jonetta rose barras: Destroying affordable housing in DC one rent increase at a time

Perhaps it started as a joke, with Mayor Muriel Bowser telling at-large DC Council member Robert White that emergency legislation he was proposing to reduce an upcoming 8.9% hike for apartments in rent-controlled buildings in the District would have an adverse fiscal impact because it would require the Department of Housing and Community Development (DHCD) to hire additional staff to process the paperwork associated with the reduction.

Nothing is funny, however, about the sorry course of events that stymied consideration of this needed help for the city’s renters.

White said last week that he introduced the Inflation Mitigation for Rent Stabilized Housing Emergency Amendment Act of 2023 because “many low-income residents are not only still recovering from the pandemic but are also seeing higher prices everywhere.”

“I worry that for some people this increase will be too much and will tip them into eviction,” continued White, chair of the council’s Committee on Housing. 

His aim wasn’t to completely rescind the increase. White said he wanted to “balance the impact of staggering inflation costs on renters with the rising costs of business on landlords which could ultimately harm tenants and the District’s housing stock.”

That seemed reasonable to me — a partial win-win for everyone: Landlords of buildings subject to rent control would get an increase of 6.9% while tenants would get some relief. As many as 90,000 households could be affected over time by the increase.

Don’t think this is temporary. The huge 8.9% hike doesn’t preclude landlords from requesting yet another excessive increase next year; it is a quiet and incremental erosion of affordable or low-cost housing in the city.

Still, the Bowser administration decided to block White’s solution from implementation, essentially by exploiting council rules that govern emergency legislation. In an email sent to me earlier this week, DHCD Acting Director Colleen Green reiterated the mayor’s position.

“Changes to the allowable rent increase at this late hour, after some housing providers have already filed their statutorily required notices, will indeed have a fiscal impact on the [DHCD],” Green wrote. 

She seemed to object to the council’s passage of the proposal as emergency legislation — “without public input and discussion.” (Is she really unaware of the dozens of bills, costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars, that are sent by the executive to the council each month for consideration on that same basis?)

There is a cold war underway at the John A. Wilson Building. It has intensified over recent months. Despite the enormous challenges DC faces as it attempts to recover from a prolonged pandemic that has devastated the city’s economy, the executive and legislative branches seem determined to work at cross purposes, with a palpable animus infecting everything.

Bowser and Green know that White’s proposal wouldn’t have caused any significant injury to DHCD. Isn’t the agency’s stated mission to “create and preserve opportunities for affordable housing and economic development, and to revitalize underserved communities”?

Further, the city isn’t wanting for workers. The DC government currently employs more than 30,000 people — some providing direct services to DC residents. Others are superfluous; consider, for example, the Office of the Senior Advisor to the Mayor; it has a $4.5 million budget and the equivalent of 20 full-time employees.

What’s more, DHCD’s current total gross budget is nearly $100 million with more than 84 full-time equivalent positions, according to documents on the Office of the Chief Financial Officer’s website. The mayor has proposed pushing that up to $121.4 million for 2024 while increasing the number of workers to 95.

Last month, Bowser asserted that currently there are 3,500 funded but vacant positions across the government.

If one of those vacant and funded positions is used temporarily to process adjustments to the 8.9% rent increase, where is the fiscal pain to the DHCD?

There is none. 

As people who read my columns know, I am no spendthrift. Recently, I endorsed the mayor’s decision not to continue funding the Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ERAP) at pandemic levels that were supported in no small measure by federal money. 

In my view, the Bowser administration’s argument about a negative fiscal impact due to the need for DHCD to process changes to the rent increase lacks credibility. It’s clearly an expenditure that could be absorbed by the agency if the mayor agreed to let it do so — a threshold that would allow White’s bill to proceed as emergency legislation. Instead, Bowser seems more interested in responding to the desires of a political base that has brought money to her past campaigns. 

“We have to make sure that we have an environment, a marketplace, where property owners can maintain their [properties],” Green wrote in her email, reiterating a statement reportedly made by the mayor. 

According to Green, Bowser noted that when properties aren’t maintained, landlords often “get fined and they may get out of the rental business altogether, and that’s not good for us because we need good quality rental housing.”

We have entered the realm of executive branch mythology. 

Tenants in this city continue to suffer because the government doesn’t effectively enforce local housing laws. I may have had my problems with DC’s previous attorney general, Karl Racine. However, were it not for him, more than a few low-income renters would still be living in squalor to which the Bowser administration turned a blind eye.

Green offered in her email, “We know owning and operating rental housing, under safe conditions, comes at a cost.” 

That’s true. But, for the past three years, what has been the cost borne by DC landlords?

The federal government ensured that most rental property owners were not severely impacted by the pandemic. There may have been a freeze on evictions in DC, but the city covered outstanding rents for many tenants. That $43 million for ERAP went straight into the bank accounts of landlords — some of whom didn’t necessarily use those funds to help maintain their properties. Even more was spent on the STAY DC program set up to distribute federal COVID-19 relief funds for renters and housing providers.

Interestingly, I saw no mention of that fact in Green’s correspondence. Actually, there was no mention of the hardship being felt by tenants at all. Maybe I overlooked it — the same way the Bowser administration and even the council seem to be overlooking the unintended consequences of many actions by a government that claims a priority of preserving and constructing affordable housing.

For example, the city has permitted the DC Housing Authority to provide subsidized housing, using vouchers, for units whose rents far exceed the market rate. The problem has been well-documented in media reports, including DCist’s recent investigation that charts the future damage from facilitating this as a business model. 

When rent-stabilized units overpriced through approved government policy become vacant, the law permits the landlords to further increase the rents. That means a unit that may have once been affordable has moved out of the reach of the average low- or moderate-income family. Gentrification is further fueled.

The 8.9% increase will result in a similar effect. Once vacant, the cost for these units will ratchet up. In the rental market, what goes up almost never comes down.

If Bowser wants to preserve affordable housing in the District — as she has said — she may want to stop blocking and start collaborating with the council. Yes, we know White mounted a campaign against her in the last election and may do so again when the next opportunity arises. This is not about him — or her, for that matter. This is about residents of the District who need a fair and balanced approach to addressing the housing issues they face. 

Bowser should support the effort to adjust downward the rent increase approved by her Rental Housing Commission. Then, she should assign one of those 30,000 government employees to the DHCD or fill one of those 3,500 vacant and funded positions to help the agency process the paperwork to affect the reduction posthaste.

That is the action currently needed behind the mayor’s mostly empty rhetoric.

---

jonetta rose barras is an author and freelance journalist, covering national and local issues including politics, childhood trauma, public education, economic development and urban public policies. She can be reached at thebarrasreport@gmail.com.