When Kevin got a notice in early 2017 that the rent on his Eckington apartment would go up 5% — roughly $80 more a month — he was skeptical that his landlord could even ask for that. His rent had never increased by that much, and he suspected his unit fell under the city’s rent control law.

But actually confirming this proved to be more challenging than Kevin expected. It required multiple trips to D.C. government offices to dig through paperwork on his unit. It ultimately paid off.

“I emailed the apartment manager and said that I had confirmed my unit is rent-controlled. About a week later he called and told me to disregard the 5% notice and that a new 2% rent increase notice would be coming shortly,” wrote Kevin, who asked that we omit his last name to protect his privacy, in an email.

But where Kevin notched a win, many other tenants could have just accepted the rent hike — or they may have been priced out altogether by rent increases they didn’t know were illegal.

While rent control can be a tool to limit how much rents can be increased in tens of thousands of units across the city, determining what the legal rent should be in a rent-controlled apartment in D.C. can sometimes take a level of sleuthing that many tenants are unaware of or can’t spare the time to pursue. Documentation that’s required for rent-controlled housing is still filed on paper, and is not publicly accessible or easily searchable.

One proposed solution mandated by the D.C. Council — a public database listing all rent-controlled units in D.C. — remains mired in delays, having been passed from one agency to another. At this point, the database isn’t expected to be done until mid-2021 at the earliest, some six years after the Council required that it be created.

Housing advocates say the delay in creating this new database has impacted tenants, some of whom may not even know they are paying rents that may be illegally high. And without an easy way to check, some landlords have managed to increase rents faster than the law allows — essentially turning rent-controlled units into market-rate ones. Moreover, without data on what’s happening in rent-controlled housing across D.C., advocates say pushing improvements or changes to the city’s rent control law has been harder.

“We have so many questions about rent control the [city] just has no idea what the answers are,” says Beth Mellen, a supervising attorney in the Housing Law Unit at Legal Aid of the District of Columbia.

The unknowns of rent control

D.C.’s rent control law was passed in 1985 and applies to owners of most large buildings that were built before 1976. In those buildings, annual rent increases are limited to 2% plus the prevailing rate of inflation. (Last year, that was 2.3%, so rent could go up 4.3% total.)

Landlords can seek exemptions to raise the rent above that rate, using tools like voluntary agreements (in which current tenants agree to higher rent increases on future tenants) or by filing a petition to do significant upgrades on buildings. Higher rent increases can also be imposed once a unit becomes vacant.

The D.C. Rental Accommodations Division and the city’s Rent Administrator — both housed in the Department of Housing and Community Development (DHCD) — oversee and enforce the law.

But enforcement can be tough. For as powerful a tool as housing advocates say rent control can be, it exists almost entirely on paper in D.C. Documentation for every unit of rent-controlled housing — which includes the history of rent increases, any petitions from landlords to raise rents above the legal limit, whether a unit is converted to a condo, and more — is filed and stored largely on paper; a system to file the paperwork electronically is decades old and not accessible online.

That means that getting details on both individual rent-controlled units and how rent-control as a whole is functioning is very difficult, so much so that many advocates and lawmakers have no idea how widespread rent control truly is.

“When I’m talking to people about it, the point I come back to is that we do not even know how many rent-controlled units there are,” says Mellen.

In 2011, a study by the Urban Institute found that 79,145 units across 4,818 properties in D.C. were “potentially subject to rent control. At a recent Council hearing, advocates have put the number closer to 90,000 units. The D.C. Policy Center, though, set the number at 72,858 units in a policy analysis published in November.

The only consistent point is that everyone conceded their numbers are just estimates, simply because reliable and easily obtainable data does not exist.

On a micro level, advocates say the fact that documentation on individual apartments remains siloed in a single place and largely inaccessible to the general public puts tenants at a disadvantage. In many cases, Mellen says they may not even realize they have a case to make in fighting a rent increase. “It takes a lawyer almost because it’s so complicated and you have to push so much and the records are fairly disorganized. And so you never know,” she says.

James Nimri, who lives in a rent-controlled building in Ward 6, managed to fight for himself — but realized how much the process was stacked against tenants. When he became skeptical about a proposed rent increase a few years ago, he worked back through the unit’s paperwork and determined that it was likely illegal. Nimri is a researcher by day, so he knew how to work the system — but also says it’s not easy for most normal tenants.

“It was relatively difficult. There wasn’t this spirit of, you know, assisting a member of the public,” he says of his interactions at the Rental Accommodations Division.

A delayed database

It was for that reason that in 2015 the Council, led by At-Large Councilmember Anita Bonds, mandated that DHCD create a “rent control housing clearinghouse,” or an online public database that would let residents search for rent-controlled units and allow landlords file paperwork electronically — which would then be available for anyone to search for and review.

“Without a user-friendly, online, searchable database easily available to the general public, tenants seeking and living in rent control accommodations are at a serious disadvantage when they attempt to find out important information,” explained a Council report on the need for the database.

In Berkeley, California, the city’s Rent Stabilization Board has a public database that tenants can use to check on the maximum rent that can be charged for a rent-controlled unit. In New York, a more limited database allows tenants to search for rent-controlled buildings by address.

The D.C. database would also let housing advocates and lawmakers better understand what’s happening to rent-controlled units across the city, and inform the current debate over whether the existing rent control law should be expanded or tweaked.

“There are a lot of people who want to make changes to rent control laws. Well, in order to know what changes to make, they need the right data. They need to know how many rent control units do we have and what has happened to the rent over the years. So, you know, have we lost units? Have we gained units?” says Amir Sadeghy, an attorney at the D.C. Office of the Tenant Advocate.

The council required that the database include the address of rent-controlled buildings, the base rent for each unit, a history of rent increases for those units, and any documentation related to landlord requests for higher rent increases. And lawmakers set a deadline: they wanted the database done in a year.

However, the database still only exists in concept, having suffered from multiple delays. After two years of no movement from DHCD, the Council passed the responsibility of building the database to the Office of the Tenant Advocate. It quickly completed the first portions of its work, but then hit another snag: the city’s Office of Contracting and Procurement awarded the $980,000 contract to build the database in August 2020, two years later than initially expected.

Earlier this fall, the council again extended the project’s deadline to the end of 2021; Sadeghy, who is now in charge of getting the database finally built, says he hopes to have something done by mid-2021.

Mellen worries that in the six years it has taken D.C. to build the database, many thousands of rent-controlled units may have been transformed to market-rate housing. “We really need this data so that we know on both sides the good and bad of what’s happened and what needs to be fixed,” she says.

As for Nimri, who is still fighting his landlord over what he believes is an illegal rent increase on every unit in his building, he says having a public database wouldn’t only have made his own experience easier to navigate, but it could more broadly empower tenants across the city to protect their rights.

“It definitely would have been a game changer, and I would imagine that maybe that illegal increase would not have been taken by the landlord,” he says. “I don’t think that they would have done it if there was a very transparent and easily accessible database.”