DC Council Needs to Address Displacement and Support Tenants

Good morning, Chairperson White and members of the Committee. Thank you for the opportunity to speak today. My name is Mychal Cohen, and I am a senior policy analyst at the DC Fiscal Policy Institute (DCFPI). DCFPI is a non-profit organization that shapes racially-just tax, budget, and policy decisions by centering Black and brown communities in our research and analysis, community partnerships, and advocacy efforts to advance an antiracist, equitable future.

The District is changing. Over the past few decades, “Chocolate City” has lost many of the long-term Black residents who built it. Between 2000 and 2020, the District’s Black population shrunk by more than 40,000 people.^[1] Decades of increasing housing costs, underinvestment in affordable housing, and vouchers that have not kept up with demand, has put extreme strain on Black residents and the affordable housing stock many rely on.

Recently, a number of the District’s affordable housing providers reported that unpaid rents are threatening the financial stability of their buildings, causing additional strain on our already taxed affordable housing ecosystem. Some lawmakers have used this crisis to promote a narrative that the District’s high rates of delinquency and substantial amounts of unpaid rent are due to the moral failings of renters. This is a dangerous narrative that ignores copious amounts of evidence that this crisis is one of rising rents, high cost of living, and impossible choices for renters.

Mayor Bowser’s proposed solutions—stricter emergency rental assistance rules, faster evictions, and demolishing renter protections like the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA) will only drive DC deeper into a housing crisis. Instead, the Council and this Committee should look to proactively support tenants as a solution to this crisis and its harm to Black and long-term residents.

Today, I will focus my testimony on ways Councilmembers can stop displacement including:

• increase vouchers and emergency rental assistance to support tenants struggling to pay rent,
• continuing to invest in the preservation of existing affordable units, and
• strengthening TOPA by funding programs that help tenants purchase their buildings, preserve affordability, and improve conditions.

Evidence Does Not Support Claims that Tenants are Willfully Refusing to Pay Rent

Renters in DC, much like renters across the country, are increasingly burdened by the high cost of living.^[2] Households living at lower income levels feel this burden deeply: 69 percent of renters making less than 30 percent of the area median income (in DC, this is $56,920 or less for a family of four), are paying more than 50 percent of their income in rent (this is considered extreme rent burden).^[3] Many of these renters are paying significantly more than 50 percent of their income just to afford a place to stay. This leaves households making impossible choices between rent and feeding their family or rent and needed health expenses.^[4]

The mayor and some housing providers have cited high rates of delinquency, but with no data to support these claims, it is hard to confirm if the District is truly an outlier when it comes to collection rates. If it is, the high rates of rent burden suggest that this is being driven by households’ inability to afford their rent along with other household necessities, rather than the willful non-payment of rent.

Even after DC lifted the eviction moratorium following the height of the pandemic, courts were not processing high numbers of evictions. Developers and some officials have used this to make the claim that tenants, no longer facing the possibility of eviction, have willfully stopped paying rent that they could otherwise afford. Data on evictions from 2024 and from the start of 2025 completely disprove this claim. Evictions in 2024 were up past pre-pandemic levels (the data also only tracks completed evictions, so eviction notices and informal evictions would drive this number even higher), and this year DC is on track for similar levels of evictions.^[5]

Cuts to Emergency Rental Assistance Program and Tenant Protections Have Left Tenants More Vulnerable to Housing Instability

Despite rising renter housing burden, rising evictions, and the loss of federal dollars for rental supports, the mayor and DC Council reduced the budget for the Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ERAP) from $43 million in fiscal year (FY) 2023 and $63 million in FY 2024 to a dramatically lower $27 million in FY 2025.^[6],[7] The reduced budget, along with temporary legislation removing many of the renter protections built into ERAP, has made renters less likely to receive ERAP and more likely to be evicted. These data along with the extreme rates of renter burden suggest that if renters are not paying rent, it is because many cannot afford to and that unfortunately many renters who could have benefited from ERAP have been evicted instead.

During the mayor’s announcement of the RENTAL Act in late February, she described several intended changes to the DC housing ecosystem. These included restrictions on who can access ERAP funds, faster eviction timelines, significant numbers of buildings that would be exempted from TOPA, among other harmful provisions. Absent from this announcement was any additional funding for building and preserving affordable units, new vouchers and subsidies for struggling tenants, or any expansions to tenant protections. If DC lawmakers are seeking to support residents struggling with low incomes, as the mayor claimed in her announcement, she and DC Council need to focus on adequately funding programs that materially improve conditions for residents.

DC Should Set Aside Funding to Preserve Existing Affordable Housing Units

A lack of guaranteed financing, particularly in the current economic climate, has left many projects, and hundreds of units, stagnating in disrepair as non-profit or mission-driven affordable housing developers apply but wait round after round for take-out financing needed to bring the buildings up to code. Allocating $5 million in flexible funding to sustain existing preservation projects and designating 25 percent of the HPTF for long-term preservation financing will make affordable housing projects financially viable and prevent displacement of tenants with low incomes.

DHCD’s use of the 2024 Consolidated Request for Proposals to support the stabilization of 69 developments, comprising of 7,700 units, was a necessary step to support affordable housing in the District. The District did not require that recipients eliminate or reduce rental arrears for their tenants. Any future stabilization funding should ensure that tenants are not being evicted from these buildings receiving District funds.

In past years when the Housing Production Trust Fund (HPTF), the District’s largest source of local affordable housing funding, was not dedicated solely to preservation, the criteria that the Department of Housing and Community Development (DHCD) used to select projects make it difficult for preservation projects to compete with new production. By setting aside a portion of the HTPF for preservation, the District can ensure more preservation projects move forward, and that those projects are financially viable, while increasing housing stability for residents in buildings in need of repair. DHCD should continue to make preservation a core priority when making selections for HPTF allocations. Dedicating at minimum a quarter of the HPTF for preservation keeps these projects out of untenable financial situations and helps improve living conditions throughout the District.

During a Crisis of Affordability, Protecting and Strengthening TOPA is More Important Than Ever

Adopted by DC Council more than 40 years ago, TOPA preserves affordable housing by giving District renters the first right to purchase a property when an owner decides to sell. In instances where tenants purchase their building, they can stay in their homes and benefit from co-op membership, preventing displacement and preserving affordable units. TOPA also allows renters to assign their rights to a housing developer who agrees to buy the building under certain conditions, including building conditions improvements, temporary relocations during renovation, and rent stabilization. In a period where affordable buildings may be at greater risk of losing affordability, TOPA is an important tool to keep buildings affordable and should be strengthened rather than undermined.

TOPA improves housing conditions. When tenants organize around their TOPA rights, they have the opportunity to shape the development outcomes to align with resident needs. The TOPA process enables tenant associations to negotiate a development agreement in which a new purchaser of the building makes repairs to their building, addressing major deferred maintenance and quality of life concerns including mold and pest remediation, safety concerns, and other habitability issues. Without TOPA, building purchasers may not be compelled to make such essential repairs.

Even when tenant associations are able to act on their TOPA rights, associations and the developers they choose to work with struggle to find financing to purchase and preserve the buildings as either affordable rental units or as limited equity co-operatives, which are cooperatively run affordable buildings owned by the tenants. The District should expand and fund the First Right To Purchase Program (FRPP), a program that offered many tenants with low and moderate incomes, the majority of whom are Black or brown, their first opportunity for homeownership by providing low-interest loans to tenant groups. DHCD, the agency that administers FRPP, has not accepted applications for this program in more than five years and it is no longer funded. As the TOPA study commissioned by the Council recommends, FRPP should be funded at $30 million in standalone funding and expanded to offer financing to multi-family properties with characteristics that make it hard for them to find other financing options due to deferred maintenance or high costs of acquisition and renovation that would require a purchaser to significantly raise rents, displacing tenants with low incomes.^[8]

Thank you for the opportunity to testify. I look forward to discussing these recommendations with you further.