Helping the owners of affordable apartments is the political equivalent of kissing babies in D.C. Who could possibly be against a bill that saves the companies providing badly needed homes from financial ruin?
It is little wonder, then, that Mayor Muriel Bowser, Council Chair Phil Mendelson, and other local leaders have used these landlords as their primary justification in pushing a bill to reform the city’s eviction protections. These euphemistically dubbed “affordable housing providers” are on the precipice of crisis due to a surge in unpaid rent, they argue, and so Bowser and the Council put aside their recent differences on Tuesday to rush through a bill to help them. The basic idea behind the legislation, passed unanimously, is to make it easier for landlords to evict tenants by removing pandemic-era protections allowing people to stay in their homes if they’ve applied for the city’s Emergency Rental Assistance Program.
Most every lawmaker on the dais rushed to pat themselves on the back for taking on eviction reform to help these firms. Officials were clearly shaken at the recent decision of the Neighborhood Development Company to close up shop, considering the firm’s substantial affordable portfolio and its political connections. NDC has won plenty of city business and its CEO, Adrian Washington, is the brother of ex-D.C. Housing Authority Director Brenda Donald—and they feared similar companies would soon follow suit. Any pain for tenants in the short term will be worth it if it means that the property owners supporting the entire affordable housing ecosystem don’t go under, or so the Council’s thinking goes.
“Building owners can’t pay the mortgage right now, and when that happens, everyone loses,” At-Large Councilmember Robert White, the housing committee chair, said Tuesday. “Buildings are sold, affordability covenants disappear. … If we don’t act now, this will only get worse.”
That’s a fine idea, in theory. It certainly makes it a bit more politically palatable for lawmakers to side with landlords against struggling renters when those landlords aren’t publicly traded corporations. Bowser brought in some of the city’s foremost affordable developers and property owners to really drive this point home and sing the legislation’s praises at a big press conference Monday where she showed off some foreboding figures: Her office estimates that “mission-oriented affordable housing providers” in D.C. are currently owed something like $100 million in unpaid rent, and that debt could balloon to $154 million next year. Without that money, these landlords can’t pay their debts, let alone perform badly needed repairs or make payrolls, Bowser argued.
All of that may be true—even the harshest critics of the bill tell Loose Lips that this sector of the real estate market is in trouble. But why is this eviction reform the solution? Property owners readily admit that it will take several months for these changes to reverberate throughout the market. The best-case scenario is that the bill helps landlords finally evict tenants who have racked up huge debts but have gotten to stay in their homes anyway while awaiting rental assistance. Property owners can then find renters who will actually pay their bills. Is that lengthy process really enough to help them pay down millions in debts? What if the type of people looking for affordable apartments simply don’t have the financial wherewithal to pay these ever-rising rents, and there aren’t prospective tenants clamoring to reliably pay these bills?
“There are still going to be investments that we have to make, especially around the [rent] arrearage issue, that is just not going to be resolved without an injection of cash and without a lot more support,” Ward 2 Councilmember Brooke Pinto said Tuesday, becoming one of several lawmakers to admit out loud that this legislation won’t touch a huge problem facing these landlords.
Bowser is also offering the owners of affordable apartments funding to pay their bills via the city’s Housing Production Trust Fund, which seems a much surer solution for these problems. That relief can be targeted specifically to the companies that need it, whereas these eviction reforms affect all property owners equally. The massive national firms that rent to most tenants in the city may be feeling some financial stress, but they’re hardly in the sort of existential danger that smaller housing providers describe. Why should the Council do them a favor and help them evict their tenants more quickly? LL would note that it’s often much more lucrative for big property owners to boot out struggling tenants and rent out their homes anew (often at higher rates) than it is for them to wait for them to receive rental assistance.
It won’t be a surprise for Wilson Building watchers that lobbyists for the biggest landlords in the city have been intimately involved in crafting this legislation (and many were on hand at the mayor’s press conference Monday). The Apartment and Office Building Association of Metropolitan Washington may also represent smaller landlords, but there can be no mistaking what sort of property owners chiefly fund their operations, seed their political activities, and sit on their governing board.
“The bill is taking a machete to tenant protections to deal with this when a scalpel could suffice to focus on the narrow issues that the affordable housing providers have raised,” says Vikram Swaruup, the executive director of Legal Aid DC. “The bill does not just apply to the particular providers that are facing challenges. It’ll affect everybody and tenants that live in all kinds of buildings with all kinds of different housing providers.”
AOBA’s own spokespeople have freely admitted to City Paper that there’s little evidence to support their claims about why these changes are necessary. And Bowser has grounded her support in one of her favorite hobby horses: the myth of welfare moochers. She has insisted there is “some anecdotal evidence” that people are taking advantage of rules allowing renters to “self-certify” that they need help via ERAP, using the city’s prohibition on evictions while those applications proceed to simply stop paying their bills even though they have the ability to do so. Mendelson himself has said repeatedly over the past few days that he’s skeptical of those claims, with good reason, but he sat next to Herronor to promote the bill just the same. This certainly would not be the first time the District government acted based more on vibes than on evidence.
“We believe it will lead to an increase in people paying their rent,” Bowser said Monday. “I don’t want anybody to leave this room thinking that we’re talking about wanting more evictions, because that’s the last thing that anybody wants.”
Swaruup and other tenants’ advocates have suggested a whole host of ideas that they believe would address the issues affordable housing owners are seeing, but few of them indeed are ameliorated by this bill. For instance, they point to a variety of instances where landlords have failed to provide the necessary documentation to move ERAP applications forward. And DHS has been notoriously slow to process these applications in its own right—a coalition of legal services providers found one instance where $8 million in ERAP money was held up for weeks because of the agency’s delays.
Rather than letting landlords evict tenants while they wait on ERAP, Swaruup says DHS could try to address these problems rather than begging for a legislative fix. The Council could also bar landlords from receiving ERAP money if they can’t demonstrate that they’ve moved expeditiously to provide information to expedite the process, he adds.
But instead of doing any of that, these ERAP changes could actually slow the eviction process even further, Swaruup warns. The Council’s changes still give judges the chance to halt an eviction while an ERAP application proceeds, but it requires tenants to prove they’re eligible for the assistance and that they’re likely to receive enough assistance to cover their debts, adding an extra step to the whole proceeding.
Mendelson called such claims “a little mystifying” when LL asked about them Monday, but by Tuesday he said that court officials subsequently reached out to raise similar concerns. Councilmembers approved a few amendments Tuesday to allay those issues, but the underlying problem remains.
Throughout the past week, LL has heard D.C. leaders repeatedly lament that the fundamental problem here is that ERAP’s purpose is being distorted from an emergency stopgap into an expansive solution for low-income people. “It’s for unforeseen emergencies that [tenants] experience that prevent them from paying their rent,” Bowser said Monday. “It is not a program that is meant to subsidize people because they don’t make enough money to pay their rent.” That is perhaps on the harsher end of the spectrum of the opinions on offer, but it is not wholly uncommon.
“ERAP has been the fix for a lot of things that it just can’t be the fix for,” Ward 1 Councilmember Brianne Nadeau lamented Tuesday, noting Bowser’s recent cuts to the program.
Perhaps that is true enough in a time of limited government resources. But maybe it’s also yet another sign that the District needs to think differently about this whole issue. Is it any less of an emergency that a family can’t afford rent because they can’t make enough money? If more and more people are applying for rental assistance, is that a sign that tenants are lining up to game the program, or that there’s a huge amount of need out there that the government could try and do something about?
“Nothing we’ve talked about today addresses the underlying causes of those missed payments,” said Ward 4 Councilmember Janeese Lewis George. “We owe it to the people of the District to address the affordable housing crisis as a whole.”
But tenants generally don’t have high-powered lobbyists pressing their case in the Wilson Building. Landlords do. And the squeaky wheel gets the grease.