Maybe someday DC will a database listing each house that is controlled by rent in the city, a vital resource for tenants and politicians. But Loose Lips is starting to lose faith that it will ever actually materialize.
The Council instructed to create such a “settlement house” back in 2015and it was supposed to be completed in a year, but efforts to develop a database were made suffer from delays since then. Here not quite unusual for the DC government, especially if a a politically saturated issue as well as rent control, but even by district standards it has become absurd.
The latest delay is surprising: one DC agency will not give another the data needed to complete database creation.
In particular, severely maimed The Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs spent several months withholding information from the tenants ’advocacy office, according to the agency’s responses to recent Council oversight questions, but it’s unclear what the data is. Staff for a member of the Grand Council Anita Bonds, who chairs the council’s housing committee and has spearheaded efforts to set up an information center, hopes the dispute will be resolved and the database will be launched by the end of the year, but there is little clarity as to how this will happen. Technically, the District of Columbia law requires that the database be online by the end of 2021, but that deadline has come and gone without much progress, so there is much reason to doubt the timeliness of the project.
It all adds up to one of the most Kafkaesque episodes in DC’s long history of bureaucratic cunning, and it has real implications for tenants. Lawyers say tenants need this information to determine if their landlord is raising too sharply or too fast, or just to say whether rent control law (which applies strict rent standards to all buildings built before 1976) applies to their building. Incredibly there is there is no centralized record of which district buildings are under lease control, although the law has been in effect for nearly 40 years.
“These agencies exist to serve the people of the county, and without disseminating this information, residents cannot know their rights and defend their rights,” he said. Beth Melen, a supervising attorney for the DC Legal Aid Society and one of the city’s most influential tenant advocates. “It just doesn’t make much sense, and overall it’s a very bad policy.”
Several officials of both DCRA and OTA, who took responsibility for developing the database back in 2018, did not respond to LL’s requests for comment on the matter. But the tenant’s lawyer’s position is clear in the Council’s February responses.
“The last obstacle was the reluctance or inability of DCRA to provide the data needed to complete the database,” the office said. “It is unlikely that this project will be completed in [fiscal year 2022]. If we fail to agree with DCRA on the transfer of the necessary data, we will be forced to rework some parts of the project, which will undoubtedly lead to delays.
Not yet (in the end) divided into two parts, DCRA collects information about urban businesses, such as their addresses and top managers, and most people involved in this drama with databases agree that this is probably the data that OTA needs. The database specifically requires information about the owner of each building, and even if the building is owned by a reputable developer or management company, it is common practice for landlords to create a separate limited liability company that technically “owns” each property. It is quite difficult to sort it all out without information directly from the source – DCRA. Even advice recently passed a law try to make these LLCs more transparent.
The OTA has informed the Council that since December 2020 it has been trying to gain access to “certain data fields that are crucial for the proper functioning of the database”, but without much success. The agency wrote that it had begun talks with DCRA to establish a system that would allow it to access this information last September, but those talks failed a month later, and “DCRA refused to hold any further meetings between technical experts to complete the datasets. provided ”.
“Unfortunately, we can’t estimate how long it will take to resolve these issues,” said the tenants’ attorney general. Johanna Shryv informed the Council in February.
Ram Uppuluri, director of the Housing Committee on Bonds, says lawmakers have certainly been following the issue ever since and are pleased to see “significant progress” in bringing the database online. In an email, he acknowledged that “there have been problems with the import of important data from related agencies (DCRA), but we hope they can be resolved.”
“The main database has been developed, and the system should be operational by the end of the year,” Uppuluri wrote. Lawmakers gave OTA until March 31 to complete the database in the next gate shift, but even after that deadline has passed, Uppuluri believes the OTA should still have the money needed to complete the work as soon as the 2023 budget officially becomes laws.
But without any commitment from the DCRA (or clear evidence that the OTA has some workaround), L.L. it’s hard to share your optimism. Melen agrees, noting that the agency’s ultimate plan is to transfer the database to the Department of Housing and Community Development to manage it, which could cause additional complications.
And every day when the database is unavailable, Melen says valuable information is being stolen from tenants.
Note, for example, that owners of controlled buildings are prohibited from raising rents if less than a year has passed since the previous increase. Tenants could easily access this schedule in the database instead of tracking past notifications from the landlord about rent increases. In addition, tenants moving into a rental-controlled building may not know when the landlord last raised prices. There are even a an inconspicuous provision in the law of DC requiring all owners of leased buildings to re-register in the city 90 days after the database is released online. Melen notes that anyone hoping to get an exemption from the rent control law will have to re-apply. If they fail to do so, their buildings will be subject to the law, regardless of whether they have won a past release or not.
This is important for individual tenants, but Melen notes that the database will allow for even more systemic reforms. Lawyers can use the database to “identify patterns of problem landlords’ activities, ”Melen says, helping them sue large companies that abuse the system.
And if the Council ever again undertakes a reform of rent control in a significant way legislators could work with real data rather than just make sound assumptions. If ever there is a majority, say, extend control over rent to all buildings built since 2005. some defenders want), wouldn’t it be good to know how many properties it will actually affect?
All of these changes would be beneficial to tenants, and not so much to large property owners who would benefit from the current system design. And these interests usually get what they want from the mayor Muriel Bowserso ll not hold your breath to run this database until absolutely necessary.
