As recently as Presidents Day, 4801 Connecticut was advertising its one-bedroom apartments to prospective renters for $1,700 per month. According to a Washington Post investigation, the DC Housing Authority is subsidizing nearly two dozen renters in similar 4801 apartments, and in each case is paying $2,648 per month. The difference: nearly $1,000. Not all overpayments are this large, but the Post says DCHA is paying rents in excess of market rates on 4,000 units across the District. And the cost to DCHA and its housing affordability efforts? Millions of dollars each year.
“DCHA has a set of [rent] price caps according to neighborhood and bedroom quantity,” reporters Steve Thompson and Dalton Bennett write. And DC and federal laws require DCHA to check the rents it’s offering to pay landlords against market prices. However:
In practice, if a landlord asks for the cap, that’s what DCHA pays — regardless of market price, The Post found, and [DCHA Director Brenda] Donald acknowledged in her interview.
The agency pays these caps for a quarter of its voucher contracts…. In many cases, DCHA pays the caps regardless of whether tenants in the same building who don’t have vouchers pay far less. [emphasis added]
The Post’s reporting also touches on an issue Connecticut Avenue tenant leaders have been trying to raise with DC leaders and agency heads for some time: that excessive rent subsidies incentivize landlords to favor voucher holders over renters who do not qualify for subsidies. They even warned Mayor Muriel Bowser, during a meeting we reported on last June. The tenant leaders said the mayor agreed to state explicitly that meeting her affordable housing goals “[do] not entail ‘converting’ existing rent-stabilized units into means-tested units.”
And as we reported last April, then-Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Chris Geldart told ANC 3F that the system “ain’t working,” between overpayments turning some apartment buildings into “de facto public housing,” and formerly homeless residents in need of extensive services finding little or none.
Since the Post published its investigation online on February 15th, two of the newspaper’s opinion columnists have weighed in. “[T]he millions of dollars they are wasting every year could go to help some of the tens of thousands of residents who have long been waiting and hoping for housing assistance,” Theresa Vargas writes.
And Colbert I. King writes of “the D.C. Housing Authority’s single-handed contribution to the city’s affordable housing crisis.”
Rent hikes ahead: Renters in DC’s – and this neighborhood’s – many rent-stabilized apartment buildings will be getting notices of a 8.9 percent rent increase in the coming weeks and months. And it’s not because their landlords have suddenly gone rogue.
Blame last year’s inflation spike. The intention of DC’s “rent-control” law is to prevent arbitrary and excessive annual rent hikes in older apartment buildings, and provide a measure of predictability and affordability regardless of the residents’ incomes (when landlords don’t try to skirt the law).
The formula is based on the federal government’s inflation index for urban areas, the CPI-W. In 2022, CPI-W increased by 6.9 percent, the most in decades. Landlords can add another 2 percent to that, and from May 1, 2023 through April 30, 2024, the Rental Housing Commission says they can impose a one-time rent increase of as much as 8.9 percent. That’s the largest annual rent increase since the law took effect in 1985.
The maximum rent increase for the year beginning May 1 will be 8.9% for most people in rent-stabilized buildings. That’s a huge jump. While landlords will imply that the increase is mandated, that’s not true – it’s the maximum. https://t.co/Iecdl0xYTX
— vnsta3003 (@vnsta3003) January 27, 2023
Renters 62 years old or older, and those with disabilities can limit their rent hike to 5 percent during the May-through-April period if they meet certain income requirements, live in one of these apartment buildings constructed prior to 1976, AND are registered with the District’s rent administrator. You’ll find the application form and instructions here.