DC undoes eviction protections amid ballooning unpaid rent – Washington Examiner

The emergency action on Tuesday aimed to reduce the burden on housing providers in crisis due to an influx of unpaid rent and delayed eviction cases.

ERAP is a government program that provides low-income residents with subsidized housing. People earning less than 40% of the area median income receive government assistance for overdue rent, late fees, and court costs for households facing evictions, according to the District of Columbia Department of Human Services.

Tweaks made to the program in 2022 prohibited landlords from evicting tenants who held unpaid rent if they had pending applications for ERAP funds and placed heavy restrictions on judges’ ability to weigh in on eviction appeals from landlords.

Council Chairman Phil Mendelson said this week that, under the ERAP policies, housing providers have run into a wall of financial challenges.

“What we are seeing is, on an aggregate basis, these affordable housing providers are carrying tens of millions of dollars in uncollected rent, and that is not sustainable,” Mendelson said.

With landlords losing millions of dollars in unpaid rent, the council’s emergency legislation reversed eviction policies, empowered courts to process eviction proceedings even if a tenant had a pending ERAP application, and allocated $80 million in Housing Production Trust Fund money as bridge loans to prevent subsidized affordable housing providers from declaring bankruptcy.

The council’s legislative action is a temporary measure. However, the mayor’s office is seeking permanent actions to remedy the housing fiasco.

“Comprehensive, permanent legislation and continued robust investment in the system will be needed to protect our investments and progress,” Mayor Muriel Bowser said Tuesday evening.

The district’s affordable housing market is facing a “looming crisis,” according to a June report published by the Apartment and Office Building Association of Metropolitan Washington. The report found that ERAP policies had put affordable housing providers “on the verge of financial insolvency.”

Earlier this spring, Laura Green Zeilinger, the director of the D.C. Department of Human Services, the agency that oversees ERAP, worried that the program was not a sustainable solution to the housing affordability crisis. She warned that the injection of federal funds into ERAP during the pandemic “created an expectation that [DHS] cannot meet.”

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“ERAP is never going to have a budget of $300 million, and we need to be honest with residents that they need to do everything they can to pay their rent,” Zeilinger said.

The ERAP announced this year that due to its funds being “exhausted,” it is closing the application portal for new beneficiaries for fiscal 2025.