Chris knew he lucked out when he signed a lease on an apartment in NoMa last year. His new one-bedroom unit at Union Place cost $1,690 a month after factoring in two months of free rent. Not bad for a hot neighborhood near grocery stores and Metro.

“It was a really good deal. That was part of the appeal of moving here,” says the young white-collar worker.

But the good times ended abruptly. According to a lease renewal offer Chris shared with WAMU/DCist, the building’s owner now wants to raise his rent to at least $2,547 after his lease expires in August. He acknowledges that rents fell more sharply than usual during the pandemic, but the 51% increase is still drastic, he says.

“I was a little insulted, you know?” says Chris, who asked WAMU/DCist to withhold his last name to avoid retaliation from his landlord. “I’m a good tenant. I don’t cause trouble. I pay my rent on time. I think they’d at least want to make an effort to keep people in their units for more than a year or 14 months.”

A spokesperson for Toll Brothers, which owns and operates Union Place, writes in a statement that the company strives “to provide a luxury residential living experience for our residents, while keeping our rental rates in line with current market conditions.”

Chris says he might move, but he’s not sure he can find a similar apartment within his budget. He says it seems like every new building nearby is jacking up prices as high-income workers move back into the city.

“It’s not good to be a renter these days,” Chris says.

National and regional rent data support that conclusion. The median monthly asking rent in the U.S. exceeded $2,000 for the first time in May, according to Redfin. In D.C., data from Apartment List shows that average rents have grown 9% over last year, and hikes range from 12.5 to 14% in suburban areas such as Rockville and Alexandria. There are extreme outliers, too: A dozen local tenants interviewed by WAMU/DCist say their rents have gone up 20% or more over last year.

The region’s biggest landlord lobbying group tells WAMU/DCist that rent hikes were unavoidable after months of unusually high vacancy rates and, in some areas, legislation that capped or banned rent increases during the pandemic. Vacancies hit 4.4% among high- and mid-priced apartments in the first quarter of 2021, according to Delta Associates, and property owners dropped rents and rolled out perks to hold onto residents. In D.C., lawmakers prohibited rent increases during the health emergency. (D.C. also has a rent control law, but it only applies to buildings constructed before 1976.) The Montgomery County Council passed two temporary rent stabilization measures that have since expired.

Today, vacancies hover around 2.5% across the region, per Delta Associates, and landlords have little incentive to keep rents low, says Brian Gordon, senior vice president of government affairs for the Apartment and Office Building Association of Metropolitan Washington, or AOBA.

“We are seeing the costs of providing housing have absolutely skyrocketed. The property management industry has not been immune to inflation and supply chain challenges that have plagued every other business sector,” Gordon says. “The money’s got to come from somewhere.”

Rent hikes have been modest overall, Gordon says, with AOBA members reporting increases around 3.4% on average. He adds that the largest rent increases are affecting new leases, not lease renewals — which make up the majority of rent increases — and they’re found mainly within the region’s new, upscale buildings.

“The renters we’re seeing paying the largest renewal increases tend to be higher-income and live in the nicest, most expensive rentals,” Gordon says.

The dramatic hikes are startling nonetheless, tenants say.

Several residents shared documentation with WAMU/DCist showing sharp rent increases at their buildings. Emily, a tenant at Jefferson Marketplace in Northwest D.C., was hit with a 37% increase, from $3,126 to $4,275. Another D.C. renter saw his monthly rate at The Mission on 14th Street NW rise 26%, from $1,999 to $2,515. Northern Virginia resident Adam, who until recently lived at The Gramercy in Arlington, says a rent increase of 27% — from $1,888 in January 2021 to $2,400 this spring — prompted him to move to a cheaper building nearby. (Some residents asked to withhold their full names because they fear landlord retaliation or they don’t want to be connected with sensitive financial information online.)

Some landlords say they’re just bringing rents back up to where they were before the pandemic. A spokesperson for Dweck Properties, which owns The Gramercy, says average rents at both buildings “are just now nearly at the same levels they were before COVID.”

Bell Partners, the company that manages The Mission, declined to comment for this story. Representatives of Jefferson Marketplace’s parent company, Jefferson Apartment Group, did not respond to requests for comment.

Adam Cunningham says rising rents may reflect a return to pre-pandemic “normal,” but that’s little comfort for priced-out tenants like himself. A progressive Democrat in Montgomery County running for Maryland state senate, Cunningham says the rent on his family’s townhouse in Germantown climbed 23% this year, from $1,950 to $2,400. Their lease expired last month, according to documentation and text messages shared with WAMU/DCist, but his landlord let his family overstay the lease while they search for another house in Cunningham’s senate district. (The landlord did not return a request for comment.) The candidate says he house-hunts while knocking on doors ahead of this week’s election.

“While I’m going into these neighborhoods, I’m looking for ‘for rent’ signs,” he says.

Cunningham’s political platform includes strengthening tenants’ rights and providing financial assistance to aspiring homeowners.

While national reports show that rents have begun to moderate slightly, some local officials want to take additional measures to control rising prices. Last week, Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich — who is up for re-election  — submitted legislation to the county council that would extend the pandemic-era cap on rent increases for six months. Landlord groups and business interests are already mobilizing against the proposal, which they say would unfairly burden housing providers.

“I plan to [email] 500 Montgomery County landlords to oppose it,” says Dean Hunter, who leads the Small Multifamily and Rental Owners Association, a lobbying group for “mom and pop” landlords in the Washington region. Law firm Ballard Spahr, which has donated $2,000 to a political PAC that supports Elrich challenger David Blair, is also promoting criticism of Elrich’s rent stabilization measure.

Rent relief during the pandemic was generous, thanks to an onslaught of federal relief dollars. But that relief has largely dried up at this point. Applications for rent assistance are closed in D.C., Montgomery County, Prince George’s County, and most of Virginia.

The only thing to do now, some tenants say, is suck it up and pay — or move out, hoping for a better deal that may not materialize.

“I’m faced with the fact that I’m probably going to need to move, and there’s definitely still a housing shortage here,” says Matt Felperin, a Montgomery County resident who says his rent for a subsidized unit at National Park Seminary Apartments swelled by $300 this year. “I’m just unsure what to do next.” (The complex’s owner, The Alexander Company, says the increase conforms to affordability requirements.)

Several tenants interviewed by WAMU/DCist say they don’t believe landlords are raising rent purely to cover increased costs or make up for losses they incurred during the pandemic. Opportunism — or what some left-leaning economists call “greedflation” — is probably involved, too, wagers Tarsi Dunlop, a Northern Virginia resident whose rent rose 22% this year.

“I’m sure landlords lost money during the pandemic. And yes, inflation has gone up,” Dunlop says. “But 22%? Nah.”

This story has been updated to include more statistics about apartment vacancy rates in the Washington region.