Most landlord-tenant disputes involve a few months of missed rent and a lot of frustration. This one has run more than two years, involves over 200 alleged instances of a tenant blocking inspectors and repair crews, and has now pushed the landlord to the edge of losing the building entirely. According to a WJLA I-Team investigation built on DC Department of Buildings records and court filings, the tenant, Michele Watley, has not paid rent on her Capitol Hill basement apartment since July 2023, while her landlord, Jeffrey Levin, has defaulted on the $1.5 million loan he took out to buy the property.
The unit itself is small by any measure: 225 square feet in the basement of a rowhouse at 105 6th Street NE, rented under a lease Watley signed back on April 1, 2017, at $800 a month. Levin bought the building in July 2019. According to WJLA’s reporting, rent stopped coming in around July 2023, meaning roughly two and a half years of unpaid rent have accumulated on an already modest lease.
A pattern of blocked access
What sets this case apart from an ordinary nonpayment dispute is the access fight. DC’s Department of Buildings has documented between 10 and 70 occasions when inspectors were turned away from the unit, according to the I-Team’s review of city records. Levin’s own count is far higher: he alleges more than 200 instances combining blocked repair visits and inspection attempts, and says Watley used email correspondence to formally deny entry in over 90 of those cases.
Whatever the exact number, the building has racked up 42 open code violations and more than $40,000 in accumulated fines, according to the report, a bill that falls on the property owner regardless of who’s preventing the repairs that would clear those violations.
Courtroom back-and-forth
The legal history between the two is tangled. WJLA’s reporting notes an October 2023 incident in which a judge found Watley to be the aggressor in a hallway confrontation involving a baseball bat. Yet in a separate small claims proceeding, Watley was awarded $10,000 over what she alleged was negligent property maintenance on Levin’s part. It’s a reminder that a tenant refusing entry and a landlord failing to maintain a unit aren’t mutually exclusive claims, and DC courts have had to sort through both sides of it. Watley previously worked as a political consultant, including a stint on Senator Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign, a biographical detail WJLA notes but that has no bearing on the underlying building-code dispute.
A landlord now fighting to keep the building
The financial toll on Levin’s side is the part that turns this from a tenant dispute into a real estate story. Having stopped collecting rent on the unit more than two years ago while still carrying a $1.5 million loan on the property, Levin has gone into default, according to WJLA, and says his total losses now run into the millions when factoring in fines, legal costs, and lost rent across the ownership period. A landlord facing foreclosure because a single tenant won’t pay rent or allow inspectors inside is an unusual scenario, but it illustrates a real gap in how DC’s building and tenant codes interact: a property owner can be held financially responsible for code violations even while documenting, in writing, repeated attempts to gain the access needed to fix them.
For a market where landlords are often assumed to hold most of the leverage, this case is a useful corrective. Watley’s continued occupancy without payment, combined with her own successful small claims judgment against Levin, shows how a determined tenant can tie up a property for years using the same legal system landlords typically rely on to enforce leases. Whether Levin ultimately loses the building to foreclosure, and whether the city ever gets consistent access to resolve the 42 open violations, remains unresolved as of the I-Team’s reporting. What’s clear is that neither side has come out of this ahead, and the building itself, along with whatever tenants eventually live there next, has absorbed the cost of a fight that’s now well into its third year.
For anyone renting out a unit, the case is a cautionary tale about how slowly the DC system can move once a tenant simply stops cooperating with entry requests. Filing for eviction over nonpayment is one process; actually gaining physical access to document repairs, when a tenant is contesting every visit, is another process entirely, and the two can run on completely different timelines. Levin’s loan didn’t pause while the paperwork worked its way through housing court, and the fines on the property kept accruing the whole time. Watley, for her part, still lived in the unit as of the reporting, with an active small claims judgment in her favor sitting alongside a housing court record that’s anything but clean. Neither outcome looks like what either party expected when the lease was signed back in 2017.
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