens of security cameras (and plenty of signs alerting passersby about said cameras).
The same property was also adorned with copious signs advertising one of the candidates in the 5B05 ANC race: Rachel Williams. Naturally, neighbors started asking questions.
The more they learned about Williams, who works for the city’s procurement office, the more confused they became. For one thing, they found thousands in speeding tickets tied to two cars parked outside her house, including one with D.C. government plates. Ironically, her campaign website says “excessive speeding” in the area is one of the issues she’s most interested in confronting as ANC.
Others in the neighborhood say their personal interactions with Williams deepened their curiosity.
KT Beckman-Gotrich says they encountered Williams at a recent community potluck, striking up a conversation once they learned she was running for ANC. She seemed nice enough, Beckman-Gotrich says, but they noticed something you don’t see often in deep-blue D.C.: Williams’ beagle was outfitted with a harness emblazoned with ICE logos.
Neighbors also began noticing a man coming into and out of Williams’ house who one recognized as Michael DePasquale.
DePasquale’s Instagram describes him as a businessman and a “U.S. Human Rights Agent,” but he’s primarily gained notoriety locally for his efforts running restaurants and nightclubs in Philadelphia and Baltimore. (His Insta documents frequent interactions with D.C. restaurateurs, as well as local politicians, such as Bowser and her deputies.) He also happens to be a big fan of President Donald Trump, and his website and social media pages are awash with photos of him smoking cigars and otherwise hobnobbing with various figures in the MAGA orbit over the years.
He’s posted several photos with Trump himself (including some at the White House), in addition to former members of Congress like Marjorie Taylor Greene and George Santos and a variety of Trump-aligned bitcoin entrepreneurs. Philadelphia Magazine discovered last year that he also has a lengthy criminal record and has falsely boasted about serving in the U.S. Marines. (He also told the publication that he was friends with the late celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain and is “investigating” his death, and that he’s cooked dinner for Russian president Vladimir Putin, but it’s unclear whether any of that is true.)
The exact nature of his relationship with Williams is unclear, though a society publication described her as his girlfriend when the pair showed up to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s inaugural ball last year. It also mentions her as “key member of the influential Trump-favored social circle.”
Williams has yet to address any of this publicly, despite rumors flying fast and furious on local Facebook groups and WhatsApp threads. (She also didn’t respond to The 51st’s requests for comment.)
“I think people should be well educated on the background of the folks that they're potentially going to vote for,” says Michael Chaney, one of the other candidates vying for the seat. (John Feeley, who served as the area’s ANC several years ago, is also running but did not respond to requests for comment.)
An IT professional, Chaney says he mainly got in the race to work on the sort of things that traditionally define ANC races: He wants to see more traffic calming measures in the neighborhood, the track at the Turkey Thicket Recreation Center resurfaced, and the redevelopment of the old Providence Hospital site run smoothly. But he admits the rumblings about Williams also concerned him enough to throw his hat in the ring.
She is not “an accurate reflection of where this 5B05 neighborhood is right now,” he says.
‘An angry neighbor and her personal printer’ in Columbia Heights
Columbia Heights ANC Anthony Thomas-Davis found himself in the middle of a bizarre situation late last year: A bar owner in his district started falsely claiming he was the area’s true ANC following a dispute with Thomas-Davis over his liquor license.
Thomas-Davis’ run for reelection in the 1A06 district hasn’t been quite that strange, but it has still been far from normal.
A few weeks ago, Columbia Heights residents began finding a flyer tucked into their mailboxes: “Vote Him Out,” it declares in large block letters. “ANC Commissioner Anthony Thomas-Davis welcomed Trump’s troops to our streets, but he votes against neighborhood cleanups, crosswalks and small businesses,” it continues, featuring a QR code linking to a website featuring information about the ANC’s record.
No one in the neighborhood is quite sure who’s distributing them, though several residents tell The 51st they’ve received them. “Paid for by an angry neighbor and her personal printer,” reads a small disclaimer at the bottom of the flyer, which indeed looks like half a sheet of regular A1 paper.
The website doesn’t provide many other clues about the printer’s identity. It links to a September 2025 story from WJLA quoting Thomas-Davis saying he’d be open to accepting the National Guard’s help in cleaning up public spaces in the district, such as the Columbia Heights Civic Plaza, and it catalogues a series of votes Thomas-Davis has taken against various measures to support small businesses in the area.
The links on the website lead only to a password-protected D.C. government site, so it’s difficult to judge exactly what they’re referencing. But other commissioners in the area say the site’s claims on his votes are pretty much accurate, and that Thomas-Davis, who works as a staffer for Ward 6 Councilmember Charles Allen, has won few friends on the commission. (Thomas-Davis did not respond to The 51st’s requests for comment.)
“Seeing the amount of ‘no’ votes and the number of times he is on the outs of the votes with his other commissioners leads me to understand that maybe this [district] could use a commissioner who can work a little bit more easily with the rest of the commission,” says Arjun Singh, who is challenging Thomas-Davis. “Anthony has a lot of insight, a lot of passion, but I think we have just fundamentally different philosophical approaches to what an ANC does and how we would go about the job.”
Singh, a former Washington Post staffer and a podcast producer, says his main aims in running for the seat are to help the neighborhood build more housing and coordinate more community events at the civic plaza and along 11th Street NW to help local businesses. But, chiefly, his aim is to make the ANC feel more inclusive to “people in the neighborhood who are not necessarily interested in being policy wonks or career politicians,” arguing Thomas-Davis can get too stuck in the weeds of Wilson Building matters.
“It's important for ANCs to have people who are just a little bit outside of the D.C. city government system to be able to amplify the voices of just regular residents and stay in contact with them,” Singh says. “I appreciate that the ANC doesn't have robust power, and I'm not necessarily trying to create more power, enforcement power, legislative power. I'm really trying to use this as a coordinating body.”
Alex (he/him) is a senior reporter for The 51st who has spent his career covering local government, politics, the criminal legal system and more in the D.C. area. He was raised in Northern Virginia, graduated from Virginia Tech, and lives in Shaw.
Renters at Faria Management properties say they're battling mold, rats, sewage leaks, and intimidation. They believe a reckoning for unaccountable landlords is finally here.
The team plans to ask for an exemption to the city's climate law that would allow it to add a natural gas-burning plant, which is worrying environmentalists and lawmakers.
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