As an affordable housing crisis looms over the District, where its stagnant housing voucher waitlist tops 37,000 people and homelessness rates are increasing, researchers, developers, and legislators contend the city needs more affordable housing.
“We’re still kind of falling short in terms of producing the housing we need that would allow us to adequately house everyone in the city,” said Peter Tatian, a senior fellow and research director focused on housing at the Urban Institute, a non-profit that researches social policy issues.
But developers and landlords in the District say city laws are inadvertently driving them away from entering the affordable housing market at a time when it needs new housing stock the most.
Affordable housing caters to city residents who make 30 percent or less of their area’s median income (AMI), which is the District’s lowest income bracket. City and federal housing agencies manage a large portfolio of public housing and run voucher-based rental assistance programs like the Local Rent Supplement Program (LRSP).
For those who make 30 percent or less of AMI, however, there is one housing voucher for every four people who need one, Tatian said. The need for rental assistance is growing at higher income levels, too, he continued. The District is a particularly expensive place to live. As demand for affordable units far outpaces supply, some in the housing industry are warning policies meant to protect and preserve housing are actually deterring new developments.
“D.C. has made it so difficult to build and manage housing here,” said Saman Zomorodi, who runs Zed Development, a small, mission-driven affordable housing company. “It honestly doesn’t make sense anymore.”
To re-vitalize the market, Mayor Muriel Bowser is fighting for legislation that would revise the policies the industry says make affordable housing an unsustainable business practice.
The Rebalancing Expectations for Neighbors, Tenants, and Landlords (RENTAL) Act aims to address components of city law that have dissuaded affordable housing providers from entering the scene for years. It proposes shortening eviction timelines to pre-pandemic levels, exempting the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA) from market-rate buildings, and increasing LRSP voucher eligibility from 30% AMI to 50% AMI, among a myriad of other reforms.
Providers Zed Development and Jubilee Housing said the proposed changes are a good starting point to increase developer confidence in affordable housing. The legislation is intended to help prevent the downfall of mission-driven providers, like the case of Neighborhood Development Company (NDC). In 2024, the enterprise shut down due to inoperable local market conditions, its website stated. The company had operated since 1999, when it was hailed as a beacon of affordable housing. Zomorodi asserts NDC couldn’t stay afloat amid delayed payments, delayed eviction timelines, and increased interest rates. NDC could not be reached for comment.
Tatian worries, however, the legislation won’t be fully effective. Expanding voucher eligibility without increasing supply could make the coveted vouchers even more competitive to access, he said. Reforming eviction timelines, too, could require deeper legislative digging. A number of judicial vacancies have reduced the capacity of the courts, he said, slowing eviction proceedings. Without addressing court capacity, he continued, eviction delays will likely stay the same.
“Like many housing providers, we’ve experienced challenges navigating the current eviction landscape,” said Jubilee Housing’s Vice President for External Affairs, Tyrell Holcolmb, in a statement to Street Sense. “The long timelines for legal resolution, paired with limited enforcement mechanisms, place strain on our properties and staff.”
Affordable housing providers are also facing a financial threat from the government itself. Although providers rely on city and federal funds to make rental payments for tenants enrolled in government programs, some organizations are reporting receiving those payments inconsistently or months late. Jubilee Housing has experienced unreliable payments from the D.C. Housing Authority (DCHA), Holcolmb continued in his statement.
“The LRSP is a critical tool in our ability to offer deeply affordable homes in high-opportunity neighborhoods,” Holcolmb wrote. “That said, our experience has been inconsistent. There have been periods where payments have been delayed for months, which impacts our operating budget, creates strain on property maintenance, and limits our ability to be proactive in planning. When the system works well, it works very well, but we need that consistency across the board.”
In a bureaucracy, mistakes can happen. It’s hundreds of people sometimes doing the job that thousands of people should do. DCHA acknowledged in a statement to Street Sense that delays in payment do happen, but the vast majority of landlords get their payment on time.
“DCHA values these partnerships and understands the critical need to ensure disbursements are processed effectively. Housing Assistance Payments (HAP) are processed monthly, and DCHA pays the vast majority of voucher payments to landlords and non-profit partners due on-time every month,” said DCHA in a statement. “Occasionally, delays may occur because of action or inaction by landlords or DCHA. For example, there may be delays in determining tenant eligibility or certifying a unit as in compliance with HUD’s Housing Quality Standards. DCHA diligently works with all of its partners in resolving any issue that may prevent timely payment for voucher households.”
The RENTAL Act also proposes to significantly limit instances where tenants can use the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA), another significant driver of investment hesitancy. Introduced in 1980, TOPA requires building owners to offer residents the first right of refusal to buy their own building in the event it is being sold. Some tenants use the law in partnership with a lawyer to obstruct the sale of their building to another owner for long periods of time, only then to demand a payout to stop their obstruction, according to Zomorodi, who said he’s seen payouts reach $80,000. These are high costs on developers but common occurrences, he said.
Despite longer transaction times and rare tenant purchases, a report released in 2023 by the Coalition for Nonprofit Housing and Economic Development found that TOPA successfully offered tenants a seat at the negotiating table, reduced displacement, and substantially preserved and developed District affordable housing stock over the law’s 40-year history. The report was co-authored by Tatian, commissioned by the D.C. Department of Housing and Community Development and funded by the D.C. Council.
In a long-desired win for affordable housing providers, the D.C. Council passed a reform this month on the Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ERAP), which eliminated the pandemic-era policy of barring evictions for any resident with an open ERAP application. ERAP applications now require deeper documentation of an unforeseen and time-limited emergency to be approved.
The revisions are an attempt to protect the District’s affordable housing stock by preventing foreclosures of affordable housing providers who lose money for months when rent payments are not received, the D.C. Council said on a website post.
The Small Multifamily Owners Association, an advocacy group representing small landlords in support of naturally occurring affordable housing, also said the legislation was a promising first step in stabilizing the District’s troubled rental housing market in a statement.
One landlord, who identified himself as a senior citizen named R. Ware living in the building he rents out, has incurred tens of thousands of dollars in losses due to tenant criminal activity and felony-level property destruction, he reported in written testimony submitted to the D.C. Council for their March 6 DCHA oversight hearing. His three tenants refuse to pay rent due to knowledge of city regulations and long court processes that severely delay eviction processes, the landlord said.
“My financial circumstance would have been better if I had never rent the units at all,” he wrote.
“The people who own property at some point have to be able to remove people if there’s not good faith about paying the rent,” said Van Ness Tenants Association President Harry Gural. “But again, I’m not seeing that directly. I see opposite situations where people who are tenants fear being evicted wrongly.”
“You have times when somebody’s stuff all of a sudden gets put out in the street, and it puts fear in people’s hearts,” he continued.
As the RENTAL Act hopes to re-work the narrative fabric around the District’s affordable housing market, those on the ground, including Gural and local resident Taniya Rogers, are concerned it is rather offering tenant disenfranchisement and ineffective solutions.
In written testimony submitted to a March 6 DCHA oversight hearing, Rogers stated, “Mayor Bowser and her allies sold this bill as tenant protection—but let’s be clear: this is landlord protection. It guts tenant rights, making Emergency Rental Assistance (ERAP) harder to access, keeping families trapped in debt, and letting landlords evict tenants in just 10 days. 10 days.”
Editor’s Note: This article was updated to correct the spelling of Tyrell Holcomb’s name.
