Jun 12, 2009  |  By: Lou Chibbaro Jr.  | COMMENTS     

The management and board of an upscale condominium building in downtown Washington declined this week to confirm whether a Maryland minister seeking to overturn the city’s same-sex marriage recognition law through a voter referendum is a resident of the building.

Bishop Harry R. Jackson Jr., pastor of Hope Christian Church in Beltsville, Md., filed an affidavit in April with the D.C. Board of Elections & Ethics saying he was a resident of a sixth floor apartment at the Whitman condominium at 910 M St., N.W., next to the D.C. Convention Center.

“For privacy reasons, the association does not comment on the personal information of any of its residents or unit owners,” said Leslie Brown, an attorney representing the Whitman Condominium Unit Owners Association.

Jackson, who owns two homes in Silver Spring, Md., was required to provide proof of D.C. residency in order to file papers last month calling for a referendum to overturn a law approved May 5 by the D.C. Council and signed by Mayor Adrian Fenty recognizing same-sex marriages from other jurisdictions.

Jackson did not return the Blade’s calls seeking comment for this story.

Prior to Brown’s statement that the Whitman could not comment on Jackson’s association with the building, some of the building’s residents questioned whether Jackson lived there.

“I have never seen him and I have yet to find anyone who has,” said Earl Fowlkes, owner of an apartment at the Whitman.

Fowlkes, co-founder of the city’s Black Pride celebration, said he showed a newspaper photo of Jackson to one of the building’s desk clerks, and the clerk did not recognize Jackson as a resident.

Fowlkes said he also checked an electronic directory at the building’s entrance door and found that Jackson’s name was not in the directory.

D.C. gay businessman Bryan Pruitt, who owns an apartment in the Whitman and who serves on the condo board, also said he had never seen Jackson in the building.

The condo that Jackson claims as his residence is owned by Joseph Honaker. A source familiar with the building said Honaker has claimed that Jackson is his roommate and is not a tenant.

City property records show that Whitman’s unit 630, which Jackson has declared as his residence, is a three-room apartment with one bedroom and two bathrooms.

Pruitt noted that the Whitman’s condo documents, which spell out the rules and regulations for the building, established a cap on the number of apartments that can be rented by owners. Pruitt said he understood that the cap had been reached some time ago.

The cap means that Honaker would not be allowed to rent his apartment to Jackson under the condo rules.

Honaker is allowed to have a roommate, Pruitt said, but further questions surfaced about whether Honaker actually lives in the apartment. An online residential phone directory, WhitePages.com, lists Honaker as a resident of both the apartment he owns at the Whitman and another apartment at 555 Massachusetts Ave., N.W. Someone other than Honaker owns the latter apartment.

Two people familiar with the 555 Massachusetts Avenue building, which also is a condominium, said tenants other than Honaker have lived in the apartment listed by WhitePages.com at Honaker’s residence for at least the past several months. They said they don’t know whether Honaker has lived in the building in the recent past.

If Honaker is living somewhere other than his apartment at the Whitman, it would mean that Jackson’s residency there violates the condominium’s rules.

But Honaker’s absence from the apartment would not necessarily place Jackson in violation of D.C. voter registration residency rules as long as Jackson actually lives in the apartment, according to Cary Silverman, an attorney and head of the Mount Vernon Square Neighborhood Association, which represents residents in the area.

Honaker did not return phone calls placed to two numbers listed for him on WhitePages.com.

Jackson’s decision to declare residency in a one-bedroom apartment at the Whitman has come as a surprise to the building’s large number of gay residents. Some estimated that 30 percent of the building’s occupants are gay.

“This is a shock to all of us,” said one gay resident. “I’m outraged that someone would try use our building as a platform to push anti-gay policies in our city.”

Evidence suggests Maryland residency

In a related development, a source familiar with the street in Silver Spring, Md., where Jackson and his wife, Vivian Michelle Jackson, have lived since early 2006 said Jackson’s neighbors on the street were not aware that he or his wife had moved from their $1.1 million house on a four-acre tract of land at 15713 Holly Grove Road. Michelle Jackson ...