Welcome! Here you can read plaintext versions of all the recent news articles about the Copycat Building. This page was created to give all tenants equal access to this crucial information, regardless of their financial standing or ability to pay for online newspaper subscriptions. Articles are listed chronologically starting with the oldest, more links are at the bottom of the page.
During Maryland rent moratorium, more landlords using legal ‘loophole’ as means to evict
By Hallie Miller-December 30, 2020
Read on the Baltimore Sun Website
When Indigo Null first set foot in the CopyCat apartment building several years ago, they finally felt a sense of belonging that long evaded them in their rural South Carolina hometown.
Null, a photographer who works in food service to supplement their income, jumped at the chance to live in the arts haven with other like-minded creatives — filmmakers, musicians and painters among them. Few other apartment buildings in Baltimore offer similar studio spaces for living and working, save for those priced out of Null’s budget.
“The building is great if you’re a working artist, and if you don’t have parents who can pay for stuff,” said Null, who identifies as transgender and uses they/them pronouns. “It’s the difference between running a photography business and otherwise having to work 80 hours a week.”
When the coronavirus pandemic hit Maryland, Null — legally known as Anna Velicky — and several of their neighbors and friends quickly lost the ability to pay rent. In-person dining, nightlife, arts and entertainment ground to a halt, drying up incomes for millions of workers who rely on week-to-week paychecks to survive.
Null said their landlord, Charles Lankford, initially tried to contact tenants via email and memoranda. But as weeks passed and tenants still hadn’t paid rent, Lankford took some of them to what is known as tenant holding over court, through which he can circumvent both state and federal moratoriums on residential evictions for failure to pay rent.
In tenant holding over court, a landlord can take action against a tenant whose lease has expired, without having to provide a codified reason for not extending or renewing the lease. This legal route has become particularly popular in 2020: In August and September alone, 233 tenant holding over cases were filed in Baltimore district court, an 82% increase in activity from the same two-month period a year before, according to a Baltimore Sun data analysis.
Tenant advocates and legal experts said the recourse functions as a loophole for landlords seeking to evict during the public health crisis, which has entered a new phase of surging case counts, hospitalizations and deaths. It underscores the disparate economic outcomes imposed by the forces of the pandemic, which has disproportionately impacted low and middle-class workers — especially Black women with children, who are more likely to be behind on rent payments than any other group, according to a study published Dec. 16 by the National Women’s Law Center.
Lankford also was able to turn to tenant holding over court despite operating without a rental license. Baltimore Housing spokeswoman Tammy Hawley said he did not receive a rental license in 2020 due to outstanding violation notices issued on the CopyCat property, including inadequate lighting and ventilation and improperly constructed lofts.
Lankford, who bought the CopyCat building in 1983 for $225,000 and has spent decades promoting its image as a premier arts destination for the city, did not respond to requests for comment.
“The CopyCat case is narrow because it examines whether or not unlicensed landlords can access the courts to evict someone when their very activity of operating as unlicensed landlord violates the law,” said Gregory L. Countess, director of housing advocacy at Maryland Legal Aid, which is representing Null and other CopyCat tenants. “But it’s also about the broader issue of a pandemic: When you have a supposed moratorium on actions to evict people because of the public health imperative, it’s just not safe to put people out.”
That’s why both Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention imposed the halt on evictions.
State courts will not hear failure to pay rent cases until existing restrictions on court operations change. The courts are, however, processing warrants of restitution — the paperwork crystallizing evictions — and still hearing tenant holding over, wrongful detainer and breach of lease cases.
The CopyCat, in Baltimore’s Station North neighborhood, previously housed a Crown Cork & Seal factory for making bottle-capping machinery. Baltimore celebrities including Dan Deacon and the Wham City arts collective have inhabited the building, which maintains the flavor of its warehouse origins with cement floors, metal staircases and graffiti-smacked walls.
Lankford’s attorney, Herbert Burgunder III, a partner at Rimon Law in Baltimore, said his client has a well-defined legal path. Lankford, he added, has dedicated his life to making the CopyCat an inclusive space for all.
“The law permits a landlord to regain possession of an apartment under a month-to-month tenancy after sending a written notice,” Burgunder said in an email. “Tenants who do not move out after the notice period are subject to an order of repossession from the court.”
But Lankford’s case has been complicated by his lack of a license. Baltimore City law requires landlords to register with the Department of Housing and Community Development every year. Without the license, they can neither charge nor collect rent.
The lack of a license also rendered him ineligible to receive any of the federal relief funds that the city designated specifically for landlords.
“The landlord wants to get through the backdoor what he can’t get through the front,” said Douglas Nivens II, the Maryland Legal Aid attorney handling Null’s case. “We are seeing an increase of landlords finding alternative ways to evict tenants.”
Two district court judges have sided with CopyCat tenants. Yet, when Null motioned to dismiss the case, a judge denied the motion and sided with Lankford, determining that despite not having a license, he fulfilled all the other requirements for tenant holding over.
However, Judge Videtta Brown also declined to set an appeal bond — making it easier for Null and their attorney to take the case to a higher court if they so choose.
Brown also prohibited Lankford from evicting Null at least until the Maryland Judiciary becomes fully operational again. And since he remains unlicensed, Lankford still cannot collect rent.
But not all judges will respond the same, said Carol Ott, the tenant advocacy director for the Fair Housing Action Center of Maryland. She called tenant holding over court “the quickest and easiest way to evict somebody.”
“Giving landlords a loophole to evict people, particularly during the winter and a pandemic, created a perfect storm,” Ott said. “The problem isn’t the law, and it’s not the tenants. It’s how the law gets interpreted in court.”
Ott said several of her clients have had their landlords not renew their leases over the course of the pandemic.
“There never seems to be any sense of urgency to correct the power imbalance,” Ott said. “We need to take a hard look at how tenants are treated in court versus landlords. The tenant doesn’t get any loopholes.”
On March 16, Hogan, Maryland’s Republican governor, halted evictions for tenants who could prove that their failure to pay rent stemmed from the public health crisis. The state has allocated grants through its housing department for eviction prevention, including $2 million for Baltimore in November. The CDC’s eviction moratorium, which adds another layer of protection to renters who have lost income during the pandemic, has been extended through January.
Maryland Del. Jheanelle Wilkins, a Democratic lawmaker who represents Montgomery County, said she plans to introduce statewide legislation during this upcoming General Assembly session that would require landlords to provide “just cause” for not renewing leases in tenant holding over cases. The bill accompanies additional rent relief legislation slated for this year’s session, including one proposal that would ensure a tenant’s right to counsel and another that would raise the rent court filing fee from $15 to $125.
“The CDC order has been holding the flood gates, but once these protections disappear, it’s going to be intense,” Wilkins said. “Tenants pretty much have no rights when it comes to tenant holding over. The conversation is, ‘Did you provide notice?’ and ‘Are you still living there?’ Then it’s granted if all those boxes are checked. But there are many more factors at play.”
Null and the other CopyCat tenants’ success or failure with the Court of Appeals could signal to both city and state lawmakers the need for further policy modifications, said Zafar Shah, an attorney at Baltimore’s Public Justice Center.
“We were warning legislators in April or May that eventually we’ll get to a point where the incentive is tenant holding over instead of failure to pay rent, and we’re there,” Shah said. “This is not an argument that a landlord should never be able to repossess their property or get their money eventually. But these eviction actions are being taken through the processes before rental assistance catches up.
“If we had this ‘just cause’ requirement, even for just for tenant holding over, we’d be increasing the chances that they can resolve these issues through rental assistance.”
Maryland Court of Appeals rules in favor of Copycat landlord, saying he can evict without rental license
By Hallie Miller- December 03, 2021
Read on the Baltimore Sun Website
In a 5-2 decision, the Maryland Court of Appeals has ruled in favor of the landlord of Baltimore’s Copycat building, saying he could evict tenants without having a rental license.
The verdict ends a tense conflict between tenants of the artists’ community and the building managers, who pursued legal action against some residents during the coronavirus pandemic when they stopped paying rent. Many are artists or entertainers whose prospects dried up last year after the coronavirus swept into Maryland and forced people to retreat from public life.
But with state and federal restrictions on some evictions as a result of the public health crisis, Charles Lankford, who owns the Station North apartment and studio building, relied on what is known as tenant holding over court to remove residents from the property. With this alternative legal route, a landlord can remove a tenant whose lease has expired, without having to provide a reason — such as failure to pay rent — for not extending or renewing the lease.
Legal experts and tenant rights advocates called the Nov. 29 decision a major blow to Baltimore’s licensing law, which was designed to protect tenants from unsafe or predatory housing conditions. It will become “settled law,” they said, unless the Maryland legislature takes it up in the next General Assembly session.
Lankford’s case, filed in August 2020, was complicated by his lack of a rental license. Per Baltimore City law, landlords can neither charge nor collect rental payments without licenses, which they must obtain for one-, two- or three-year periods depending on the property. The licenses are meant to ensure that properties are safe to inhabit.
The tenants fought their eviction and were successful at the district court level. Lankford appealed. There, a judge sided with Lankford, determining that despite not having a license, he fulfilled all the other requirements for tenant holding over. However, the judge declined to set an appeal bond — making it easier for defendants to take the case to a higher court.
At the appeals court level, the majority said even unlicensed property owners have certain rights.
“There is no reason for this court to judicially alter the balance between a property owner’s right to repossess the owner’s property after the expiration of a tenancy, and a tenant’s right to safe and habitable living conditions during a residential tenancy,” Judge Brynja M. Booth wrote in the decision. “We will not preclude the availability of a statutory remedy enabling a landlord to seek repossession of the landlord’s property interest at the conclusion of the tenancy.”
Dissenting judges and tenant rights advocates said the decision essentially renders useless the city’s licensing law and disincentivizes property owners from acquiring them.
“This loophole presents an obvious risk of danger to tenants, as unlicensed landlords may now use tenant holding over actions ... to recover rent and possession of property and lease the property again, with little incentive to eliminate hazards on the premises and obtain licenses,” Judge Shirley M. Watts said in her dissenting opinion.
Watts encouraged General Assembly lawmakers to review the case and codify in state law the question of whether unlicensed property owners should be able to recover properties via tenant holding over actions in places where such licenses are required.
State Del. Jheanelle Wilkins, who represents Montgomery County, said despite marginal gains over the past year, lawmakers have much more work to do to provide more robust protections against people losing their homes.
She said she hopes to find ways to beef up the licensing requirements and fund a “right to counsel” bill for tenants that passed last year. Wilkins said she also will introduce a statewide “just cause” requirement that should prevent more tenant holding over actions, as it would require landlords to cite reasons for not renewing leases.
“We need to do more on the long-term stability for renters, and this case makes the case for just-cause legislation ... even more critical,” Wilkins said. “Hopefully, this will be a clear demonstration of the work we still have to do.”
In Baltimore, the current licensing law went into effect in 2018 and was tied to existing license requirements to landlords’ ability to collect rent. Rental properties have to be registered with the city’s housing department and must be inspected by a licensed inspector before they can be leased.
The law was strengthened specifically to provide more protection to tenants and eliminate financial incentives for landlords to not comply with housing codes, said Zafar Shah, an attorney with the Public Justice Center’s Human Right to Housing Project in Baltimore.
He called the court’s decision an “earthquake” that could endanger tenants and subject them to unsafe living conditions.
“It’s basically giving the blueprint to landlords in Baltimore City, specifically, to avoid the regulatory objectives that the rental licensing law purports,” Shah said. “The argument was never that landlords don’t have the right to repossess their property — but how they do it.”
Shah said the majority ignored Lankford’s true motive, which was to intimidate tenants into paying rent despite the pandemic. He never intended to leave the units empty, Shah said, and continued advertising space and collecting payment from other tenants.
“The majority ... ignored the facts in front of court, which showed a duplicitous and intentional scheme to avoid regulation,” Shah said. “And we’ve seen a lack of enforcement by city [housing] to enforce its license program. The city has really not taken any enforcement action.”
Representatives from the city’s law department did not respond to a request for comment.
Tammy Hawley, a spokeswoman for Baltimore’s Department of Housing and Community Development, said the ruling doesn’t change the city’s licensing requirement.
“Failing to have a valid rental license may result in substantial fines that are a lien on the property and may impact the landlords ability to evict a tenant in a District Court failure to pay rent action,” Hawley said in an email.
Herbert Burgunder III, Lankford’s attorney, said the decision upholds a landlord’s right to regain possession of properties.
“The court recognized an important property right and affirmed our position as presented in the trial courts,” Burgunder said in an email. “My client is hopeful that the former tenants that still occupy the apartments will respect the decision and promptly return possession to the property owner.”
The court heard two cases from two different tenants, Christopher Walke and Indigo Null. Both had month-to-month leases at the Copycat and were told they would face legal action once they stopped paying rent.
Null, a photographer who also worked in the food industry before the pandemic and has lived in the Copycat building for several years, said Lankford communicated in emails and notices that the tenant holding over action would be used as a legal alternative during the eviction moratorium. The case felt like a retaliatory action for not paying, Null said.
“They are doing this to enforce the illegal payment of rent,” Null said. “People here keep insisting they want an arts district. But they don’t actually care about the artists making that culture.”
In a statement, Douglas Nivens II, the Maryland Legal Aid attorney who co-defended the tenants, said licenses not only protect renters, but also ensure safe and quality housing for all, no matter their income, race, ethnicity or gender.
“[We] will continue to prioritize informing and educating tenants of their rights,” Nivens said Thursday. “This case does not hold us back from advising clients about when their place doesn’t have a license.”
The organization encouraged tenants to check on the status of their rental properties before signing leases as a way to prevent future evictions from unlicensed properties.
The CopyCat building is the last bastion of DIY studio space for Baltimore artists. Is the city’s warehouse arts scene coming to an end?
By Giacomo Bologna - July 29, 2022
Read on the Baltimore Sun Website (Paywalled)
Nick Wisniewski remembers getting a tour of the CopyCat in 2001 when he was still a freshman in art school. The windows were tall, the floors were concrete, the large open spaces were bathed in natural light, and — perhaps most importantly — the rent was cheap.
Wisniewski said he got the impression from the owner that as long as he and his art school friends weren’t doing hard drugs, they were free to do whatever they wanted to the space.
For just $150 a month, Wisniewski joined a community of artists who used two-by-fours, scrap metal, extension cords and self-taught carpentry to turn an unlicensed former bottle cap factory on Guilford Avenue into the pulsating heart of Baltimore’s warehouse arts scene.
A mix of locals and artists drawn from more expensive cities, like New York or Los Angeles, found an open-minded community of performers, musicians and show promoters who were literally building their own space in the CopyCat and other postindustrial buildings nearby. The unique do-it-yourself culture became a launchpad for artists who couldn’t afford to live anywhere else and a welcoming space for queer folks.
But a mix of gentrification, a pandemic, and a nationwide clampdown on such unregulated warehouse spaces has suffocated the city’s warehouse arts scene in recent years. The CopyCat is now the last major warehouse arts space in Baltimore. The massive, redbrick building in the Greenmount West neighborhood of North Baltimore may look the same from the outside, but residents have been moving out and the inside is being gutted as the owner finally tries to get it licensed with the city.
A group of remaining residents, led by the artist Indigo Null, has feuded with management for years. It might look like a typical fight between tenants and a landlord who has been raising rents, but the residents say it’s a struggle over something bigger: Once the CopyCat is gone, where can Baltimore’s low-income artists create their own space?
“A lot of these underground, DIY spaces that emerged were spaces where landlords just gave people blank slates, free rein, which is illegal, right?” Wisniewski said. “But that’s the paradox. How do you give that kind of agency and freedom while still being legal and up to code? It’s a real conundrum.”
The labyrinthine CopyCat once housed hundreds of residents and had a dozen or so practice and performance spaces. But Null said a recent canvass of the building found fewer than 100 residents and as few as two performance spaces left.
Charles Lankford, the building’s owner, did not respond to multiple interview requests.
The building management sent an email to tenants in May that said plans call for carving up some remaining large spaces.
“Whatever the end results, The Copycat will not be the same,” wrote Frank Yantosca, the building’s leasing agent, in the email. “We are truly hoping for an improved version of what we have always been, but as of today, we just don’t know what that looks like.”
Baltimore once had numerous unregulated spaces like the CopyCat. Then a 2016 fire at the Ghost Ship warehouse in Oakland, California, killed 36 people and put a nationwide spotlight on unregulated warehouse spaces. Baltimore set up a Safe Arts Space task force after the Ghost Ship fire to bring the city’s underground warehouse arts scene up to code.
Two people interviewed for this story recalled seeing a concert at the Bell Foundry, also in Greenmount West, where the floor bowed under the weight of hundreds of people. The city shut down that 13,000-square-foot space shortly after the Ghost Ship fire. It’s since been renovated and is being turned into apartments, which still irks some artists.
“The Bell Foundry was a beautiful painted-up space,” painter Zen Xaria said. “Now, it is gray. They painted it gray, and they’re calling it the Foundry Lofts — and it looks like a prison.”
Xaria used to live on a floor of the Annex, a former office space down the block from the CopyCat that is also owned by Lankford. Xaria was part of a group that threw DIY drag shows and recruited diverse performers who wouldn’t otherwise get a chance to try drag. In October 2020, the Annex closed and Xaria moved into the CopyCat, but they and their roommates were evicted this month.
“What other place is there for us to go? It’d be different if we had somewhere else to go. We really don’t,” Xaria said. “And that’s the real issue is that everywhere is being gentrified. We can’t afford to be anywhere.”
The CopyCat is the only such space remaining. Improvements were made to the building after the Ghost Ship fire, but it has never been properly licensed as a residential rental building.
Some residents have been holding a rent strike to protest the building’s deteriorating condition. Null and others paid for an independent property inspection in 2020 that found numerous problems, like rodent and bug infestations; unsafe wiring; mold; water damage; flaking, old paint that likely contained lead, and more.
Null said the inspector ballparked the renovation costs at $10 million to $20 million.
That’s significantly lower than what Ellen Janes thinks is needed. Janes is the executive director of the Central Baltimore Partnership, a nonprofit that has been trying to make safer spaces for artists without displacing them.
Janes said she thinks the CopyCat needs about $70 million worth of renovations.
“It’s extremely expensive,” Janes said. “It’s a huge building, and it’s a rambling and complex building.”
The partnership recently teamed up with other groups to buy Area 405, a building down East Oliver Street from the CopyCat, for about $3.8 million, more than 20 times its previous sale price in 2002. A developer had been eyeing the property for condos, which would have displaced dozens of artists who work in studios there, as well as the Station North Tool Library, one of the country’s biggest libraries for lending power tools and teaching classes like woodworking.
Now, the plan is to increase the number of work studios for artists, keep rents affordable, and possibly build additional housing units for artists.
But the CopyCat is not Area 405.
“Anyone I’ve spoken to in the development community does not want to buy that building,” said the Rev. Michele Ward, a member-at-large of the Greenmount West Community Association. “Because it needs so much work, so much repair work done.”
Ward owns a rowhouse facing the CopyCat building and said she can’t imagine any single developer investing the millions of dollars needed to renovate the building without simultaneously jacking up the rent — a devastating blow to the working-class artists living there.
Ward moved to Baltimore from Philadelphia in 2018 largely because she wanted to live in Greenmount West, the neighborhood around the CopyCat. She called it a “unicorn” neighborhood because it’s racially and economically mixed, LGBTQ-friendly and full of artists.
Property values have been rising in Greenmount West, and the home vacancy rate has fallen sharply. Ward said some longtime renters in the neighborhood have been leaving as more newcomers buy homes, and while some transplants like her appreciate the CopyCat and its history, not everyone else does.
“Unless multiple developers. who are willing to make a serious financial investment and are committed to that neighborhood experiment that we have in Greenmount West, are willing to pool their resources and save that building, it won’t happen,” Ward predicted. “It’ll continue to fall into disrepair until a developer from out of state with a lot of cash to burn will buy it and then turn it into expensive lofts.”
The area around Amtrak’s Penn Station, including Station North, Midtown and Greenmount West, has seen increased investment from developers in recent years as rail commuting to jobs in Washington, D.C., has grown.
But without a space like the CopyCat, its current and former residents say Baltimore will lose a key link in its arts ecosystem. The CopyCat for decades has provided a space where artists could showcase their work, collaborate, practice and perform with practically no barriers or costs, and push the boundaries of their art. It became a launchpad for artists with nowhere else to go.
The Baltimore rapper DDM performed a few shows in what he called the CopyCat’s “golden age,” from 2009 to 2014.
“I liked it because there was no judgment,” DDM said. “It allowed for you to be your most authentic self, without editing yourself.”
The muralist Gaia recalled “holding a forty” in a hallway of the CopyCat and talking to the singer Grimes after she performed to an intimate crowd of about 20 people.
“It used to be a club,” Gaia said of the CopyCat. “It was the engine of the nightlife of the DIY art scene. It was literally pulsating.”
Jimmy Joe Roche was one of several New Yorkers who moved to the CopyCat in 2004 and 2005 as part of the art collective Wham City. He recalled watching his friend, Ed Schrader, pull a CD rack out of a pile of trash, connect a contact microphone to it, and start hitting it with pieces of metal, making a rhythmic sound. Schrader would go on to tour internationally and is still releasing music as part of the duo Ed Schrader’s Music Beat.
“I lived in a cubby hole above a piano, and they charged me $30 a month,” Schrader said. “It gave us all a space to spontaneously combust with ideas.”
Without the CopyCat, Schrader said, “we’d all be working at Guitar Center.”
Those low rents are now gone, and the surrounding neighborhood, once pockmarked with vacant buildings, is one of Baltimore’s trendier neighborhoods. Some current and former CopyCat residents feel like they aided unwittingly in gentrifying the area.
”Developers use artists like window dressing,” Schrader said. “Once they’re done using the artist, they dispose of them and put up condos the artists can’t afford … and then you’re left with a bunch of people in condos listening to Ed Sheeran.”
Null is among about 15 people, mostly queer or trans, who have faced eviction in recent months. Null and their roommates won an eviction appeal in June. Management at the CopyCat was unable to produce a rental agreement, and the judge noted the building’s shoddy accounting practices.
That could open a path for Null and their roommates to resume paying a $2,700 monthly rent for a large open space on the fifth floor, but they received a letter Friday ordering them to vacate the space by the end of September. Null, who moved to the CopyCat in 2015, acknowledged that much of the community that once existed in the building has “collapsed.”
“I came in on the tail end, quite honestly, and I was here just long enough to see how cool it was before it got murdered,” Null said.
Other residents, like Cam Alvarez, are leaving Baltimore. Alvarez fronts the band Period Bomb and organized a weeklong music festival in June based out of True Vine record store on Charles Street. Alvarez was part of the rent strike at the CopyCat after one of their pets died from an infection they believed to be from a mouse infestation at the building.
Alvarez agreed to leave the building in mid-July to avoid an eviction on their record and is headed back to the Miami area, where they have an archaeology job lined up.
Alvarez spoke at a rally in June with Null outside the courthouse in Baltimore to protest the evictions.