Photo by Pappa91.

Do you rent one of the hundreds of basement apartments in the District of Columbia? If so, there was certainly nothing reassuring about some of the comments left on this Prince of Petworth post about reporting rental income, which turned into a happy hour of sorts for less-than-ethical property owners. For example, here’s one commenter’s advice to the property owner in search of ways to reduce the amount of rental income they need to report to the IRS:

You can make the tenenat [sic] pay all utilities and reduce the bills paid from the monthly rent – This will make your rental income lower.

Get the tenant to buy you a VISA gift card or something instead of paying you rent every month. Even if you do it for two months out of twelve, it will offset the $12,000 cap.

There are many ways to work around this, you just have to be creative, and legally you are not wrong at this. It is no crime to receive a gift card.

Strange — that reads eerily like the prose of that dude who rented me a place that didn’t have adequate heating a few years ago. Maybe I should have sent him more gift cards.

Anyway, the District’s Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs was reading along and was similarly intrigued by some of the responses. DCRA — which already operates a relatively well-known information source dedicated to providing college students with resources to help them find fair and safe off-campus housing in D.C. — decided that the misinformation out there about the struggles of obtaining a certificate of occupancy, license and inspection had to be addressed. So they unveiled Rent Your DC Basement Apartment Legally yesterday, a resource center for landlords who want to follow the law, but have no idea how — or worry about the potential consequences of going through the process if they are already renting illegally.

“There’s a lot of misconceptions about [the process]; the whole string was pretty interesting to us, that people weren’t coming in because they thought we were going to fine them,” said DCRA’s Public Information Officer, Mike Rupert.