By Adam Pagnucco.
Two sizeable jurisdictions in the Washington region have rent control. One of them is the District of Columbia, which has a rent control law with several exemptions. It does not apply to units built after 1975, units owned by an individual who owns 4 units or less or units that are subsidized by the federal or D.C. governments. These exemptions critically affect the scope of the law.
A 2011 report by the Urban Institute identified 79,145 units covered by rent control in D.C. The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that the city had 350,364 total units in 2020 and 165,659 rental units in the 2016-20 period. That means less than a quarter of D.C.’s total units and less than half of its rental units are covered by rent control. That share will continue to fall unless D.C. expands coverage of its law to include at least some units built after 1975.
I lived in a rent controlled building in D.C. before moving to MoCo so I have witnessed the tactics used by landlords to get around the law. One tactic applied to parking fees. While rent paid on my apartment was covered by the law, parking spaces in the building’s garage were not covered and were leased under separate agreements. Increases in parking space fees FAR exceeded rent increases. While I no longer have the records, I wonder how our parking fees compared to our housing unit rent on a per-square-foot basis by the end of our stay in the building.
Another set of tactics related to vacancies. D.C.’s rent control law allows landlords to raise rents on new tenants by up to 30% of the rate charged to former tenants of the same unit. This gives landlords a strong incentive to encourage tenant turnover and my landlord certainly behaved accordingly. Soon after we moved in, we began noticing lots of water outages. The pipes were always being “fixed.” Sometimes hot water was out. Other times all water was out. Little notice was given and the outages seemed random. No matter how much “fixing” was going on the problems always resumed. The elevators seemed affected by the same issues as the pipes. They were out so often that I was eventually on a first-name basis with some of the elevator technicians.
If those were the only problems, I might have been happy to exchange them for a rent cap. But there was another set of issues connected to the non-human tenants of the building – those with shells, antennae, tails and claws. They tended to live near the dumpster at the bottom of the trash chute, which was accessible through tiny garbage rooms with chute doors on each floor. I found out about this dumpster when my girlfriend accidentally dropped jewelry down the chute. Seeking to prove my worth, I gallantly went down to the dumpster to retrieve it. As I approached the dumpster in the basement’s trash room, I noticed that the trash bags inside it were moving. The sounds of rodents feasting on the dumpster’s contents along with the occasional wag of a hairless tail convinced me that paying for new jewelry was a better option than diving into the vermin’s lair. That said, I could never totally avoid the marauding rats because they patrolled the nearby park and also sometimes lurked inside elevators (when they were operating) to surprise human entrants.
Then there was the time that I heard one of the loudest noises of my life. EEEEEEEEEEEEEE! It was the sound of my girlfriend fleeing the bathtub after being greeted by a giant, thirsty cockroach. Floored by its hulking size, I named it Godzilla. I grabbed a wrapped up newspaper and WHAP! It bounced off. Godzilla looked up at me and silently laughed, “That all you got?” I marveled at him. “Wow, that’s a tough roach, and it’s fast too!” “Shut up and kill it!!!” my girlfriend screamed. Fifteen minutes later, I finally drowned it with scalding water after driving it back to the tub. But while Godzilla was gone, he left behind many children, siblings and associates who visited the kitchen every night.
Did they get rent caps too?
I lived in four buildings during my time in D.C. and this one was the only one covered by rent control. I came to view it as a devil’s deal. I was paying lower rent increases but in return I had to tolerate colossal cockroaches, rampaging rats and constant maintenance failures. And as the parking fees soared, I began to question the value of my end of the deal. Soon after we moved out, we checked rental listings for our old unit and – sure enough! – they were asking waaaaay more than we paid for it. The turnover strategy had worked.
So does D.C.’s rent control law result in lower housing costs? That’s hard to say. The table below shows median contract rent from the Census Bureau for each of the region’s ten largest jurisdictions in 2010 and 2021.
Median rent in D.C. is lower than the regional average. But it is not the lowest in the region as Prince George’s and Frederick counties both had lower median rents without rent control. And median rent in D.C. has increased faster than in any other large jurisdiction in the area over the last decade.
There are lots of things going on here. First, because D.C. landlords are allowed to greatly increase rents for new tenants, it could be that the actual effect of its rent control law is to defer rent increases rather than to truly limit them. Second, the exemption of new construction from D.C.’s rent control law has likely combined with gentrification to enable significant market-wide rent hikes. And because rent control applies to a smaller percentage of D.C.’s rental market with each new rental building constructed, the ability of rent control to affect the broader market is in long-term decline. Third, differences in crime levels, perceptions of schools and quality of life, and patterns of supply and demand all impact median rents so rent control is far from the only factor in explaining the trends above.
The bottom line is that D.C.’s rent control law is weak because of its exemption of post-1975 units and its loopholes exploited by landlords to evade it. That reduces both the benefits that rent control provides, at least for those who it covers, as well as any harmful impacts of deterring new construction.
From the perspective of Montgomery County, the fact that we have seen the second-lowest increase in median rent among the region’s largest jurisdictions – at least through 2021 – is not helpful in making the case for county rent control. While rents (and almost all other prices) have increased with the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, MoCo’s compound median rent increase between 2010 and 2021 has been just 2.2% a year – hardly a draconian increase by any standard.
Next: a look at Takoma Park, the only jurisdiction in MoCo with rent control.