District of Columbia

For around two decades, Bennie “Tops” Coleman, a retired Vietnam War veteran, lived in a brick duplex that he owned in Northeast Washington, D.C. Bennie bought this home in the late 1980s, after his wife passed away from breast cancer.¹

But in 2006, Bennie neglected to pay his $134 property tax bill, resulting in D.C. seizing and selling the home he had planned to live in for the remainder of his life. 

It all started with Bennie beginning to show signs of dementia in the mid-2000s. He would frequently forget to pay bills and buy food. His neighbors often checked in on him to make sure he was doing okay.²

When Bennie failed to pay his tax bill, the district placed a lien on Bennie’s home and charged him $183 in interest and additional penalties. The district was following its usual practice: If someone fails to pay their property taxes on time, the delinquent amount automatically becomes a tax lien on the home. Tax-delinquent homeowners get at least 18 months to redeem the home by paying the back taxes, interest, and penalties. Once the home is foreclosed, the lienholder can sell the home to a third party for a profit.³

Although Bennie’s son paid off the total for him in 2009, it wasn’t enough to prevent tax foreclosure. A Maryland company that had bought the tax lien demanded $4,999 in legal fees. Bennie could not afford the fees.⁴

His son wrote to the court for help, stating that he would hate for his father to lose his home at his age. Despite the circumstances, the court approved the foreclosure in June 2010. One year later, federal marshals came to Bennie’s home to evict him. Bennie refused to leave and slept on a chair on the front porch that night.⁵

Bennie was completely incapable of understanding the complex developments affecting his rights or showing up in court to fight for his home. “He has dementia,” his court-appointed conservator said. “He did not understand the ramifications of what was going to happen to him.”⁶

Two months after Bennie was kicked out of his home, the Maryland company sold it for $71,000. Bennie was not able to get a single penny back. He lost the place he believed would be his forever home and was left with no choice but to live in a group home.⁷

Unfortunately, Bennie is only one of the countless victims of D.C.’s predatory tax foreclosure system. For decades, the city has enabled home equity theft by selling liens on people’s homes to private investors and allowing those investors to pocket the owners’ equity as a windfall for satisfying the unpaid tax debt. These tax sales have affected the city’s most vulnerable homeowners: the sick, elderly, and financially constrained. Minority homeowners have been hit especially hard, making up 72 percent of all home equity theft victims in the district, according to a 2013 Washington Post article that reported on the home equity thefts occurring from 2005 to 2013.⁸

While the Washington Post’s findings remain relevant today, the district made minor improvements to its laws in 2014. Following the newspaper series and the attention it brought to the issue, D.C. passed the Residential Real Property Equity and Transparency Act to curb home equity theft in the district.⁹ However, the law only forbids home equity theft for a narrow set of properties: those that are owner-occupied with five or fewer units or where delinquent taxes total less than $2,500.

The Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution forbids the government or private investors from keeping more than what is owed when a home is seized to repay a debt. This amendment applies to all properties, not just those excluded by the recent reform. Washington, D.C. must end home equity theft in its entirety to protect all homeowners from the type of injustice that Bennie experienced.