Free Rent Comes At A Price

Checcia Durham now understands that free rent isn't as appealing as it might sound. A longtime legal tenant of an abandoned apartment building, Durham has no one to complain to when things go wrong. After the original landlord proved to be a fake and vanished, the only maintenance of the building has been prompted by infrequent requests from tenants to the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs, which recently "performed a building-wide inspection, finding...'numerous housing violations' ranging from water damage to dangerously unsecured bathroom fixtures to an absence of smoke detectors".