Saving the safety-net: protecting DC’s Emergency Rental Assistance Program
This is the first article in a three-part series on resisting displacement in DC.
Read part 2, Bigger than rental assistance: the need to fight for social housing
Read part 3, Home is the battleground for DC’s working class tenants
Over the past few months, DC’s austerity apologists have been spreading a rash of bad framing and false narratives across the city, quick to blame poor and working class people for the shortcomings of the Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ERAP). Having successfully convinced the DC Council to pass emergency legislation limiting access to rental assistance, the landlord lobby is hoping to get those changes made permanent.
It’s true that ERAP is a flawed program that remains woefully out of scale for the economic conditions in the city, but ERAP is a life-saving program nonetheless. For that reason, tenants, like those of us in the Woodner Tenants’ Union, will be providing testimony today, arguing that the emergency legislation be allowed to expire, so that ERAP can be protected. We encourage you to watch our testimony live. It is important that working class tenants make our voices heard. We must do everything we can to preserve and expand DC’s tattered social safety net.
If the Council makes ERAP harder to access, fewer of our neighbors will make it through emergencies that risk utterly derailing their economic lives. More people who are already struggling through the daily emergency of attempting to survive in this economy will end up stuck on the bottom forever. In fact, MIT economist Peter Temin has said that it takes 20 years of almost nothing going wrong for a person to lift themself out of poverty. How many years have you had like that? In our eviction defense work, we have seen time and time again that what tends to happen is more like watching a row of falling dominos. An illness or injury leads to missed work. Missed work leads to job loss, which exacerbates illness, depression, and anxiety. It also leaves no resources for child care. Job searches, even for people with graduate degrees, can take years to complete. Meanwhile, those who do have jobs are seeing that their incomes continue to stagnate or be consumed by the costs of rising rents, even in rent-stabilized buildings.
The landlord lobby has lately framed ERAP as a product of the Covid pandemic’s early days, when policy makers were responding to an acute crisis. In fact, the program existed for more than a decade before the pandemic started: It was created in 2008. Even so, there is no need for us to feel ashamed that we reevaluated our city’s social contract in 2020. The pandemic created an opportunity for everyone to take a serious look at temporary and longer-term solutions to the cost of living and housing crises in the nation’s capital and across the country.
Now in 2024, the emergency eviction moratorium is long gone, and only the new policies that the DC Council had intended to be permanent remain. These include a law to prevent people from losing their housing if they’re less than $600 behind in rent, and the ERAP stay, which pauses a person’s eviction case so their rental assistance application can be
processed without them losing their housing while they wait.
The eviction stay and self-certification of emergency were the recent targets of the city council’s attack on ERAP emergency legislation, passed early in October. These are policies that make it possible for many qualifying tenants to actually access the program. Changes to those policies will absolutely increase rates of homelessness and displacement. We are already seeing it underway in the Woodner, where we have nearly 100 active eviction filings, and where our building owner is nevertheless still collecting multi-million dollar profits annually. Just yesterday, we lost 3 more neighbors. Regardless of what the Counsel decides, Dian Woodner will remain safe and housed, despite some delays in her cash flow. We, on the other hand, stand to lose still more community members over this. Tenants who meet ERAP’s eligibility requirements, and owe less than the maximum they could receive from the program, have been counting on ERAP to open back up so they can stop their evictions this week.
Both Mayor Bowser and the landlord lobby like to bemoan how costly it is for the city and housing developers to guarantee affordable housing to DC’s low-income tenants. But somehow, they find it totally justifiable for the city to guarantee that landlords profit from the passive income they receive from collecting rents. In fact, if landlords don’t collect at least 12% in annual profits (that’s profit, not revenue), they may qualify for something known as a “hardship petition,” which allows them to increase rents even further. With such programs, it hardly matters if tenants unionize their workplaces and successfully negotiate for good contracts with annual cost of living raises based on the Consumer Price Index (CPI). DC’s Rent stabilization rules encourage housing hoarders to take the same cut (or more) right from the tenants’ pockets. Even in this optimistic scenario, all the progress made by the workers’ efforts is lost to the landlord. Worse yet, the DC minimum wage itself only goes up by the CPI, while the (stabilized) rents can increase by up to the CPI plus 2%.
Anti-tenant narratives about ERAP also operate under the false assumption that all other government programs are functional and suitable to meet the needs of those unable to earn wages. But who among us in lower income brackets doesn’t have multiple loved ones with disabilities? How many of us know (or are ourselves) people who can barely live on a meager disability check, or more often, have not been able to access programs they should qualify for in the first place? Administrative burden in accessing benefits is a policy unto itself. The mayor and council members get the clout for representing a “sanctuary” city, promoting inclusive liberal values, but residents being able to access relevant rights and services? That is another question entirely. Who benefits from such a situation?
It certainly isn’t the working class, because we typically never get access in a way that corresponds with the prevailing economic trends that we face, and over which we have no control.
Our government knows it is ignoring lower-income people through mismanagement and bottlenecking resources. Over the last 2 fiscal years, DC was the second-to-last among US states to successfully process food stamp applications within 30 days of a person applying for the benefits. The Housing Authority is in a multi-year recovery plan after years of failing low-income residents. Their decades-long voucher waitlists have been closed for years. Even the agency that oversees the city’s emergency 911 system is being sued by its former director. Surviving gets harder by the day.
Employment limitations form another hurdle for the District’s low-income residents. Many of our neighbors at the Woodner have applied for unemployment benefits and have appealed countless times, only to be denied again. Seniors aren’t able to stretch their pensions and Social Security payments (if they are lucky enough to have access to either) far enough to cover their over-inflated rent. And often despite chronic pain and limited mobility, they are also forced to compete for jobs against workers decades younger than them who have advanced degrees and lifelong tech affinity. Parents of young children also struggle, often paying the equivalent of half their rent in childcare expenses just to attempt to earn enough income to keep their families housed.
The social infrastructure that the city requires has never existed, and what we have continues to be steadily dismantled. So it’s no surprise when we see the the poor being portrayed as useless, entitled, or even cheaters.
The worst, most subtly propagandistic narrative related to rental assistance could be found on the ERAP website itself (until it was updated after the recent announcement of the program re-opening November 20). What the website had said was: “Work is currently underway to reform the ERAP program to ensure its limited resources are going to District residents who are eligible for the program and face the most urgent need for rental assistance.” Any time a government official talks about how hard they want to get a resource to people “who need it most,” you can bet that they are being deceptive, and are really arguing for continued austerity. In this kind of narrative, what may sound like care for the working class and poor is more accurately an attempt to pit us against each other.
It is hard to meaningfully approach an existential threat to the majority of the city’s population. It’s much easier to cover up a lack of political will with a feigned desire to keep (intentionally) scarce resources out of the hands of bad actors, rather than develop solutions that ensure that resources are getting to everyone who qualifies for them.
In September, several local housing advocates and legal aid organizations drafted a letter to the DC Council, outlining how the bill gutting ERAP protections “does little to address the problems the Council has identified” with prolonged eviction cases and the rental assistance process. In fact, the letter argues, the bill “will exacerbate delays by creating burdensome administrative requirements and novel legal proceedings, all while displacing tenants who have a pathway to pay the rent they owe.”
Instead of “reforms” to the ERAP process that don’t meaningfully address the underlying causes of DC’s housing crisis, the authors of the letter outline a few ways that the council could begin to rectify the problem:
We urge the Council to focus on addressing the fundamental issue that rents are outpacing income for too many District residents, by, for example, leveraging the Housing Production Trust Fund, funding more permanent vouchers, inclusionary zoning for new housing developments at 30% AMI, and funding the First Right to Purchase Program (FRPP) so tenant TOPA purchasers can keep their buildings affordable.
This was a situation that DC’s top government officials, landlords, and developers decided to allow. But we don’t have to passively accept it. By giving our testimony at this Friday’s hearing, the Woodner Tenants’ Union hopes that like-minded neighbors will raise their voices about the need to protect ERAP.
While struggling residents may be currently forced to fight over the crumbs offered by the city, there is a more comprehensive solution to the challenges working class tenants in the District endure. Read about it in the second part of this series.
Sierra Ramírez is a lead organizer with the Woodner Tenants’ Union and the founder of the Direct Democracy Institute.
