Like other large cities, elected officials in the Washington keep creating and heavily funding new programs intended to address Washington’s affordable housing and homeless crises. However, as is most always the case, when progressive governments create social programs to side step the free-market, the results of their efforts often fall flat.
One glaring failure is a program supported by Mayor Muriel Bowser. Repaid Rehousing provides housing vouchers for families with children for four months up to a year. Unfortunately, these families are often coping with unemployment and other health problems that prevent them from earning enough income to cover rent once vouchers run out. Many suffer from mental illness, which leads to the destruction of property and other serious issues for landlords.
The Rapid Rehousing vouchers are intended to cover rent for the short term. Once exhausted, if rent is not paid, then eviction is only possible after months of legal wrangling and thousands of dollars in attorney’s fees footed by the landlords and D.C. taxpayers. Sadly, the evicted tenant then re-enters Rapid Rehousing, homeless again, to start the process all over.
The program is so poorly developed, the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless recently released a report entitled, “Set Up to Fail – Rapid Re-Housing in the District of Columbia.” The report came to the obvious conclusion that the families in the program can’t possibly succeed because as soon as their vouchers run out, they are back in the same position — possibly worse off after being evicted due to inability to pay rent.
The report also lashed out at the city government statistics, such as The D.C. Department of Human Services’ assertion that the program has an 85 percent success rate, which was characterized by the group as an “oft-shared illusion that it is a successful program for families.”
To me, the city leadership’s affordable housing efforts seem more concerned with racking up short-term success stories to help boost their re-election campaigns rather than helping families in need.
By law, all landlords in Washington have to accept tenants using Rapid Rehousing vouchers, but many landlords put up roadblocks such as requiring high credit scores and rental references. For the landlords that actually do take the vouchers, the city does them no favors.
One problem for landlords is the city’s Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act. TOPA provides tenants the legal right to purchase the property if the owner decides to sell. The mandate has allowed renters to team up with lawyers to sell their “TOPA rights” to developers, sometimes for as much as $50,000 or $100,000. TOPA is being abused, as NBC Washington reports even squatters and vacation renters can claim TOPA rights.
TOPA creates an additional risk for landlords, especially those who accept Rapid Rehousing vouchers because the residents can band together to block the sale of a building. In other words, tenants living rent-free on taxpayer-subsidized vouchers or simply because they cannot pay their rent can assert their TOPA rights to block a building from being sold.
This is not how to fix the affordable housing crisis.
Using the much-discussed Terrace Manor apartment complex as an example of failures in the system, the city government has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayer money taking the landlord to court and delaying the sale. These delays hurt tenants by preventing the new buyer from fixing and renovating the old buildings.
In my view, the city is applying consumer protection laws in a way that has never been done before. Why are they wasting taxpayer resources to prevent progress and thwart the free market? Couldn’t those resources be spent housing people?
Ultimately, city officials must recognize that private landlords are a critical part of a long-term affordable housing solution. Landlords need to be seen as partners, not enemies.
But, this contentious situation is not likely to improve soon. The D.C. Council is now working to pass legislation to start a taxpayer-funding program to provide free housing attorneys to low-income tenants. It’s called the “Expanding Access to Justice Amendment Act of 2017.” This law will result in more lawyers, more courts, and still no long-term affordable housing plan.
Finally, Bowser, D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine, and the City Council need to come together to find a free-market solution that works both for low-income and homeless families and for landlords. But rather, it seems the city government is simply going to keep attacking landlords.
One has to wonder how much the city has spent the past decade going after landlords, which to me, appears only to be a strategy to draw attention away from the failings of the city’s elected leaders to actually solve the affordable housing crisis.
Ken Blackwell, a former mayor of Cincinnati, served as undersecretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. He was a Senior Domestic Policy Advisor to President Trump’s Transition Team.
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