The D.C. Department of Human Services notified tenant service providers and advocates late last week that it will not reopen its Emergency Rental Assistance Program application portal on Oct. 1—the first day of fiscal year 2025.
As housing costs in D.C. continue to rise, the program has been in such demand in recent years that DHS closed the portal last year after meeting its capacity in less than a day.
Last week’s notice from DHS said that “work is currently underway to reform the ERAP program to ensure its limited resources are going to District residents who are eligible for the program and face the most urgent need for rental assistance.”
DHS did not give a precise date for when it will begin accepting applications for the much-needed funding. But in the meantime, the agency said, ERAP providers are working through applications submitted in the final quarter of fiscal year 2024.
The last-minute shutdown of the application portal, which opens quarterly, has left legal service organizations and tenants scrambling. The D.C. Council, meanwhile, will soon consider legislation to tighten the program’s rules and eligibility requirements, based largely on claims from affordable housing providers, who say ERAP has allowed for millions of rental arrearages to build up, putting them at risk of foreclosure.
D.C. Council Chair Phil Mendelson intends to introduce emergency legislation Tuesday to limit access to ERAP. He has framed the bill as an effort to avert a financial crisis for affordable housing providers with large rental arrearages.
“The crisis is being driven, in large part, by the Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ERAP) funds and the eviction process,” Mendelson wrote in a memo circulated with a draft of the bill.
Under a pandemic-era law, tenants in eviction cases have been allowed to pause eviction proceedings from moving forward while they have a rental assistance application pending. Mendelson said in his memo that the requirement to stay proceedings has caused eviction proceedings to pile up in D.C. Superior Court. In a joint Monday news conference with Mendelson, Mayor Muriel Bowser said eviction timelines in D.C. have increased from six to 12 months before the pandemic to 18 to 24 months. She said the amount of unpaid rent for occupied units has risen from about 4 percent in 2018 to 15 percent in 2024.
But that data doesn’t specifically show whether the delays and unpaid rent are due to applicants attempting to defraud the system—essentially claiming they cannot afford their rent when they actually can—or a legitimate need for rental assistance.
Alex Rossello, director of policy communications with the Apartment and Office Building Association of Metropolitan Washington, which supports the bill, says it’s about “right-sizing the program so that you’re targeting the assistance of people who actually need it.
“You’re cutting out the misuse of the program to delay evictions, potentially indefinitely,” he says, adding that “the program has conditioned a lot of renters to rely on it to pay their rent, and it’s not capable of doing that.”
Rossello says that stays of eviction proceedings due to ERAP are frequent, based on accounts of landlords and their attorneys. But when asked to provide support for landlords’ claims, Rossello did not have specific data.
“You’re asking me for a lot of data that’s very hard to have,” Rossello says. “But we’ve legislated off of less data before.”
Legal services organizations that assist tenants with evictions and ERAP applications decry the attempts to accuse low-income tenants of misrepresenting their eligibility or misusing the rental assistance program to delay evictions.
“In our experience, when tenants are filing multiple applications, it is because the applications are getting denied—often because the housing provider is not responding to requests for documents,” says Molly Catchen, supervising attorney at Legal Aid DC. “It’s not the tenants’ fault that the housing providers are not engaging with the process.”
DHS has denied at least 10 percent of the 19,607 ERAP applications filed in 2024 because the landlord failed to provide information, according to data provided by DHS.
Delays in processing ERAP applications due to a landlord’s lack of responsiveness are common, according to tenants who spoke with City Paper, many on the condition that we would not print their names.
One tenant, who asked not to be identified, shared an email chain where a DHS employee implores the landlord to provide documents so that DHS can finish processing the application.
“Her 45 day ERAP application has expired[.] please send me the documents by Tuesday … or I will have to deny her application,” the DHS employee wrote. The tenant says the landlord was eventually responsive, but it was only after she reluctantly agreed to sign a new lease.
Another tenant, who pays rent with a housing voucher, applied for ERAP to pay for her security deposit. She says her ERAP application was denied after her landlord failed to provide documentation to DHS. Having missed the application window, the tenant had to reapply in the next quarter. “The holdup was all because of him,” the tenant says of her landlord.
A third tenant, who has received multiple ERAP denials, shared a denial form that they received from DHS that provides brief explanations: “ERAP amount cannot be calculated” because her landlord did not provide the outstanding rental balance, and “the ERAP payment cannot be processed because your landlord has not provided payment processing information.”
DHS has only referred 255 ERAP cases for additional fraud investigation as of May 2024, according to the agency. DHS does not track whether self-certification has allowed for any measure of fraud in the program.
“DHS does not have a way to run a report to show how many people used self-certification versus providing documents,” an agency spokesperson says via email. “To do so, we would need to manually go through every application.” Because DHS does not track which applications are self-certified, it’s unclear what, if any, issues are associated with self-certification.
Sunny Desai, managing attorney at Legal Counsel for the Elderly, says that eliminating the ability to self-certify would negatively impact their elderly clients, many of whom pay 75 to 80 percent of their income in rent.
“Our clients already face a technological barrier,” Desai says. “Some of them don’t have the devices needed to access the internet. Some of them don’t even have email addresses, and we help them create email addresses just so they can apply.”
He believes that ERAP applications have increased because more tenants are in need, not necessarily because of self-certification.
“We have clients who’ve been in their apartment for decades. They were able to afford rent. Those people probably never applied for ERAP, but now they need it because they don’t have any other source of income,” Desai says. “The only thing that’s changed is that the pandemic happened, and rents skyrocketed.”
City Paper analyzed a sample of 62 eviction filings by affordable housing provider Wingate Properties, which was selected randomly for the analysis from a list of housing providers receiving low-income housing tax credits. The cases filed between Jan. 1, 2023, and June of this year offer a glimpse into the use of ERAP stays.
Twenty-three filings, almost one-third of the cases City Paper reviewed, did not have ERAP stays and resulted in default judgments. Those cases were resolved in an average of five months. About 40 percent of the cases were stayed once due to ERAP, and only three contained a second ERAP stay; none of the cases were stayed three times due to ERAP.
In 19 proceedings, which account for 63 percent of closed cases, judges approved an eviction allowing the U.S. Marshals to forcefully remove tenants from their homes.
The total number of executed evictions in D.C., where tenants are removed by U.S. Marshals, are higher now than pre-pandemic levels, totaling 1,705 so far this year, compared to 1,494 in 2019, according to data provided by the Office of the Tenant Advocate.
Mendelson’s bill, the Emergency Rental Assistance Reform Emergency Amendment Act of 2024, would narrow the definition of an “emergency” under the program, would not allow tenants to self-certify eligibility, and would eliminate the requirement that eviction proceedings be automatically stayed if a tenant has a pending ERAP application. Instead, judges would have discretion to pause proceedings and could only do so once per case.
The bill would also require the tenant to provide evidence that ERAP will provide enough assistance to pay off their back rent, or show that they have a payment agreement with the landlord.
“I don’t think they’ve adequately defined what the emergency is and how this bill solves that emergency,” Desai says. He questions how removing self-certifications is going to stop these affordable housing providers from leaving the market. “I’m not sure that connection has been made at all.”
Amber Harding, executive director at the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless, adds that “we cannot legislate based on myths, stereotypes, and unsupported claims.” She calls Mendelson’s bill “a cobbling together of different interests in a way that makes the problem of rent arrears worse and increases evictions.”
She also cautions against using a system that second-guesses the way struggling low-income tenants are allocating their income for emergencies.
“People are struggling to make ends meet and are sometimes paying a utility bill one month and a rent bill the next. And so is that an emergency?” Harding says. “A lack of electricity and food and other basic needs feel like an emergency to me, but whether DHS will think it’s an emergency is unclear. There’s this Venn diagram of what tenants and landlords both want, and it’s to have the rent paid. And this bill makes it harder for that to happen. It doesn’t serve anyone’s interest unless your interest is eviction.”
This article has been updated with data from DHS on the number of fraud investigations.