Chairman’s race profile: Lazere pushes incumbent on scale of affordable housing investment

Ed Lazere still isn’t satisfied. The longtime executive director of the DC Fiscal Policy Institute knows the DC Council increased support for affordable housing this year — even investing $15.6 million more than Mayor Muriel Bowser proposed in her budget. But Lazere, who’s challenging DC Council Chairman Phil Mendelson in the June 19 Democratic primary, says lawmakers must do more.

“When there are nearly 30,000 very low-income families spending more than half their income on housing, you realize it would take 40 years at that pace just to address the current need,” Lazere said in an interview.

Lazere wants to double the District’s spending on affordable housing. “We need a greater sense of urgency in our leadership to be tackling the fact that DC is losing its affordability and diversity,” he said. “We shouldn’t be watching as people sleep in tents or get pushed out of the city.”

It’s all part of his larger campaign against Mendelson, arguing the District must do more to address inequality.

“Particularly when it comes to affordable housing and homeless services, I feel like we’re taking incremental steps,” he said.

Mendelson notes that DC has roughly doubled its investment in the Housing Production Trust Fund over the past decade, and says simply spending more money isn’t the answer to the District’s housing woes. “[Lazere] doesn’t say how that will be funded,” Mendelson said. “It’s not enough to say we need to spend money. There also needs to be a focus on spending the money effectively. I have never heard my opponent criticize how the dollars are spent, even though the auditor has pointed out that millions of dollars have been wasted — and that translates to a significant number of units that could have been built.”

But “improving oversight and efficiency on programs and spending more on programs is not either-or,” Lazere said. “Indeed, we need more oversight to make sure we’re spending our money as wisely as possible. That’s a lot of what I’ve done at the DC Fiscal Policy Institute. But no one can argue that we can solve our homelessness and affordable housing problems without devoting more resources.”

Bowser found $100 million for affordable housing even though she initially hadn’t figured out where the money would come from, and Ward 7 DC Council member and former Mayor Vincent Gray committed to creating universal pre-K without a prefigured funding stream, Lazere said.

“He had the vision, and then he fought for it to make it a reality,” Lazere said.

Lazere says Mendelson lacks vision. “Mr. Mendelson can talk about a few properties that he helped preserve — a handful of those L’Enfant properties [in historic Anacostia]. But citywide we have a policy that when a building goes up for sale — which, in a gentrifying real estate market is going to happen a lot — the city has the legal ability to be the first purchaser, allowing us to lock down those properties as affordable. … We’ve never utilized that authority.”

(On the vision question, Mendelson said, “I think we also need to look at new initiatives such as affordability covenants to preserve existing housing at affordable levels, continuing to protect rent control, as well as maintaining and seeing if we can expand inclusionary zoning.”)

Lazere also criticizes his opponent for “protecting an estate-tax cut for people with $5 million estates and a business tax cut for big corporations like Walmart.” Instead, Lazere said, the council should “look to close loopholes in the city’s tax system that are allowing people to escape taxes.”

Lazere took a leave of absence from his role at the DC Fiscal Policy Institute through June 30 to make his first run for office this year. His campaign website is edfordc.com.