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Kayla Goodman-Weinbaum was met with evidence of a furry trespasser when she returned to her Dupont Circle studio apartment on a recent summer night.

She had heard noises in her walls for weeks, and here was visible proof: A bubble gum-flavored lollipop on her nightstand had been torn open, eaten halfway and abandoned, little hairs all over it. She was sure the rats were back.

Rather than risk a repeat visit in her sleep, she dragged her chaise longue to the balcony and slept outside — right in the middle of D.C.’s heat wave.

Goodman-Weinbaum said she pays about $2,100 a month in rent, meaning she paid $70 to give up her home to the rats that night. It was their apartment.

“I can hear them chewing the wall to make new holes,” said the 22-year-old resident of the Flats at Dupont Circle Apartments.

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Goodman-Weinbaum and scores of others paying rent have been waging a two-month battle with the rats and humans who run their 10-floor building. It’s gotten to the point where even the city is involved.

Gerard Brown, the rat czar who oversees rodent control at D.C. Health, said his team confirmed the existence of “active rat burrows” outside the Dupont Circle complex July 1. The property managers had 14 days to show they were working to get rid of the rats. On Monday, D.C. Health said the issue had not been fixed and planned to issue a $500 fine to Equity Residential.

The Chicago-based building owner said it was trying to remove the rats from the complex but declined to answer specific questions from The Washington Post.

Five hours after this article published online, management sent residents an email saying that they would start inspecting, from the top to the bottom floor, every unit for rat activity and entry points. They wrote that they had also retained an independent pest control consultant, according to a copy of the email reviewed by The Post.

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Washingtonians deal with rats every day, but the situation at the apartment complex is on another level.

One woman says she goes to bed armed with a stick in case a rat creeps too close in the dark. Another says she goes to the bathroom with an empty water bottle to throw at rats. Others say they have come back from vacation to find their floors covered in rodent feces.

Fed up, they are now fighting back. They have formed a WhatsApp group named “The rats at DuPont circle” where more than 120 residents swap hair-raising photos and stories and are putting together a petition. Some sued, and others are exploring alternative legal options. One man went as far as placing a caged rat in the property manager’s office.

Rats are sneaky and adaptable creatures. But rats getting into apartment units? “It’s very rare,” said Brown, the rat czar.

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Nearly three dozen residents held a meeting — attended by a Post reporter — inside the apartment complex’s common room in early July.

It was a cross-section of Washington: There were residents in their early 20s taking notes on stickered-up MacBooks, a graying man wearing Skechers, a woman sporting pink pepper spray on her keychain.

The crowd wasn’t immediately in agreement. Some wanted to hit management where it hurts.

At issue was the language of a petition they would send to management. Many wanted the wording to be stronger. Others said to keep it as vague as possible to garner the most resident signatures. They also discussed withholding rent, and a few said they planned not to pay this upcoming cycle.

The Flats at Dupont Circle Apartments is one of those high-end workforce housing buildings: hundreds of residents enjoying their yoga room, valet dry cleaning service, pool and sun deck, EV charging stations and 24-hour concierge. Studios go for $2,000 a month. A two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment with 987 square feet costs $4,300 a month.

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But the rats get it all free, plus complimentary trash.

The building is worth $58 million, according to Washington property appraiser records. It was last sold for nearly $40 million in 2004. The land alone is currently appraised at $48 million.

Marty McKenna, Equity Residential’s first vice president of investor and public relations, acknowledged there have been rat sightings in residents’ apartments and building common areas.

“We have responded to and addressed every resident immediately,” McKenna said, adding: “We have and will continue to communicate to our residents on every step of the process.”

But residents say that management has not kept them in the loop.

After spotting rats in her 400-square-foot unit many times and listening to them eat through the foam and bend the metal sheets blocking their entry points for the past two months, Goodman-Weinbaum took action. She sued Equity Residential in small-claims court in June.

‘Gnawing and chewing’

To live in a big city is to always have rodents in the back of your mind.

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Okay, one may jump out of that trash can.

Look, one along the sidewalk.

Hey, that’s my jumbo slice!

Like us, they seek three basics: food, water, shelter. And they will do anything to survive. A rat can shove its head through a hole the size of a marble and then collapse its rib cage, The Post has reported. The rat then uses the long whiskers on its nose and face to make sure the hole is safe before squeezing its body through — bringing in feces, lice, fleas, bacteria or viruses via its fur or feet.

And apartment buildings appeal to rats for several reasons.

For them, it’s as simple as crawling from the dumpster to the trash chute. Once in a trash room, rats will squeeze through doors or even gnaw through the mortar between bricks in a foundation.

Residents at the Flats said rat activity spiked in May.

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The regional manager for Equity Residential, Robert Parker, did not respond to The Post’s specific questions about the infestation but said that they are “confident in our plan and commitment to resolving the issue.”

Dozens of residents argue that management has ignored their pleas for help and requests for rent relief. Breaking a long-term lease with Equity is costly, leaving some feeling stuck. When their emails go unanswered, residents feel that management is minimizing the issue or making it appear that a problem has already been solved, they said.

Hannah Noel, a longtime tenant in the building who claims she can hear the rats in the walls all night, said management sent an email to residents advising them to pick up after themselves and referring to the rodent problem as a “DC issue in general.”

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“It’s awful,” she said. “I can hear them gnawing and chewing inside the walls and it keeps me up at night because I am afraid they will punch through the wall.”

A group of concerned residents put fliers under every unit’s door with a QR code asking people to respond to a survey about the rats. As of Tuesday, they had received 145 responses from residents, of which 78 reported seeing a rat in their unit during the previous six weeks.

The survey comments also tell the story:

• “I’ve waked up to giant rats in my apartment nearly every night for the last month.”
• “I am willing to do just about anything to resolve this issue.”
• “They have died in the walls multiple times and the management does nothing. The smell is so awful and if you have asthma it makes it worse. No matter how often you have the window open or clean it doesn’t work if you can’t find the source! Even air purifiers didn’t help!”
• “Rats are taking the place over, lots of evidence of rats and I have seen them inside my unit various times. I’m going to start charging em rent.”
• “[One] attacked my foot while I was cooking and then ran under the stove and then another one scurried out from under my dish washer and also ran under the stove. 2 rats in my kitchen.”

Rats usually appear when accessible trash piles up, said Brown, the rodent expert with D.C. Health. Rats typically want to live within 150 feet of their food source.

He said that once rats get into buildings, he would suggest crews spray tracking powder into the burrows. When rats groom themselves, they will ingest the poisonous powder.

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Typically, property owners take action when they’re threatened with fines, which can vary from $500 to $5,000 depending on the number of violations, according to D.C. Health. Officials said it is unclear how long it would take to fix the rat problem at the Flats.

Inspectors visited the Flats several times the last week of June but found no burrows that could be treated, according to reports The Post obtained via the Freedom of Information Act. But, during a visit early this month, an inspector noted that they did treat a burrow and would follow up, according to a July 3 report. Several rats usually live in one burrow.

If there’s no response or remedy? Officials can place a lien on the property.

“We don’t want to get that far,” Brown said.

‘Broken in tears’

This has gone far enough for Ben Lowe, who has lived at the complex for two years and became the de facto leader of the upset residents.

Lowe, a 25-year-old who works on the tenant side of a commercial real estate brokerage firm, said he’s so obviously exhausted that his co-workers ask him if he’s okay. He said his work performance has suffered.

Lowe said he is also tired of being startled awake, without his contacts in, to have a standoff with a rat. He said he hasn’t cooked in his apartment for nearly six weeks for fear of disease. Takeout bills add up quickly.

Lowe said he expects rats in a large city, but he said the management has not done nearly enough to protect residents.

The first time he said he saw a rat was about 4:40 a.m. on May 26.

Lowe stumbled to the source of the noise and started recording on his phone. He captured a rat leaping from his red trash can and scurrying away. (He lives on the ninth of 10 floors.)

The maintenance staff tried and failed to patch rat entrances in his apartment. Sick of it, Lowe got his own trap.

He captured one of the rats, and made a point to management: He left the trapped rat inside the leasing manager’s office. (Lowe said he sent an email to give the manager a heads-up.)

“I knew it would send at least a little bit of a message,” Lowe said.

He set more traps in mid-June before he went home to Massachusetts. He said he returned to find that the trap had worked, but the rat chewed through the plastic to release the spring holding the trap door.

Through late June and early July, he said, the search-and-seal team came by five or six times. Lowe said that he can still hear the rats in his roughly 450-square-foot unit.

He asked management to send an email to the community to warn people, but they declined.

Management only sent out a community email after the situation at the Flats went viral from an Instagram post on the D.C. humor and news account Washingtonian Problems that showed photos of rats in the complex’s gym.

Maria Peña said she gets into bed with a stick to bang the walls whenever she hears a rat. She said management keeps sending people to patch the holes with sheet metal, but the rats push past the metal.

She said she has started showing up late to work because she is so sleep deprived. One time, she said, it was too much: “I was basically broken in tears.”

Her husband has been away for months, so Peña is paying for her brother from Bogotá, Colombia, to stay with her for six months and take English classes. She said she is too afraid to be alone in the apartment.

Peña, who has lived at the Flats since about the beginning of the year, said she is starting therapy.

“I’m so afraid to open my door,” she said.

One tenant who may no longer be afraid is Goodman-Weinbaum. She had documented every rat encounter — in emails, voice recordings and photographs — with management before she sued them in June.

Last Tuesday, she was given permission to break her lease and was promised a portion of her rent in exchange for dropping the lawsuit that was to be heard Sept. 26. She also had to agree to no longer disparage the management company.

She said she is happy to receive some sort of justice but is upset for others.

“I’m also frustrated that other residents, many of whom have had worse problems than I have, still aren’t being offered the same assistance and compensation,” she said last Monday. “Receiving money for my bad experience also isn’t a replacement for competent and effective pest control.”

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