Unpaid Rents Pushing D.C. Affordable Housing Owners Into Distress
Directly across the Anacostia River from RFK Stadium, a complex of 51 three-story brick buildings has become the latest symbol of D.C.’s worsening housing crisis. Rental arrears have continued to mount at apartment complexes in D.C. even months after emergency legislation was passed aimed at forcing more tenants to pay their rent on time. Five of D.C.’s largest housing owners — Enterprise Community Development, WC Smith, CIH Properties, Donohoe Cos. and E&G are sitting on more than $30M combined in total rent delinquencies.
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The Silly Rule That’s Helping Keep Housing Costs High
American cities face a paradox: empty office buildings downtown and rising homelessness on the streets. Alex Horowitz, project director at Pew Charitable Trusts, suggests an innovative solution—transforming offices into affordable, dorm-style apartments by removing outdated building rules, like the requirement for openable windows.
This change could drastically cut costs and increase housing supply, providing affordable rents for those in need. By embracing such ideas, cities could revitalize downtowns, reduce homelessness, and create vibrant, accessible urban communities.
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‘Crisis’ in unpaid rent leads D.C. to roll back eviction protections
The D.C. Council unanimously passed an emergency bill Tuesday to roll back pandemic-era eviction protections and rental-assistance policies that city leaders say have led to a crisis of unpaid rent, causing some affordable housing developments to be on the brink of foreclosure.
Under the bill, the council will undo policies that allowed people to self-certify their eligibility for ERAP and that required judges to repeatedly delay eviction proceedings if a tenant had a pending ERAP application.
Tenant advocates argued that tightening these policies will lead to more evictions and warned that the new rules could create new problems.
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Chairman Mendelson: D.C. Must Stop ‘Strangling’ Housing Providers By Preventing Evictions
D.C.'s top local lawmaker says legislative reform is needed to alleviate the crisis that has put housing providers at risk of shutting down as their tenants accrue tens of millions of dollars of unpaid rent.
Council Chairman Phil Mendelson addressed the issue publicly for the first time Monday morning during a regular media briefing. He confirmed Bisnow's report last week that he is seeking co-sponsors for draft legislation to reform D.C.'s Emergency Rental Assistance Program, which industry leaders say has been used by tenants to delay eviction proceedings while not paying rent.
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Lawmakers Scramble To Reform Eviction Law That Upended D.C.'s Housing Industry
An under-the-radar tweak to Washington, D.C.'s Emergency Rental Assistance Program passed in 2022 created a loophole that is at the heart of the existential crisis engulfing the District's affordable housing sector.
The new rule barred tenants from being evicted from their homes as long as they had a pending application for ERAP funds, and it removed judges' discretion to weigh whether a tenant has hope of receiving assistance or whether it would cover their debt.
Landlords say tenants and their attorneys have taken advantage of the rule and collectively racked up millions in unpaid rent that there is no hope of recouping.
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‘The Whole Industry Could Collapse’: D.C.'s Housing Providers Face An Existential Crisis
When Adrian Washington announced last month that he was shutting down his prolific D.C. affordable housing development firm, the news was a shock to many and left the thousands of residents in Neighborhood Development Co.'s buildings in limbo.
It was also a warning.
NDC's collapse wasn't an isolated incident. The owners of tens of thousands of income-restricted apartments are at risk of losing their properties, jeopardizing the future of affordable housing in the nation's capital.
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Neighborhood Development Co. Ending Operations, Citing 'Untenable' Market
D.C.-based developer Neighborhood Development Co. is shutting down after 25 years of building affordable housing, attributing the move to today's difficult market conditions.
The company announced the news on its website with a message dated Aug. 23, saying it was “ending its operations and the operations of its affiliates” as of September 30. The announcement doesn't appear to have been widely distributed or previously reported.
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The Best Plan for Housing Is to Plan Less
Research confirms that there are large benefits in saying yes to tall buildings, yes to multifamily structures, yes to dense single-family development and yes to speedy permitting. The growing YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard) movement already has high-profile wins in Minnesota, Oregon, California and beyond, but even YIMBY devotees rarely appreciate the scope of the merits of loosening rules on housing.
What would happen if homebuilders could once again freely build until housing prices were driven back down to cost? According to a conservative estimate, prices would ultimately fall about 50 percent on average nationally — with significant, wide-ranging implications.
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Why Private Developers Are Rejecting Government Money for Affordable Housing
Across California, efforts to address the homelessness crisis by building more affordable housing with government money have been plagued by sky-high costs. SDS, an investment firm, is financing construction of its L.A. building, scheduled to open in June, with a $190 million fund it raised to build an estimated 2,000 units for formerly homeless people in the city with mental-health and other medical needs. It is one of several such efforts venturing into an affordable-housing market that for decades has been dominated by developers and nonprofits that cobble together public funding and typically move at a snail’s pace.
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The Surprising Left-Right Alliance That Wants More Apartments in Suburbs
For years, the Yimbytown conference was an ideologically safe space where liberal young professionals could talk to other liberal young professionals about the particular problems of cities with a lot of liberal young professionals. But the vibes and crowd were surprisingly different at this year’s meeting. In addition to vegan lunches and name tags with preferred pronouns, the conference included — even celebrated — a group that had until recently been unwelcome: red-state Republicans.
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There’s A Growing Push To Develop Social Housing In D.C. What Is It?
Taking stock of the housing crisis in D.C. and across the country, it’s not difficult to see that something has to change: As housing and living costs rise, more people than ever are spending at least half of their income on rent. More than one in ten D.C. residents face housing insecurity, and demand for housing programs, like emergency rental assistance, remains sky-high.
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How to Make Room for One Million New Yorkers
In the heart of New York City's housing crisis lies a challenge: how to provide adequate homes for its growing population without compromising the city's unique character. The solution may not be as daunting as it seems. My architecture firm, Practice for Architecture and Urbanism, collaborated with Times Opinion to envision a future that accommodates the city's need for housing while preserving its iconic skyline and neighborhood integrity.
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I Want a City, Not a Museum
Structures like tenements on the Lower East Side, brownstones in Brooklyn Heights, and quaint buildings in Astoria not only tell a story of my ancestry but also reflect a broader narrative of the city's evolution. Yet, this preservation of the physical city comes at a cost. The same buildings that connect us to New York's rich history are also part of a complex web of laws and regulations that hinder new construction, contributing to the city's acute housing shortage.
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American Cities Have a Conversion Problem, and It’s Not Just Offices
The pandemic forced American cities to make such transformations, temporarily. They turned sidewalks into restaurants, parks into hospitals, streets into open spaces. Now on a lasting and larger scale, they will need to convert offices into apartments, hotels into affordable housing, curb parking into bike lanes, roadways into transit routes, office parks into real neighborhoods.
“If these last few years have taught us anything,” said Ingrid Gould Ellen, a professor of urban policy and planning at N.Y.U., “it’s the need for flexibility, the need to be open to surprise in the way we’re going to use space.”
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The Number of Homeless People in Los Angeles Increases by 9%
Los Angeles is hardly the only American city to struggle with homelessness, but its homeless population is disproportionately large, and about 30 percent of the nation’s homeless population lives in California. As a result, Los Angeles is a kind of large-scale test case for which solutions work and which don’t.
For years, local leaders and advocates working on homelessness solutions have bemoaned a lack of urgency and coordination across Los Angeles, where the city and county have separate but overlapping governments.
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Affordable Housing Woes Paint a ‘Bleak Picture’
San Antonio, the most impoverished major city in the country, according to census data, has enacted policies to help low-income renters, including a $150 million bond issue to support affordable housing construction and a Strategic Housing Implementation Plan. Before the pandemic, the wait list for public housing in San Antonio was roughly 35,000 families, earning an average of $11,000 annually, said Ed Hinojosa Jr., president and chief executive of Opportunity Home, the city’s housing authority. Today, it’s 95,000.
“The need has never been as high as it is now,” Mr. Hinojosa said. “And with the trends we’re seeing, it’s just going to keep growing.”
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Imagine a Renters’ Utopia. It Might Look Like Vienna.
Soaring real estate markets have created a worldwide housing crisis. What can we learn from a city that has largely avoided it? Experts refer to Vienna’s Gemeindebauten as “social housing,” a phrase that captures how the city’s public housing and other limited-profit housing are a widely shared social benefit: The Gemeindebauten welcome the middle class, not just the poor.
In Vienna, a whopping 80 percent of residents qualify for public housing, and once you have a contract, it never expires, even if you get richer. Housing experts believe that this approach leads to greater economic diversity within public housing — and better outcomes for the people living in it.
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The U.S. Lost Half A Million Affordable Housing Units Since Pandemic Onset
The U.S. shortage of affordable housing, bad enough before the pandemic, has only gotten worse since 2020, according to a new report by Moody's Analytics. Since then, a combination of factors have conspired to eliminate 500,000 units for extremely low-income renters nationwide, or about 8% of the total stock.
Many affordable housing properties for that income group, which were funded via Low-Income Housing Tax Credits, or LIHTCs, have reached the end of their 30-year compliance period in the last few years. At the end of that period, the property owners have the option of converting their units to market rate.
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Homelessness surges in D.C. suburbs, amid national crisis, study finds
Homelessness surged across the Washington region by 18 percent in the past year, with the greatest increases in the suburbs, according to data released Wednesday by the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments.
The D.C. region joins a growing list of cities that are seeing similar spikes, which coincided with the end of pandemic relief programs and stubbornly high inflation.
“We are seeing these increases all over the country,” said Donald Whitehead, executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless. “What we are also seeing is a real criminalization and villainizing of the homeless, which is something I haven’t seen in my 30 years in this field.”
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Why Free Street Parking Could Be Costing You Hundreds More in Rent
If there’s a building in America, a local government has decided the number of parking spaces it needs. But these rules not only overestimated the amount of parking that was needed, they created a society that virtually demanded a car to conduct daily life. America has a parking problem. We’ve built millions of parking spaces we don’t need. Each one costs us.
Parking minimums shape your entire life even if you don’t realize it, from the size of your rent check to the length of your commute to how many friends live nearby. Requiring businesses to include copious parking spots raises the cost of construction and the amount of land needed, codifying sprawl.
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