jonetta rose barras: DC Councilmember Robert White winds up humming to the mayor’s affordable housing song

Earlier this week, moments before the DC Council began debating its massive $22 billion Fiscal Year 2026 Budget and Financial Plan, members took their first vote on comprehensive housing legislation known as the “Rebalancing Expectations for Neighbors, Tenants and Landlords (RENTAL) Act of 2025.” The bill, if enacted, would remove historic protections for DC tenants while installing many changes that had been sought for years by housing providers and developers. 

The former has reason to lament their future. If the latter group of people weren’t dancing in the halls of the John A. Wilson Building, they should have been.

“Our housing crisis demands action, not delays,” at-large Councilmember Robert White said as he successfully pushed back an effort to postpone the vote. A motion by Ward 1’s Brianne Nadeau and Ward 4’s Janeese Lewis George to do so failed 10-2.

“Doing nothing is not an option,” continued White, chair of the Committee on Housing, citing data that indicates that DC issued only “1,500 of the region’s 9,600 apartment permits” in 2023. He also noted that construction in the District dropped from about 7,200 units in 2022 to about 1,200 units in 2024.

“There is not an endless stream of investors,” White said Monday during the debate around the bill. “Data show investment in housing has dropped precipitously. That hurts our residents.”

But while White seemed to present the RENTAL Act as some sort of elixir to what ails the housing market, Daniel del Pielago, housing director at Empower DC, and renters with whom I spoke see the measure — a revised version of legislation introduced in the spring by Mayor Muriel Bowser — as another case of “citizen unfriendly” public policy from the District government and its political leaders.

“We are incrementally moving to less protections for tenants. If we keep in [this] direction, it spells disaster for tenants,” del Pielago told me during a telephone interview.

As written, the measure amends seven existing laws, including the Rental Housing Act of 1985; the Rental Housing Conversion and Sale Act of 1980; the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act of 1980, generally known as TOPA; and the Inclusionary Zoning Implementation Amendment Act of 2006. 

Among other things, the RENTAL Act would reduce the time it takes to evict a tenant for nonpayment of rent. It would expedite the removal of a renter who has been charged with criminal or violent behavior. Where currently a technical deficiency found in a complaint or an eviction notice could force a landlord to start the process anew, the RENTAL Act would give the courts the discretion to allow the proceeding to move forward.

Equally important, it would exempt new buildings from TOPA for the first 15 years after their construction. If that weren’t benefit enough for landlords and developers, it would provide that same exemption to those that were constructed over the past 15 years. Anyone who knows anything about the housing development market in DC knows that owners will be sure to put up their real estate for sale or transfer within that threshold.

And speaking of transfers: The RENTAL Act apparently would relitigate a victory tenants thought they had won by forcing certain ownership transfers to be defined as actual sales, thereby triggering tenants’ TOPA rights.

Ward 3’s Matt Frumin — chair of the Committee on Human Services, to which parts of the bill were referred — offered two amendments during the debate earlier this week. One amendment would have prohibited the retroactive application of TOPA exemptions for housing constructed in the past 15 years. The other would have eliminated the imposition of an affordability covenant as a way to gain a TOPA exemption.

In the rationales for his proposed changes, Frumin wrote that the retroactive exemption would “withdraw an existing right from current tenants — a dramatic policy shift,” and would yield no benefits around the intended goal of increasing affordable housing construction. 

He also argued that the provision that would exempt any property from TOPA if there is a promise of a new income-restricted affordability covenant is “problematic because it allows a purchaser to circumvent TOPA and deprive tenants of the ability to negotiate for terms that are the most appropriate.”

Frumin’s proposals made sense to me — but not to a majority of his colleagues. Both amendments failed, as did one offered by Lewis George. The council eventually voted 10-2 to give initial approval to the RENTAL Act, with Nadeau and Lewis George casting the only “no” votes. 

When I reached out to Frumin a day later, he said via email that White had expressed “a willingness to work together between now and second vote.”

“I think we made real progress yesterday but now we all have to step back and closely review what passed. What is good and what might be missing,” continued Frumin, adding that he wasn’t prepared yet to outline next steps “with all of the other things going on.”

The second vote on the bill is scheduled for Sept. 17. Any tenant watching the handwriting on the wall is not optimistic, however. Neither am I.

It’s true that landlords and developers have taken a beating since COVID. Council legislation made it next to impossible during the pandemic to evict any tenant for nonpayment of rent. When they sought help to kick out renters engaged in criminal activity, their pleas were mostly ignored. 

Some renters deliberately stopped paying rent because they were living in squalor or generally dangerous conditions, explained del Pielago. He worries that these people — one might call them conscientious objectors — will be caught up in the changes to eviction procedures.

Interestingly, for many years, tenants, landlords and developers repeatedly sought reforms to the city’s Rental Housing Act of 1985, which governs rent control. The former chair of the council’s housing committee had convened sessions attended by representatives of the affected groups. Little came from those gatherings, except, perhaps, more frustration. 

Undoubtedly, tenants thought they were getting a more sympathetic legislator with White’s appointment. The revised version of the mayor’s proposal probably has disabused them of that notion — although Bowser sent a letter to Mendelson indicating her dissatisfaction yet again with the council’s version. She did, however, praise some of White’s most recent changes, which watered down the committee print after the council voted July 14 to delay consideration of the bill for two weeks.

Bowser, who wanted a 25-year TOPA exemption for new or significantly improved buildings, said that she was “opposed to any additional amendments that would reduce the proposed TOPA exemptions, add unnecessary administrative burdens, take away judicial discretion, or add further complications to the judicial eviction process.” She also warned against a section that would alter the existing structure of the board of directors of the DC Housing Authority, vowing to veto separate emergency legislation designed to enact those provisions immediately. 

No public policy is perfect; we all get that.

However, the council seems to have a penchant for flawed public policies. Members have allowed themselves to be driven by political considerations and the demands of vocal nonprofit advocates and lobbyists. The recently approved FY 2026 budget exemplifies that reality.

To satisfy calls to spend more, officials restored cuts to certain programs made by Bowser and her team. They even sought to use new revenue that DC Chief Financial Officer Glen Lee had estimated would be collected.

Mendelson had asserted that the legislature could rightfully use $60 million of the projected $243.7 million revenue increase. Lee stopped him cold, as I had predicted in my previous column. That money was not available to the council given the need to cover overspending and replenish mandatory reserve accounts. 

Consequently, Mendelson said that “under duress” he was being forced to amend the budget before members could vote. At one point, Monday’s legislative session devolved into something akin to a middle school student government meeting, with new amendments being offered from the dais that had not been circulated for review by all members. Mendelson was forced to briefly recess the meeting.

“The council has become really petty,” del Pielago said during our conversation. “They’re putting their feelings on the front burner, and they act like a bunch of teenagers fighting in a room.”

Worse than that, they are creating public policy and programmatic priorities on the fly. That does not advantage residents, especially those reliant on the government for some of their most basic needs. 

Further, their improvisational style of governing injures residents, businesses and investors — see Initiative 82 and the legislature’s failure to institute a wholesale repeal; or the piecemeal response to the destruction of Chinatown as a community and a one-time valued tourist attraction; or the inability to produce and preserve enough affordable housing in DC.

All too many services provided by the DC government have become an amalgam of antiquated thinking, ineffective design and inefficient systems. Apparently, no one is actually rebuilding a new and solid structure. District leaders are engaged in a series of hydra-headed experiments that rely on 20th-century models and dynamics.

Interestingly, a year ago, White sought to persuade the council to establish a formal review of agencies and programs with an eye toward sunsetting those that were no longer cost-effective or that had outlived their original mission. Now, he has failed to take advantage of an opportunity to closely examine the city’s entire affordable housing delivery system — including the Department of Buildings and the Department of Housing and Community Development, among others — to determine where the dysfunction or operational failures reside. Instead, White appears to have settled on working within the analysis and outline provided in Bowser’s original legislation.

In essence, the mayor gave landlords and developers everything they wanted in her original legislation. White has given them quite a bit of what they wanted — probably more than they expected, and enough that many of them are not totally dissatisfied. Unfortunately, however, the end product will not yield the transformation desperately needed for everyone affected by the District’s affordable housing crisis, especially tenants. 

jonetta rose barras is an author and DC-based freelance journalist, covering national and local issues. She can be reached at thebarrasreport@gmail.com.